And yet, the comedian did quote Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, from the confirmation hearing earlier that morning. In front of gathered journalists at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, Mulaney introduced his upcoming series “Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney,” which is inspired by his limited series “Everybody’s in LA” from 2024.

Mulaney explained, “Netflix and I discussed this summer not being done with the show, and I was thrilled to do that. It was a total blast and it was one of those shows that neither Netflix nor I really needed to do. I never wanted to host a talk show, and they were getting out of the talk show game. So it was the perfect moment to do this.

“And I just heard Robert F Kennedy Jr. say during the confirmation hearing, ‘I have a nice life and a happy family. I don’t need this,'” said the comedian, reading from his notes.

Although Mulaney is paraphrasing, he did indeed grasp the gist of the opening speech, in which Kennedy Jr. said about his dedication to the nation’s health care: “I know how to fix it, and there’s nobody who will fix it the way that I do because I’m not scared of vested interest. I don’t care. I’m not here because I want a position or a job. I have a very good life and a happy family. This is something I don’t need.'”

After this uncharacteristic foray into newsiness, Mulaney doubled down on his self-deprecating style of underselling his series “Everybody’s Live,” which will air live weekly starting March 12 for 12 weeks.

“We will be live globally with no delay,” he continued. “We will never be relevant. We will never be your source for news. We will always be reckless. Netflix will always provide us with data that we will ignore.

“This will be the one place where you could see Arnold Schwarzenegger sitting next to Nikki Glaser sitting next to a family therapist with music by Mannequin P***y. That’s just a brief sampling of guests. We don’t know if we can lock in Mannequin P***y, but we are in talks with them.

“This is a really fun experiment. Not since Harry and Meghan has Netflix given more money to someone without a specific plan. . . . I think that this show will be something that people will want to tune into live. We will have a host in a suit taking calls from viewers. It’s Netflix’s commitment to embracing the 20th century. There is absolutely nothing new about what I’m doing but, by taking a lot of elements other people have already done and doing them out of order, it feels new and that’s what’s important.

“If we can be one-tenth as popular on Netflix as anything from South Korea, I will have the most successful talk show in world history.”

As with his Los Angeles series, Mulaney will be joined by the delivery cart robot Saymo and actor Richard Kind, who plays a goofier version of himself in the role of talk show announcer and sidekick.

Besides “Everybody’s Live,” the streamer also announced its upcoming slate of movies, TV shows and other programming, using the tagline, “You’re not ready for what’s next,” which some could see as an accurate statement about 2025 overall. A video for the slate features a Netflix hero who takes on the various roles from the streamer’s globally popular shows returning this year including “Stranger Things,” “Wednesday,” “Squid Game” and “Alice in Borderland.”

The Netflix event also afforded the network an opportunity to acknowledge the recent fires still ravaging parts of Los Angeles, that have taken 29 lives and left many without homes and/or jobs.

Mulaney referred to the fires elliptically when discussing last year’s Los Angeles series. “We had a blast,” he said. “We had many comedians who were in town for the festival. We had lots of guests. We had a hypnotist. We had an expert on coyotes in Los Angeles. We had a palm tree expert. We had an earthquake expert. We covered most all natural disasters that take place in California . . . except for one. We just weren’t ready.”

Tina Fey, who had introduced her upcoming series adaptation of Alan Alda’s 1981 movie “The Four Seasons,” said, “It’s nice to be here with you all in person. I love Los Angeles and I wanna thank Netflix for this chance to come in from New York and check on my friends.”

And even before the presentation began, Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria commented to the press, “I feel so lucky that I called Southern California home since I was 9 years old. I love L.A. I love West Coast rap — true story. I still think palm trees are breathtaking and I defend L.A. whenever people talk s**t about it. So that’s why it’s also been so heartbreaking to see what’s happened to this community over the last couple of weeks, and sorry to see that some of you and your colleagues have lost homes and have your lives turned upside down. Between COVID, the strikes, the fires, this town has been through a lot in the past few years, but just like we’ve gotten through everything else together, we will rebuild the [Pacific] Palisades, Malibu, Altadena and all the areas that have been devastated.”

Before leaving, the press was presented with a bag containing a t-shirt with “City of Angels” printed on it and a note that stated proceeds from the item would go to the American Red Cross to “support their critical work in responding to the LA wildfires.”

The post “I don’t need this”: John Mulaney cheekily quotes RFK Jr. while promoting new Netflix live talk show appeared first on Salon.com.

Noem, who was removed from her position in Donald Trump‘s Cabinet this week, was the focus of the show’s cold open and weekly news segment. In the former, Noem herself offered a tearful goodbye during a Pete Hegseth press conference on the war in Iran.

“DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has been reassigned under the bus,” Colin Jost as Hegseth said, inviting Ashley Padilla‘s Noem to the podium.

“I just want to make it clear that I didn’t get fired, I self-deported,” she said. “I will not be ending my mission. As I told my plastic surgeon, the work is never done.”

Despite obviously botched DHS operations in Los Angeles and Minneapolis, Noem said she had “no regrets.”

“Like they say, ‘You miss 100% of the dogs you don’t shoot,'” she said. “I think I really nailed it. And by it, I mean my married coworker.”

Jost was also involved in the second roast of Noem. He led off the “Weekend Update” sketch by feigning shock at her firing, asking viewers to “name one to 20 things she did wrong.”

“On some level, I feel bad for Kristi Noem. Imagine being singled out as the worst member of Trump’s Cabinet,” he said. “That’s like someone coming up to you at a party and saying ‘We think you should leave you’re making Diddy uncomfortable.”

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Jost’s co-anchor Michael Che joined in on the pile-on, taking shots at Noem’s new position with the Shield of the Americas.

“[It’s] a brand new department located on a farm upstate,” he said.

Watch the segment below via YouTube:

The post “Saturday Night Live” comes to bury Kristi Noem appeared first on Salon.com.

Granted, there are (literally) one or two outliers, like Zelda Williams’ perfectly fine 2023 film “Lisa Frankenstein.” But even that movie dilutes Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel to a fraction of its story, reducing all of the text’s thematic resonance to a footnote along with it. And that nuance is critically important. Shelley’s “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” is a story of creation, birth, love, fear, exile and loneliness. A woman’s perspective is inextricable from its text. There’s a good reason why “Frankenstein” is favored in gothic literature curricula over Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”: Shelley’s novel has infinitely more to parse. “Frankenstein” is rich with subtext yet highly accessible. It’s not dense, it doesn’t blabber on and it certainly doesn’t reek of masculine self-obsession. Yet, the bulk of people — down to a fraction of a percent — who have been given the power and financial means to adapt “Frankenstein” have been men.

(Niko Tavernise/Warner Bros. Pictures) Christian Bale as Frank and Jessie Buckley as The Bride in “The Bride”

This reality alone makes the existence of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s sophomore feature “The Bride!” something of a marvel. Not only has Gyllenhaal taken the reins from cinema’s patriarchal collective, but she’s implemented a distinctly feminine gaze, as complex and fascinating as the social implications tucked away between the lines of Shelley’s original text. Gyllenhaal has flipped the focus from Frankenstein’s Monster to his female companion, who is destroyed in Shelley’s book before she’s ever given life. James Whale’s 1935 freakquel, “Bride of Frankenstein,” imagined the companion briefly alive, sporting a white-streaked, electric-shocked bouffant before being killed by the Monster moments after her genesis. The Bride didn’t speak. She never even got to clunk and thud her way through any farmhouses or laboratories like a bewigged bull in a china shop. She was a woman functioning as a titillating climactic spectacle, who died with little more than a scream.

Gyllenhaal’s reimagining is the other side of the coin, so ultra-obsessed with giving the Bride (Jessie Buckley) her agency that it frequently forgets there’s a narrative arc happening around her. Across two hours, Buckley’s Bride shoots, kicks, contorts, dances, scrapes, whizzes, licks and screams, all the while coming no closer to her true self than she was at the start of the film. She’s more caricature than character; an idea without a purpose. That’s also the point. “Frankenstein” is largely about the journey to self-actualization and the destruction left in the wake of this ceaseless human pursuit. Shelley’s story is so moving precisely because it’s tinged with firsthand knowledge of the despair that comes with being misunderstood and othered at no fault of one’s own. These facets are also what make her “Frankenstein” so sweepingly unforgettable, and with “The Bride!,” Gyllenhaal isn’t trying to adapt the text so much as she’s eager to replicate the energy of Shelley’s voice.

“The Bride!” is surprising and strange, perplexing and aggravating. At times, it’s downright bad. But through all of its muddled schlock, Gyllenhaal’s film never once loses its distinctly feminine ambition, and that makes “The Bride!” a far more faithful “Frankenstein” adaptation than any made by a man.

Then again, Gyllenhaal is perfectly forthright with her affinity for Shelley’s perspective, opening her film with a small revelation hidden from the trailers. Buckley plays both the Bride and the ghost of Mary Shelley. Shelley’s disembodied spirit is trapped in a beautifully rendered grayscale netherworld, where she harnesses the rage of unfulfilled potential to possess a young woman named Ida (pre-Bride Buckley) in hopes of continuing her tragic tale from beyond the grave. These vignettes are where Gyllenhaal’s directorial eye shines the brightest, and where “The Bride!” brims with promise — just before the first of the film’s several unexplained narrative shifts.

Where this story takes place — which metaphysical realm it’s actually set in — is skimmed over entirely. The viewer can’t understand whether “The Bride!” is set inside of the sequel novel Shelley is crafting in the film, whether Shelley’s ghost has somehow willed a new reality into being, or if we’re just supposed to go along with it and connect the dots ourselves with what little we’re given. It’s a near-catastrophic narrative oversight that, like a handful of other plot holes, reeks of studio meddling by Warner Bros. after early test screenings failed to meet expectations. It would appear that Gyllenhaal’s film has been ironically hacked up and reassembled, but the Frankenstein’d version of “The Bride!” that we’re left with works because it wills itself to. If you can suspend the frustration long enough to meet Christian Bale’s Monster, Frank — himself somehow a real scientific creation, survived from the 1800s, as well as a product of Shelley’s imagination — you’ll manage a decent enough experience with the film.

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That’s really what “The Bride!’ is best for: the experience. Not since “Cats” has there been a more misguided yet enterprising work of big-budget, intellectual property cinema. Gyllenhaal zips between tones and styles with a ferocious abandon. Even when her film is utterly befuddling, it’s a joy to behold. Few films of this caliber are allowed to take swings so big, and Gyllenhaal delights in raising her audience’s eyebrow before shooting them with a needle full of Botox to make the expression stay frozen in its puzzled place.

Shortly after a young Ida falls to her death — a symptom of her erratic possession by Shelley’s ghost — Frank arrives in 1930s Chicago in search of a companion. The good Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) agrees to help this poor, destitute soul. Before we know it, Ida has become the Bride: a walking, talking realization of the Monster’s companion, remixed from her 1935 cinematic progenitor and stricken with verbal outbursts in olde English every time Shelley’s ghost hits her with a “knock, knock.” Before long, Frank and the Bride are on the road and on the lam, invigorating the nation in their path. With a few cop killings under their belts and an increasing lack of shame over their atypical appearances, these lovers-on-the-run light a powder keg and ignite a country repressed by misogyny and corruption.

(Warner Bros. Pictures) Christian Bale as Frank and Jake Gyllenhaal as Ronnie Reed in “The Bride”

There is no shame in Gyllenhaal’s game, and her honest excitement to dabble with references and emotion is refreshing, even when these moments grate. An entire sequence pays homage to the Riot Grrrl movement, where women across America paint themselves up like the Bride and hold men at gunpoint, screaming, “This is a brain attack!” It’s beyond inane and so undercooked that it can’t manage to horseshoe its way back to brilliant, but there’s no other way I’d like it. In referencing punk culture, Gyllenhaal whiffs her mark, which is somehow even more punk. It’s impossible to watch “The Bride!” without thinking about the fact that Warner Bros. poured $80 million into such a bold vision, and that — at least seemingly — a good portion of it remains intact in the final film. Gyllenhaal leans into the bizarro world she’s crafting as it’s taking form. Eventually, the atonal structure becomes the film’s nature. It’s as if “The Bride!” is learning more about how to be a movie as it goes along, just as Frankenstein’s Monster understands the facets of his humanity as Shelley’s novel progresses.

(Warner Bros. Pictures) Christian Bale as Frank and Jessie Buckley as The Bride in “The Bride”

Call that a stretch if you like, but I’d argue the film is more meta than its harshest critics will give it credit for. “The Bride!” is a film about being one thing when the world tells you to be another, and — as we’ve already seen with Guillermo Del Toro’s more faithful, Oscar-nominated adaptation — viewers take much kinder to the standard, thousandth retelling of “Frankenstein” than something like Gyllenhaal’s version, which is a truly fresh idea. She reimagines the Bride character with the same wild chaos and directorial scope that this movie swims in; the same initiative with which Shelley wrote her novel.

When “Frankenstein” was first published without Shelley’s name, and chatter about its author began to spread, an early commentary in the British Critic scorned the dissonance between Shelley’s womanhood and the novel’s monstrous narrative. “The writer of it is, we understand, a female,” the piece read. “This is an aggravation of that which is the prevailing fault of the novel; but if our authoress can forget the gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should, and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment.”

While I don’t suspect “The Bride!” will be met with this same revisionist praise later in its life, there is something remarkable about the dual “aggravation” of expectations that Gyllenhaal and Shelley’s works share. They are a testament to making whatever you want to make, no matter how it turns out or is received; of swinging for the fences the second you get the chance, knowing that the opportunity is never promised; of smashing the square peg into the round hole until it breaks through the surface, creating something new altogether. “The Bride!” is a monster of its own making that isn’t trying to earn its exclamation point — it’s declaring it. And as off-putting as it may be, this rebellion from pleasant form is innately, delightfully feminine.

The post “Frankenstein” needed a woman’s touch appeared first on Salon.com.

Only when they return to Ohio, and Fusco lays eyes on his fiancée’s large and well-appointed home, does he transform into Mr. Hyde. Fusco sits her down in the apartment they share to discuss his problem with their relationship: her body. He’s used to dating women who keep it tight, he explains. And Barrett, who works the long hospital shifts required to save people’s lives, isn’t cutting it.

“So I’m trying to like, I don’t know. Somebody who works out all the time and has a different type of, I don’t know,” he stammers. “It’s just someone who does . . . Pilates every day, or someone who’s working out every day. In those situations, it’s hard for me to be like, physically, when we’re in that moment, into it.”

With saintly calm, the too-good-for-him Dr. Barrett packs her things and returns to her peaceful castle.

(Netflix) Jessica Barrett and Chris Fusco in “Love is Blind”

Later, at a couples mixer, Fusco drunkenly brays about how terrible the sex was. Then he tries to seduce his second choice, fellow cast member Bri McNees, by offering to whisk her away to the local Four Seasons and letting her know he has a Charles Schwab account. As he does this, Connor Spies, McNees’ intended, stands a few feet away.

We watch “Love Is Blind” for all the usual reasons. The mess? Sure. Its sense of romantic optimism? Not if you’ve been paying attention! But Chris Fusco’s “I’m just not that into smashing you” speech and boozy peacocking have made him the face of a moment. He’s a grade-A reality TV villain and a gift to content creators, fueling a slew of analyses and clapbacks. One TikTok user posted a video of his Pilates speech being projected onscreen in her psychology class, as a case study.

To women nodding along while reading tales of alpine divorces and ghostlighting filling their social media feeds, Fusco is the typical catch in the increasingly polluted dating pool. And to those who watch “Love Is Blind” while noticing an overall decline in our ability to relate to one another, he’s proof that the show’s matchmaking success rate probably was doomed to decrease over time.

Finding love has never been easy. I say this as someone who never had to deal with modern dating horrors, but has close friends who do, if they haven’t surrendered to heterofatalism entirely. My husband and I watch “Love Is Blind” with one of those nearest and dearest, and we three approach each season like rabid sports fans who are only in it to yell at the TV.

Since “Love Is Blind” was minted at the start of the pandemic, it follows that the further we get from its February 2020 debut, the more frequently antisocial patterns learned during lockdowns are emerging.

The convenience technology that got us through the pandemic also made it easier than ever to avoid other people. Delivery apps reduced the need to leave the house for groceries and other supplies. Apps also facilitated no muss sexual encounters; nobody wanted to catch the virus, or feelings. This has been the case since the dawn of mobile devices and algorithmic personalization, but forced separations may have turned curt, unexplained goodbyes into a perceived relationship norm. The “Sex and the City” generation was left agog at their heroine being dumped via Post-It note; today, Carrie Bradshaw is just as likely to be abandoned by a suitor dropping their text thread without explanation.

Others try to resume them by picking up that chain months after they’ve left a date on read — or ghostlighting, as it’s been dubbed.

But then, a little frustration at a cowardly lack of social etiquette is better than, say, a date abandoning you in the middle of a wilderness hike, i.e., the alpine divorce.

(Netflix) Chris Fusco in “Love is Blind”

Pandemic technology reliance fostered an expectation of a frictionless existence, including in our romantic lives. Many of us are still figuring out that being around other people doesn’t work that way – and there’s no better evidence of how harsh that lesson can be than watching “Love Is Blind” in its later seasons.

Mind you, smart women and men were making foolish partner choices ages before young men flocked to Andrew Tate, whom Fusco casually namedrops to McNees. In ye olden times, hapless manchildren genuflected before Erik von Markovik, aka Mystery, the high priest of the “seduction community” profiled in 2005 in Neil Strauss’ bestseller “The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists.” Mystery and his kind mainstreamed the practice of negging, which speculates that insulting a woman is the key to piquing her interest.

But that was when people were obligated to inconvenience themselves by leaving their creature comforts to rawdog the same air as strangers in bars. The simultaneous rise of social media and consumer apps removed that complication. Tinder’s 2012 launch moved the mating hunt onto our phones, and now single servings of strangers can mosey right to your doorstep. As for those less inclined to submit to some digital catalog call, there are and have always been chatrooms, forums, and online gaming communities enabling like-minded people to gather without meeting in the flesh.

“Love Is Blind”’s gamification dangles the promise of a deeper emotional connection, which was especially appealing when lockdowns closed community third spaces and further cemented TV as a dominant cultural hub.

For a few couples, its premise has worked. Season 1 matched Lauren Speed-Hamilton and Cameron Hamilton. Season 4 united Tiffany Pennywell and Brett Brown; their marriage is still going strong, as are those of fellow participants Chelsea Griffin and Kwame Appiah, and Bliss Poureetezadi and Zack Goytowski.

(Netflix) Emma Betsinger and Mike Gibney in “Love is Blind”

But the show’s marriage track record petered out since, coinciding with a reported rise in global loneliness that hasn’t abated since the world reopened — that, and the mainstreaming of casual misogyny. You may even recognize manosphere dictums sprinkled within otherwise normal-seeming conversations on “Love Is Blind” — comments equating dominance with male desirability and drawing a correlation between a man’s annual salary and his masculinity. Or defining a solid relationship as one where a woman isn’t too much of a bother.

Witness the tortured love story of Emma Betsinger and Mike Gibney. Betsinger is a childless-by-choice adoptee, concerned that her potential children might inherit the cancerous skin condition that required her to undergo multiple surgeries. Gibney, who has never lived with a woman, wants a womb of his own. He proposes to her, intending to change her mind while assuring Betsinger and her loved ones that he isn’t pressuring her. Then he ditches her at the altar.

Day trader Alex Henderson confuses his betrothed Ashley Carpenter with a shifting backstory involving frequent moves and overlapping dating histories, all attributed to his “nomadic lifestyle.” In the same argument where he issues a veiled suggestion that Carpenter abandon her job, he blames his lack of sexual initiation on her menstrual cycle.

Meanwhile, Brittany Wicker says yes to Devonta Anderson soon after they begin dating, but when he discovers she said yes to her wedding dress before they met, he finds that scary and clingy. The slightest hint of conflict sends him marching off in a silent funk, actually. When they call off the wedding, Wicker chooses to see that decision as a relationship pause, while Anderson bids her farewell by saying, “We will be in touch,” with the soulless formality of a Truth Social post sign-off. (“Thank you for your attention to this matter.”)

(Netflix) Brittany Wicker and Devonta Anderson in “Love is Blind”

Survey after survey places statistics behind anecdotal testimonies about our inability to romantically connect. A January 2025 report from the Survey Center on American Life found that 57% of single men and 54% of single women feel pessimistic about finding a suitable partner, although there are more single young men (59%) than similarly unattached young women (44%). You’ve no doubt read about the male loneliness epidemic, but more recent findings by Pew Research Center show that young women are equally as lonely, with 16% of men and 15% of women reporting feeling “lonely or isolated all or most of the time.”

Some theorize that women more effectively cultivated their alone time during the pandemic, choosing to develop new skills or prioritize self-care.

Of course, based on what Henderson, Gibney, Anderson and Fusco claim, it’s not that they lack for a social life but, rather, a similarly disposed person who offers none of the conflict inherent to any relationship with a real live human.

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Against all odds, Season 10 yielded two marriages. Christine Hamilton and Dr. Vic St. John got engaged so quickly and exhibited so little tension that people called them adorable but boring or, worse, ringers. They were spared the unease of the Cabo San Lucas couples retreat and sent to Malibu instead due to budgetary restrictions and their lack of triangular tension.

Their relative normalcy, and that of fellow marrieds Amber Morrison and Jordan Faeth, is a soothing contrast to the textbook Fusco fiasco and the rest of the season’s red flag bearers. But it’s getting increasingly apparent that this experiment’s purpose isn’t to see whether love is blind, but whether there’s any hope of finding it at all. In America, we should say.

The good news is that the show’s format has been replicated in many other countries. Our domestic selections may be going the way of Fusco, but I hear Sweden is for lovers. Maybe I need to watch that version to find out.

The “Love Is Blind” 10th season reunion episode debuts at 6 p.m. PT/ 9 p.m. ET Wednesday, March 11, on Netflix.

The post Why the “Love Is Blind” experiment was doomed from the start appeared first on Salon.com.

Days before Storrie’s episode, The Athletic announced that Minnesota Wild defenseman Quinn Hughes — fresh off besting Team Canada to win Olympic gold with the U.S. men’s hockey team in Milan — would join Storrie on the show before heading over to appear on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” on Monday.

In another reality, Hughes’ cameo would have been viewed as a nice tip of the hat to the world of “Heated Rivalry,” a romantic drama about hockey players from rival teams – one Canadian, one American – falling in love. But in this darkest of timelines, Hughes and his brother, Jack, were caught in a widely circulated video showing them partying with FBI director Kash Patel and laughing as Donald Trump made a dig at the U.S. women’s hockey team, who also won gold.

“I must tell you, we’re gonna have to bring the women’s team, you do know that?” Trump said after inviting the men to visit the White House. If he didn’t, he added, he’d “probably be impeached.” At this, America’s hockey dudes laughed dutifully and dude-ily, unaware of how disgusting people would find this tidbit of locker room talk.

None of this should have been Connor Storrie’s problem. But the “Heated Rivalry” of it all provided an opportunity for reputational laundering nobody at NBC or with Team USA could pass up.

So on “SNL,” as Storrie’s monologue winds down, we see the Hughes brothers take the stage to polite applause and a few hoots. A little banter ensues, making way for the real surprise guests: fellow Olympic hockey champions Megan Keller and team captain Hilary Knight. The audience roars as Keller and Knight flank Storrie before Knight jokes, “It was gonna be just us, but we thought we’d invite the guys too.”

“We thought we’d give them a little moment to shine,” Keller adds.

See what “SNL” did there?

An uncritical viewing designates this as another “all’s well that ends well” gag. Whether it came together after producers took stock of the rising fury or was planned all along is irrelevant; we’re supposed to appreciate that “SNL” made a show of giving all the gold medalists their deserved spotlight. Regardless of the media’s outsized focus on the men’s victory (“The Boys of Team USA,” crows a Free Press headline prominently featured on CBS News’ website) and this brazen example of how women’s sports accomplishments are relegated to a lower status that men’s, Lorne Michaels is once again here to remind us that the whole mess is laughable and all things are equal.

After all, this is men’s hockey’s first team gold since 1980’s “Miracle on Ice.” And the women? “The last time we did that was two whole Olympics ago,” Knight deadpans.

So yet again, Michaels and the “Saturday Night Live” producers placed an up-and-coming performer in the role of scandal laundering.

I’d argue Ayo Edebiri got a rawer deal in 2024 when she was pressed into setting up former GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who opposed marriage equality and transgender rights, with a joke about Haley’s refusal to cite slavery as the Civil War’s primary cause. Even so, Storrie has to figuratively shine up a team of athletes who probably never watched his show in front of the millions of fans who ardently do.

(Will Heath/NBC) Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie on “Saturday Night Live”

Michaels has long responded to criticisms about “SNL” being left-leaning (which it has been, historically) or humanizing odious far-right figures (which it does more often these days) by claiming that his show is politically neutral.

If neutrality equals toothlessness, I have no rebuttal to that assessment. “Saturday Night Live” has never demonstratively risen to the challenge of satirizing Trump or any of the treacherous absurdity he’s foisted on us. Even when Alec Baldwin capitalized on his celebrity to poke at Trump’s orange peel during his first presidency, it wasn’t up to the task. The show has offered even less of a challenge during this more unhinged second administration.

But the Olympic hockey incursion on a night that should have entirely belonged to Storrie is an apt metaphor for the show’s constant slips and stumbles on what it thinks of as political middle ground. Keller and Knight were rewarded with proximity to Storrie and the best punchlines, but neither Quinn nor Jack Hughes had to indicate in any way that they had joined America’s president in slighting them.

“Saturday Night Live” will always be a safe space for politicians who don’t mind laughing at themselves. That includes objectively horrendous people. Anyone lampooned with a scintilla of brutality knows that an appearance can temporarily inoculate against accusations of humorlessness. In the worst cases, it gives the audience one last chance to laugh in someone’s face before they vanish into obscurity.

For this reason, one of the smartest moves Sarah Palin made was showing up during one of Tina Fey’s dead-ringer impressions to mark the end of her time as a vice presidential candidate. This season, Fey dropped by to impersonate freshly ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Who knows, she may reprise that role this weekend when Ryan Gosling hosts.

But I wouldn’t put it past Michaels to persuade Noem herself to pop in and lay a few aw-shucks jokey-jokes on we, the people. Like everyone else in Trump’s circle, she is just human after all . . . of those Immigration and Customs Enforcement kidnappings and killings she oversaw.

Olympic athletes, in contrast, are meant to be apolitical figures representing their home nation’s highest ideals. The circumstances leading to this PR black eye for the men’s hockey team are anything but – and a sharper, braver comedy show would have done a smarter job of acknowledging that while moving the biscuit across the ice.

“Saturday Night Live” hasn’t been that show for some time – probably not since the last time the men’s hockey team won gold. But its ineffectual japing, and Michaels’ inability to help himself when it comes to normalizing repugnant behavior in the name of chasing the zeitgeist, makes it a popular stop on the image rehab express. Since Quinn and Jack’s mother, Ellen Hughes, did her part by dropping by “Today” in her capacity as a USA women’s hockey player development consultant, so must her sons make the NBC rounds.

Despite their enthusiastic appearance at the State of the Union address – the women’s team was also invited but declined, citing scheduling conflicts –  I’m guessing the men’s team does not want history to remember them as Trump acolytes. Some have offered their version of repentance for their behavior, while Jack Hughes, a center and alternate captain for the New Jersey Devils, could only muster a “You’re in the moment” excuse when The Athletic asked him about the situation. “It is what it is now,” he said a couple of days before his “SNL” appearance, “but we have so much respect for the women’s team, they have so much respect for us. We’re all just proud Americans and we’re happy that we both swept the Olympics.”

Others have asked for the public’s grace, including women’s hockey champion Abbey Murphy, who addressed the controversy on a recent Barstool Sports hockey podcast episode by saying, “We never felt anything bad from them . . . it’s sad they even have to apologize for anything.”

Regardless, the U.S. men’s hockey team became synonymous with the standardized misogyny from which “Heated Rivalry” offers a refuge.

Bringing Keller and Knight onstage somewhat sweetened the awkward position in which the show placed Storrie, but it doesn’t entirely ameliorate the White House’s intrusion into both hockey teams’ Olympic glory. Instead, the bit reduced a palpable slight to just another funny slip-up.

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Did any of this take away from Storrie’s “Saturday Night Live” debut? In the main, not so much. “Heated Rivalry” stans applauded the actor’s good-natured handling of the situation and flipped over the unannounced but entirely expected appearances by his co-star and best friend, Hudson Williams.

Not much else about the episode was as memorable as these treats, which means “SNL” successfully washed the dirt of another scandal out of our newsfeeds yet again,

The part that continues to stink is that the show used both an actor who portrays a queer hero and women’s excellence to scrub away our indignance without requiring their male counterparts to lend any muscle at all. That Quinn and Jack Hughes agreed to be the butt of the joke by simply standing there is enough in the show’s non-partisan judgment. But without their presence, the audience would have understood that Olympic gold shines just as brightly when women hockey champions are wearing it, especially in the pleasing glow of a much-adored star like Storrie.

“Saturday Night Live” airs at 8:30 p.m. PT/ 11:30 p.m. ET Saturdays on NBC and streams the next day on Peacock.

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By “the thing,” I don’t mean that he wore a shirt unbuttoned almost to the waist and stuffed a small floral arrangement into his pants, though he did do that. No, the thing Morrissey did was complain — into a microphone, from an enormous stage, to a sold-out crowd — about how unfair it is that he has been silenced. “The fact that I’m on this stage is an incredible accomplishment in itself,” he said. “Because, as you know, the jealous bit*hes tried to get rid of me.”

The crowd roared; the band members directly behind Morrissey tried very hard not to smirk. “But thanks to you [crowd whoops] and thanks to me [crowd screams] I’m still here.” Then the drummer counted them in and god’s favorite messy bit*h clambered down off the cross for “Now My Heart Is Full.” The crowd continued to go wild for the remainder of his set, which ended with a full arena singing along with the closing number, The Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.”

2026 is, on paper, a big year for Morrissey. “Make-Up Is a Lie,” his 14th solo album, dropped on Friday; his tour in support of it, despite a predictable flurry of cancelled shows, is underway; and it’s the 40th anniversary of The Smiths’ breakthrough album, “The Queen Is Dead.” But as his lament to the O2 arena’s sold-out crowd made clear, it’s simply another year in which Moz will revel in victimhood and rail against his legion of music-business enemies: The thought-police punters, the overwoke music press and a record industry so united in thwarting his genius that simply being onstage is an accomplishment.

(Gus Stewart/Redferns/Getty Images) Morrissey performs at the O2 Arena in London, England

“Being a former Morrissey fan is like being trapped in an abusive relationship with your first great love. No matter what he does or says, you somehow dust yourself down and immediately hark back to the bliss of early discovery,” wrote Kevin Maher in a recent Times of London essay. Within the piece itself, Maher makes it clear that the only way to tell the difference between a former Morrissey fan and a current Morrissey fan is to be caught in the act of a jangly reverie that slingshots us back to simpler days, when Steven Patrick Morrissey was the wordy, literate, excruciatingly sincere Pope of Mope.

We all know better, of course. “Never meet your heroes” isn’t the shibboleth of Morrissey fans, since the 66-year-old singer is known for unfailing kindness to fans. The warning is more along the lines of “Never read your hero’s political opinions, but also good luck trying to avoid hearing about them.”

“Make-Up Is a Lie” underscores perfectly the widening gulf between being a fan of Morrissey and rooting for the man himself. It is a collection of tracks that underachieves in every category other than self-obsessed bellyaching. A Paste review pulls no punches: “Morrissey really has outdone himself with this one, shattering all preconceived notions of his modern mediocrity. We expected something anodyne and forgettable, but what we received was far worse: an actively terrible album. Do not listen to it.”

In other words, the album isn’t bad because of its creator’s political views; it’s bad because it’s bad. The title track is a tinny synth beat over which he sings the phrase with varying levels of dramatic fillips. The cover of Roxy Music’s “Amazona” strips out all the edge from the original’s jagged freak-out. The single “Notre-Dame” is a conspiracy theory whose scant lyrics are so repetitive that it’s tempting to think that they’re a comment on the hamster-wheel mind of an obsessed truther, in this case, one convinced that the 2019 Paris cathedral fire was the work of Islamic terrorists. Would the inherent anti-Islam sentiment be less offensive if “Notre-Dame” were a banger? Not to me. But the whole production is hackneyed enough to suggest that Morrissey had nothing in the chamber beyond a not-at-all-cryptic assertion of “We know who killed you.”

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It’s notable that the few people who have applauded both “Make-Up Is a Lie” and Moz’s onstage pity parties seem to be flying the flag in hopes of — say it with me — triggering the woke mob. “Morrissey really is the last rock rebel,” swooned Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator. “Being at The O2 felt electrifying. We knew we were in the presence of a man frowned upon by the self-righteous. A man who through sheer bloody-mindedness managed to escape the clutches of that most ravenous of beasts: cancel culture.”

But apart from a few conservative-is-the-new-punk dorks, most of Morrissey’s fans aren’t interested in using his enduring popularity as a cudgel against their ideological foes. They know he leans towards racist and has a martyr complex, but they also reject the notion that continuing to listen to him is tantamount to co-signing his histrionics. They’ve been separating the art from the artist since they first realized that Morrissey was a jerk, years ago.

Corey, 54, recalls that, in his middle school, “people I hung out with loved The Cure, and part of that was because Robert Smith was lovable — he was the cuddly goth. We loved The Smiths, but were we like, ‘Oh, that Morrissey, he’s so endearing?’ I don’t think so. He was a charming as*hole.” My friend Rose confirms, without hesitating, over text: “I do not like him. I never did. But I love the music of The Smiths. His B.S. won’t stop me listening.”

I recently revisited the letters sent by Morrissey to U.K. music papers like NME and Melody Maker in the late 1970s, which I recall reading as a teen when they were printed in Spin, or maybe Details. More than a decade before Nick Hornby wrote “High Fidelity,” Steven Morrissey was pure, uncut record-shop guy: supercilious, brimming with confidence in the superiority of his own taste — and also, mortifyingly, too much of a fan to be cool about it, a reminder that fan is an abbreviation of a longer word.

In these letters, Morrissey is spoiling for a fight, needlessly combative in platforming his faves and scorning everyone from Aerosmith to The Ramones to The Police for the crime of not being the New York Dolls. One of his rare raves, for The Buzzcocks, closed with a bit*hy flounce: “Both this letter and The Buzzcocks themselves will probably be filed and forgotten. But for now, they are the best kick-ass rock band in the country. Go and see them first and then you may have the audacity to contradict me, you stupid sluts.”

These writings are Morrissey’s Rosetta Stone: More than any snotty interview or self-flagellating lyric, they are proof that Morrissey did not “become” anything. He was always the guy who wanted to poke at people and pick petty fights and stick a hand right next to your face and insist I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you! An edgelord. A proto-troll. But doctor, I am Bigmouth.

Rose asks if I saw a thing on Threads: The daughter-in-law of a Boomer actress posted that, during COVID, Morrissey left a note at her mother-in-law’s house. This combination of phrases — “a letter,” “COVID,” “mother-in-law” — brings several possibilities to mind, none of them good. Was Morrissey going door-to-door with vaccine-denial talking points? Was the note an anti-immigrant rant? Was the mother-in-law a woke culture crusader in league with Morrissey’s many industry foes?

The thread was written on March 3 by Mindy Stern, a Los Angeles writer whose mother-in-law was British actress Samantha Eggar. “On the evening of January 13th, 2021, still in high COVID, I dropped off food at [Eggar’s] doorstep and went home,” she wrote. “About 15 minutes later, she texted us this picture and asked if I had also left this at her door as a joke.” There’s a CD of Morrissey’s 2020 album, “I Am Not a Dog on a Chain,” with a handwritten, all-caps note that reads “Hello Samantha, Would you be agreeable to tea — with me? Morrissey.”

“WTF, had Morrissey actually been at her house??” Stern wrote. She and her husband asked to check the Ring footage and sure enough, there he was, wearing a blue sweater and a mask that appeared to have cats printed on it. His body language wasn’t Stage Morrissey, but the anxious, boyish hovering of someone who’s spent years wanting to ask one of his movie-star faves to tea and just realized it was now or never. (Eggar died in 2025 at 86).

(Taylor Hill/Getty Images for Morrissey) Morrissey

“As you can imagine, we were out of our minds,” Stern continued. “Screaming, singing, imagining their meet up . . . I mean, f*ck yes. For context, my MIL had boyfriends with names like Kris Kristofferson and Ed Ruscha. She was less impressed [and] actually annoyed he had the gumption to show up unannounced. Announced shmannouneced! It’s Morrissey! She agreed to listen to his music, so we sent her a “best of” in the hopes she’d meet him.”

And then, the kicker: “An hour or so passed, she texted us: if he’s so miserable, why doesn’t he just kill himself already?”

It’s a perfect Morrissey story. It’s got mystery, surprise and humor. Most importantly, it’s got rejection. Morrissey probably did long to have tea with Eggar. But the pathos of not getting to do so, of asking and being turned down, is so much truer to his indelible self-conception — a bit more proof that though he has gotten so much already (fame, adoration, legacy) he can’t get what he wants this time.

It’s also a clue to why people who thoroughly loathe the person Morrissey is now — and, arguably, the person he’s always been — aren’t waiting around for him to do better. For all of his narcissism and tiresome bluster and woe-is-me wallowing, he’s always known exactly what it is to have the fevered, irrational devotion of a fan. His whinging and lashing out have made for diminishing returns, creatively, but damn if he isn’t consistent.

And I’d argue that people don’t continue to be fans because they suspect he’s going to ever do anything as good as “The Queen Is Dead” or “Your Arsenal.” They don’t think he deserves endless chances to prove that he’s not as big a Boomer cliché as Eric Clapton or Van Morrison. Figuring out what musical icons are worth holding on to comes down to maintaining an equilibrium of brilliance and bulls*t. The man who once sang “I’d rather be famous than righteous or holy” always knew what he was about, even if the rest of us didn’t.

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In his June 1974 review of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book, “All the President’s Men,” The New Yorker’s political columnist Richard H. Rovere was less than impressed. The book, which provided a detailed account of the journalistic process the two Washington Post reporters used to uncover the extent of the Watergate scandal, was primed to be a bestseller. For historians and rubbernecking readers alike, “All the President’s Men” would be a necessary tome, a how-to on exposing corruption. Rovere, on the other hand, found the book to be “barren of ideas and imagination,” and “scarcely more interesting or enlightening than the day-by-day newspaper accounts.” The authors were too hung up on facts over insights, he argued. This was not the gossipy publication that many anticipated, and to Rovere, that missing element made the book a disappointment. Thankfully for Rovere, director Alan J. Pakula would turn those humdrum parts of “All the President’s Men” into a gripping procedural just two years later, crafting a legendary piece of American cinema in the process.

But near the end of his column, Rovere emphasized one particularly important point in the book: Woodward and Bernstein wouldn’t have had anything to investigate if it weren’t for Nixon’s bumbling political cabinet and the sloppy work done by the low-level criminal team conducting the Watergate break-in. “Twenty years ago, McCarthyism might have been a grace and continuing menace to the liberty of us all if the leader had been less indolent and more hungry for power,” he wrote. “Two years ago, the triumph of the Watergate mentality might have become similarly disastrous if those who planned and executed it had not been almost wholly lacking in political finesse.”

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If only that were still true. These days, America endures a Watergate-level amount of corruption every week, spearheaded by politicians as dolting and imbecilic as the ones in Nixon’s trusted circle. Federal immorality is no longer brushed under the rug, just waiting to be splashed across newspapers in big-scoop headlines; it’s scrawled out and published on X and Truth Social by the very politicians and talking heads committing it. Our government is rife with the exact kind of juicy insights that Rovere hoped to find in Woodward and Bernstein’s book, freely and fearlessly displayed. You can’t cover something up if you have nothing to hide.

Nearly 50 years after its theatrical release, Pakula’s “All the President’s Men” plays much differently than it once did. Despite its reputation as a rousing tribute to the value of journalistic process, all of the film’s finest, most impactful components have spoiled with time — and to no fault of anyone involved with the actual movie itself. The years have eroded the film’s relevance, sped up by pernicious politicians and unethical business practices that have all but made editorial institutions and the hope for a stable democratic government moot. Yet, watching the film all these years later, its ardent message of persistence is somehow all the more powerful. If Woodward and Bernstein can climb over every wall, turn over every stone and reroute themselves at every dead end, perhaps it’s not too late for some good, old-fashioned salvation.

(Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) Robert Redford, Jason Robards, Jack Warden, Dustin Hoffman, director Alan J. Pakula and Martin Balsam in front of The Washington Post building for “All the President’s Men”

The problem is that every corrupt politician in America, as well as their cronies, also knows that our fate has not yet been decided — and they’ll do anything to accelerate doom if it means the world will spin in their favor. In Pakula’s “All the President’s Men,” The Washington Post newsroom functions almost like a secret lair, a place where the good guys can hide out and compile their facts. Phones ring off the hook, cigarette smoke fills the air and the coffee is always hot. It’s a safe haven for journalists to put their heads together and find a solution that will serve the reader, and in turn, the greater good of the American people. On occasions that the reporting takes Woodward (Robert Redford) and Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) away from their cubicles, their work is financed and comped by their employers. And even though they’re on deadline, they’re afforded ample time to collect data and conduct interviews before returning to their typewriters.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that this is, sadly, a very outdated look at what newspaper journalism used to look like. Access to the internet exacerbated the need for a quick turnaround in newswriting. The homepage has to be refreshed with saucy material that will bring new readers in and keep existing readers scrolling. The number of long-term investigations published by outlets with the resources to fund such pursuits has dwindled fast. But most critically, venture capital has eaten away at the remaining vestiges of old-school journalism. Papers and websites can be bought, sold and traded, and quite often, the publication’s editorial voice will go with it.

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Coincidentally, The Washington Post first endorsed a presidential candidate in 1976, the same year “All the President’s Men” hit theaters. The paper continued the practice for almost every presidential election cycle until 2024, when Jeff Bezos, the billionaire who acquired the publication in 2013, announced that the Post would halt its endorsements — just 11 days before the 2024 election. While Bezos’ reps claimed this would be a return to neutrality for the publication, many people, including Post staffers, saw the decision as a clear and irrefutable move on Bezos’ part to curry favor with Donald Trump. In the following days, the paper lost a top editor and 250,000 subscribers, an injury that could only aid the narrative that the paper was struggling under Bezos when 300-some employees were laid off earlier this year in a “bloodbath” cut. A publication that once stood for truth and justice, emboldening reporters like Bernstein and Woodward to uncover corruption, was now wantonly flaunting its own rot.

When I first saw “All the President’s Men,” it was over the course of three days. My high school history teacher showed the film to our junior class, broken up into 50-minute segments that would adhere to the school bell. Despite being on the staff of my school’s newspaper, I expected the film to be a slog; boring and obsessed with detail and names I didn’t know or care much about.

(Warner Bros. Inc./Getty Images) Robert Redford holding papers while speaking to Dustin Hoffman typing on a typewriter in a scene from the film “All the President’s Men” 1976

To my surprise, I was gripped from its outset, fascinated by the way Pakula and screenwriter William Goldman managed to make the mundane so fascinating. Scenes of Redford and Hoffman taking phone calls and scribbling down notes, or poring over library slips in desperate search of a kernel of a lead, were thrilling. And it wasn’t only the method that was fascinating; it was the effect. Tugging on a tiny piece of thread can unspool a yarn of corruption so vast and wide-reaching that it goes all the way up to the highest office in the Western world. It’s impossible to watch “All the President’s Men” and not feel inspired by Woodward and Bernstein’s tenacity.

“Because these perpetrators were held accountable, it would be nearly impossible for a political crime of this level to happen again,” I remember our teacher telling the class. That’s a nice thought, even if it’s myopic. Less than a decade after my graduation, Trump was elected and the veil was pulled. Political cover-ups like this happened all the time, I realized. Now they were just more visible.

“All the President’s Men” is not the defining American portrait of good triumphing over evil that a more naive version of myself once thought it was. Rather, it was a warning. Pakula and Goldman saw obstacles on the horizon. The country was rocked by the Watergate fallout, but its citizens also lapped up the gossip — like Rovere hoped to do with what little tidbits made it to Woodward and Bernstein’s book. The public both abhorred and adored the scandal. The more that top-level political corruption dominated the headlines, the less taboo it became.

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The ripples of the botched Watergate operation spoke to all of those arrogant enough to think they might be able to do it better. All America needed to kick things into high gear was a pervasive advancement in technology that made it easier to silo oneself into conspiracy and conservatism, and a political sub-party like the MAGA crowd to fuel the “fake news” rhetoric. Suddenly, even if a story in the papers went through a rigorous fact-checking process and was sourced accordingly, it didn’t have to be true if you didn’t want it to be.

To certain people, reality is a fickle thing. It comes and goes, and we get to choose to accept it when we feel like it. But just because so many have made up their own truths doesn’t mean that facts aren’t real, or that actions don’t have consequences. Jeff Bezos might be trying to systematically dismantle The Washington Post, and Bari Weiss may be doing the same thing to CBS News, but not all Americans are sitting idly by to let it happen. Weiss hasn’t been able to spend one day in her tenure at CBS without flubbing something and getting called on it by concerned citizens, and Washington Post readers recently joined the paper’s union in protesting. And while the net effect of this outcry isn’t as immediately visible as governmental corruption, it’s crucial to remember that Woodward and Bernstein started small, too. “All the President’s Men” underscores that sentiment with its matter-of-fact final shot, watching a teletype machine writing out years of front-page headlines leading to Nixon’s resignation.

Journalism doesn’t look the same as it did 50 years ago, but that doesn’t mean that the stubborn reporter is a thing of the past. There are plenty of people who care enough to put the time and effort into uncovering the extent of the amoral world we’ve found ourselves in. Sifting through the noise and the voices takes more time, but it’s worth it. You never know when you’ll find yourself on the ground floor of a scandal, reading a story that will change history forever and result in the unthinkable. As Pakula’s brilliantly stark ending reminds us all these years later, justice requires patience.

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This was among the reactions Schatz had when her mother tearfully confessed a long-held secret: As a teenager, she had gotten pregnant twice; each time, she was sent by her parents to a maternity home for the duration of the pregnancy — just one of the 1.5 million girls who “went away” during the Baby Scoop era. Raised with no information about their bodies, sex, or pregnancy, they also had no say in what happened to the babies they carried. “Where the Girls Were” is set in one such home, a rambling San Francisco Victorian where a group of pregnant girls lived in near-total seclusion. (On the rare occasions they were allowed to be in public, they were given fake engagement rings to wear.) Schatz, the author of feminist primers “Rad Women A–Z” and “Rad Women Worldwide,” and coauthor (with W. Kamau Bell) of “Do the Work: An Antiracist Activity Book,” found that becoming a mother herself stoked a need to know more about her mother’s invisible, silent sorority.

Some homes for unwed mothers (or, more euphemistically, “wayward girls”) were, like Ireland’s infamous Magdalene Laundries, run by the Catholic Church as workhouses where punishment was recast as atonement. Others were private homes, like the one Schatz set her novel in. The girls were cut off from their parents, who created cover stories for their absence (just, you know, going to visit an aunt upstate) and dissuaded from sharing details of their lives to other girls. They weren’t told that they were expected to give up their newborns to more appropriate, deserving parents; when the time came to “go over,” they gave birth in twilight sleep and were pressured to sign away their parental rights in the disoriented hours that followed. Many never saw their babies at all.

For Schatz, it felt important to depict some of the camaraderie that could be found in this liminal space where they were not children but also not adults. “The story I created [is] not what happened to my mom,” she clarifies. “There are similarities that I drew from, but I wanted to create an entirely fictional account.” She put the girls in conversation (and, more frequently, arguments) with each other and with the culture, the insular secrecy of the maternity house shrinking in what Schatz calls the “tie-dyed shadow” of the Summer of Love.

“I wasn’t interested in showing the [maternity home] as an evil place. It was traumatic for a lot of people, but I also read accounts from women who felt cared for there. They had people to talk to. I wanted to show the importance of that community.” But “Where the Girls Were” is also clear-eyed about the routine dehumanization of teen mothers by maternity-home staff, social workers, and psychologists. There was no differentiation, for instance, between girls who had become pregnant via consensual sex and girls who hadn’t. They were told how lucky they were to have a chance to start their lives over after, how easy it would be to forget their mistakes — to, as “Mad Men”’s Don Draper would later put it,” “Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.” Women like Schatz’s mother, she says, “went back into a world that wanted to silence them.”

As private adoption took shape as an industry, exploiting girls’ shame was a crucial tool for social workers and psychiatrists who diagnosed maternity home residents with depression, mental instability and the vague but damning label “unfit.” Pregnant teens were told they were incapable, both emotionally and materially, of being good mothers; this pathologizing was necessary to keep a supply of almost exclusively white infants aligned with the thriving demand for them. “[There were] all these men coming back from war who were traumatized,” says Schatz, “and there was pressure to have children.” There was also infertility, itself a source of shame for women who experienced it, just as America was proudly reshaping itself for the nuclear family. “All of a sudden, it was like Wait. We could make money with these babies.”

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This was far from the only ethically shaky aspect of Baby Scoop times. Gabrielle Glaser, author of 2021’s “American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption,” wrote about for-profit adoption as a “massive experiment in social engineering;” one now-notorious placement agency used relinquished children as test subjects, with identical twins and triplets placed with separate families for long-term study. Generations of adoptees, Glaser writes, “were brought up to think their biological parents hadn’t wanted them, and that — regardless of how cherished they were — they were their adoptive parents’ ‘second choice’ to biological offspring.”

“Where the Girls Were” joins a canon of both fiction and nonfiction set during the Baby Scoop era, much of it authored by people who, like Schatz, don’t want its history wiped away. (“[I]t kind of blew my mind, the idea that these women I loved very much had children and were expected not to know them or see them or think about them,” horror novelist Grady Hendrix said in 2025 about the inspiration for his novel “Witchcraft for Wayward Girls.”)

In her author’s note, Schatz recalls accompanying her mother to see “A Girl Like Her,” a documentary based on Ann Fessler’s 2006 oral-history collection “The Girls Who Went Away,” whose audience was filled with women who were once those girls. “I watched as my mom made eye contact with these total strangers, paused for a moment, then walked right into their arms . . . They didn’t need to say a word: for the first time in their lives, their secret was understood, their grief validated.”

“I feel really proud of her,” Schatz tells me. “She went from having such enormous shame and not even telling me or my sister until we were adults to being able to have a conversation about it.” At a moment in which the importance of shame changing sides is ascendant, this feels monumental. But Schatz is also aware of how painfully timely her book is for the girls and women living in states with restrictive, often punitive laws.

Reading “Where the Girls Were,” it’s queasily clear that the Baby Scoop era is exactly the America that a Christian-nationalist GOP hungry for more white babies wants to make great again. As difficult as it is to imagine the generations now growing up with the world at their fingertips letting a new conservative order reduce them to penned-up breeders, that is the vision described, if not stated outright, in Project 2025. “It’s such a horrific trope that happens in those Congressional hearings,” says Schatz. “It’s always like, ‘If your 10-year-old daughter was raped, would you want her to have the baby?’ And then the anti-choice person has to say yes [to this] horrific scenario trotted out as proof that abortion will never be OK.” The idea of maternity homes making a comeback might seem unlikely, Schatz thinks, but so did the repeal of Roe v. Wade. “Anything feels possible. If it can be privatized and monetized, I think [it’s] on the table.”

Because the majority of modern adoptions are open ones, compelled silence is no longer the norm, though open adoption has its own set of challenges. The birth mothers and adoptees of the Baby Scoop era who want to find one another, meanwhile, have been among the enthusiastic users of consumer DNA test kits like 23andMe. A footnote to Schatz’s experience is that banking her own DNA sample led to connecting with her mother’s relinquished children, a story she calls “good, and kind of wild.” She found first one brother (“his daughter had done 23andMe, so when I did it she popped up and was like ‘Oh my god, I think you’re my aunt’”) and then the other (“He waited until his adoptive parents passed to look for his biological mother”) — it turned out they both lived in another state, within 10 miles of one another, two “old rocker dudes who play guitar and collect vinyl.”

One thing that the novel’s central figure, Elizabeth “Baker” Phillips, does share with Schatz’s mother, she notes, is the incongruity of smart, studious young women who were nevertheless completely cut off from the information they most needed. “That felt like such an important thing to convey. My mom didn’t come from a super-conservative family. She had a relatively Bay Area liberal upbringing. I’ve asked her so many times: Did you consider abortion? Did you try to argue? Did you want to do something else? And she just told me over and over how little she actually knew,” Schatz says. “She didn’t know how her body worked. She didn’t know what other options there were. It was profound for me to realize that, yes, she wasn’t raised in a fundamentalist religious household where this was all totally kept from her. But it also wasn’t available information.”

More girls and women have that information today, but it’s clear that a powerful minority would prefer they didn’t. That alone makes “Where the Girls Were” a historically resonant story, but Schatz still finds herself wondering what might have helped her mother avoid the shame she carried for so long. “I think a lot about her copy of ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves’ that I would sneak off the bookshelf and read as a kid,” she says. “The edition she had came out in, I think, 1972, after she had already gone through this. It’s wild to think: What if her pregnancy happened 10 years later? What if she had had access, just to that book?” That things could have been so different for so many women and the children they lost makes standing for bodily autonomy right now more necessary than ever.

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Listeners who relished the smooth sensuality of “Harry’s House” would be well-advised to buckle up. “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally” is a wild, unpredictable ride, chock-full of sonic sound and fury. Co-produced by Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson, the album was made for the earbud era. A veritable feast for the ears that shimmers with sound — a stray guitar flourish here, a pulsing synthesizer there.

Several years in the making, “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally” found Styles living and working in Berlin — a career move that has been likened to the recording of David Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy: “Low,” “Heroes” and “Lodger.” And the comparison to Bowie’s West German sojourn is apt: working with his producers, Styles has clearly immersed himself in the avant-garde, taking chances, and embracing idiosyncrasy.

But by his own admission, Styles attributes the vivid sonic textures of his latest album to the “joyous” influence of LCD Soundsystem. And that sense of joy and wonder radiates with eroticism and humor at nearly every turn, from the pulsing synthesizer and muted vocals of “Aperture,” the LP’s lead, chart-topping single, to “Coming Up Roses,” an orchestral ballad that unleashes a fusillade of strings into the proceedings.

Not to be outdone by the album’s soaring musical ambience, Styles’ lyrics never disappoint, blending his penchant for witticism with pop-culture philosophy. With “Season 2 Weight Loss,” he punctures the ego-driven obsessions of our age, reminding us not to take ourselves too seriously, while simultaneously living in a world in which a casual remark on social media can ignite a firestorm. “It’s kind of sad,” he sings, “but there’s something I know / Too many things for you to analyze.” The remedy, he points out, is right there in front of us: “Let light come in once in a while.”

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Although it may seem naïve, on the surface, to stoop to such mundanity — a variation on our era’s “go outside and touch grass” naturalism — Styles may be genuinely onto something. With songs like “Paint by Numbers,” he pauses the album’s disco thrum to enjoy the simple pleasures of, well, living. Working his acoustic guitar with a French horn accompaniment — French horns! — he dares us to balance our relentless socioeconomic drive with our deep need to hang out, to while away the hours. “It’s a lifetime of learnin’ to paint by numbers,” he sings, “And watchin’ the colors run.”

For some listeners, “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally” may seem like an unwelcome shift away from the tried-and-true pop sensibilities of “Harry’s House.” But rest assured that Styles’ heartwarming sense of wit and whimsy are fully in evidence. In “Are You Listening Yet?” he advises us, no matter what, to never stray too far away from the joy-inducing possibilities of music — whether it be LCD Soundsystem or, say, Harry Styles. “If you must join a movement,” he advises, tongue-in-cheek, “make sure there’s dancing.”

The post Harry Styles lets the music — and the joy — take over appeared first on Salon.com.

Crucial “Scream 7” narrative details began circulating as far back as late 2025. By January, entire plot summaries were floating around social media, while the movie-logging platform Letterboxd was review-bombed with leaks and poor ratings. Boycotters were not afraid to go low. To them, it was an eye for an eye — well-earned justice after the film’s production company, Spyglass Media, fired the franchise’s new final girl, Melissa Barrera, after Barrera posted on social media in support of Palestine in late 2023. And as public sentiment has continued to shift toward Barrera’s view over the last two-and-a-half years, support for the boycott intensified, backed by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, Film Workers for Palestine and more. Almost overnight, “Scream 7” became a politicized film. And as is the case with most politicized issues these days, the boycott was met with its own stalwart opposition, dead set on supporting the film not just despite the boycott, but because of it. While there’s no doubt the boycott irreversibly shifted public perception of the franchise in its rebooted state, “Scream 7” managed a record-breaking opening weekend gross of $63.6 million, the franchise’s largest before inflation is adjusted. Like it or not, “Scream 7” was proof that all films — even the goriest, silliest slashers — have the potential to be political.

(Paramount Pictures) Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox in “Scream 7”

Not so, if you believe filmmaker Wim Wenders, who carelessly expressed the opposite in the opening press conference of last month’s Berlin International Film Festival. A journalist at the presser began by mentioning the Berlinale’s institutional loyalty “with the people of Iran and Ukraine.” He then teed up a question about the German government’s role in the Israel-Palestine conflict and the war in Gaza, asking, “Do you, as a jury, support this selective treatment of human rights?” A bit of an unfair question, as jury member Ewa Puszczyńska noted, but an unsurprisingly unfair one given the culture we live in. Nevertheless, Wenders interjected with a rash answer. “We have to stay out of politics. We are the counterweight of politics, the opposite of politics. We have to do the work of the people, not the work of politicians.”

Though there is some nuance to Wenders’ statement, it rang entirely false and uncaring in a world replete with politicism, and shrouded the festival’s proceedings in a muck of controversy. Film is political because it affects and reflects the average person’s habits and quality of life in the same ways policy does. Right now, the tides are mid-shift. The ground is unstable. When studio mergers are set to change film as we know it, and the seventh film in a relatively innocuous horror franchise can become a political lightning rod, cinema has never been more immediately and imperatively political.

Wenders should understand the impactful potential of cinema better than most. Most known and loved for 1984’s “Paris, Texas,” the filmmaker has more recently devoted his work to nonfiction storytelling. In 2014’s “The Salt of the Earth,” Wenders chronicled the contemporary work of internationally revered photographer and photojournalist Sebastião Salgado, who dedicated his life to documenting global societies in series that opposed war and social injustice. And in 2018’s “Pope Francis: A Man of His Word,” Wenders was given rare access to Western religion’s most prominent figurehead as he preached progressive values around the world. Even something like “Perfect Days” — Wenders’ most recent narrative film, a simple but moving meditation on the beauty of life and routine — has the potency of politics in its bones.

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But we live in an age where even our most prolific artists are afraid to say the wrong thing. In the internet age, ignorance has a price, and to avoid paying it, some would rather say nothing at all, even as the window for silence quickly closes. After more than 100 artists in the film industry signed an open letter criticizing the festival’s silence, Wenders alluded to this phenomenon in a prepared statement at the Berlinale’s closing awards ceremony. “Cinema is more resistant to oblivion, and certainly longer-living than the short-lived attention span that the internet offers, while your urgency reaches places our films cannot,” Wenders said.

“Activists are fighting mainly on the internet for humanitarian causes — namely, our dignity and protection of human life. These are our causes as well. As the Berlinale films clearly show, most of us filmmakers applaud you. All of us applaud you. You do necessary and courageous work. But does it need to be in competition with ours? Do our languages need to clash?”

In short: yes and no. The internet’s demand for the right response, all the time, is designed to corner people. Cinema can and should speak for itself. Films are statements, and these statements don’t always arrive when they’re requested. But as the reaction to the Berlinale’s messy initial press conference showed, representatives of the art form have a duty to swallow their fear of misspeaking — at least when they’re given a platform as a juror for a major international film festival. This political climate might be the trickiest modern society has ever navigated, but true artists aren’t afraid to adapt if it means staying in step with the very world their art observes.

(Nina Westervelt/Variety via Getty Images) Mason Gooding, Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega and Courteney Cox at the premiere of “Scream VI”

It’s even more remarkable, then, that Melissa Barrera refused to back down or apologize after her 2023 reposts gained traction and ignited controversy. At the time, Spyglass issued a statement, saying that Barrera’s posts “flagrantly [crossed] the line into hate speech,” claiming that the posts were antisemitic and were “false references to genocide and ethnic cleansing.”

Curiously, though, every “Scream” film is now owned by Paramount Pictures, which has distributed the most recent trio of films after Paramount Global acquired the catalog from Dimension Films — a former subsidiary of Miramax — in 2020. On its face, that may not look suspicious. But in July 2025, Paramount settled a lawsuit with Donald Trump to the tune of $16 million. That same month, the FCC approved the pending merger of Paramount with Skydance Media, leaving many to conclude that the settlement was a pay-to-play way of moving the merger along. Now, Paramount Skydance Corporation holds the highest bid to acquire Warner Bros. after Netflix backed out. And if everything goes the way things look at the time of writing, Paramount Skydance will successfully subsume one of cinema’s preeminent studio giants.

This also means that Paramount (and I’ll refer to the company as that for expediency’s sake) will have a monopoly on the films audiences see. They will control what films get made, and by whom. Given that Trump criticized Netflix staffer Susan Rice on Truth Social just two weeks ago, it doesn’t take an eagle-eyed reader to make the correlation that the president did not want Netflix to have Warner Bros. Paramount, on the other hand, is a much better owner in the conservative administration’s eyes. They’ve already done a number on CBS News, shifting the longstanding program to the middle-right. And if the merger goes through, Paramount could also control the majority of films we see.

That’s a frightening thing, considering Paramount has already announced plans to continue rehabbing disgraced “Melania” director Brett Ratner’s career with a new “Rush Hour” film. They’ve also tapped the equally toxic — and just as shoddy —  filmmaker Max Landis for a new “G.I. Joe,” after Landis was accused of sexual and emotional abuse by multiple women. To put it very plainly: Paramount does not want dissenting voices among its roster, and is all too happy to not only overlook allegations against the filmmakers the company employs, but actively seek them out to give them jobs. Is it really any wonder that Paramount just so happens to distribute the very franchise that Barrera was ousted from? If the new final girl of the “Scream” series wouldn’t play nice and stick to the script, they’d simply toss her away and pay Neve Campbell to return.

While cinema is an inherently political art form — anything put to celluloid or digital has the power to influence people at the same level as politics — it shouldn’t have to be political to this degree. The average person shouldn’t have to fret that bold ideas and wondrous cinematic visions are being gatekept from them by the people in a boardroom clinging to a conservative agenda. And yet, this is the reality that we face; the barrel of the gun that we’re staring down together. Right now, politics is intertwined with almost every facet of big business, no matter what type of business it is, and that objectively sucks.

But maybe there’s a little bit of hope, buried somewhere beneath the rubble. At last Sunday’s Actor Awards, producer Scott Stuber — a key growth figure for Universal in the early 2000s and former chairman of Netflix Films — told Variety that he hopes something good can come from the losses of the potential merger. “I’m hoping there will be new companies that rise up and are entrepreneurial,” Stuber said. “I hope there are all kinds of new places. And you look over the last 50 years, companies like New Line, A24, Miramax, they came out of [entrepreneurial spirits]. And I hope a bunch of people who, unfortunately, may lose their jobs band together and create something great.”

Stuber has a very silver-linings perspective that is, it must be said, rife with privilege. But he also isn’t necessarily wrong, either. The ’90s saw a major renaissance in independent filmmaking that has bled into the new millennium, and scrappy young artists are being given new chances every day as distributors like A24, NEON and their contemporaries move further into film production. Even outside of smaller studios, there’s a renewed chance for independent artists to take bold swings. This is the moment for combative, exciting and unpolished filmmaking; the time to donate a few bucks to the GoFundMe your weird but cool college roommate is starting up to produce their first short film; the time for guerilla productions and picking up the camera to make something fun with your friends. Radicalism is the enemy of big politics, and there’s nothing quite so radical as making and enjoying art on our own terms.

The post Film is — and always will be — political appeared first on Salon.com.

Hence, people love Alex Trebek’s “Jeopardy” and Darnell Hayes’ “Black Jeopardy” on “SNL.” Minus a few champions who enjoy insane winning streaks on the former, we can’t predict who will win; even contestants with a genius I.Q. can be defeated by someone with bulletproof strategy.

“Black Jeopardy,” on the other hand, lands its jokes by fooling the audience into thinking it knows how the contestant Kenan Thompson’s Darnell sets up as the stooge will perform, then quickly turns that assumption on its ear. Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa from “Black Panther,” for example, was entirely out of his depth when called upon to answer questions about American black culture.

So was Elizabeth Banks’ Allison, playing a white woman (“I don’t see color, so it’s just Jeopardy to me!”) and Tom Hanks’ Doug, who shows up to “Black Jeopardy” wearing a MAGA hat. Only after Allison realizes that she can’t win regardless of what she does can she get points on the board —“That is the blackest thing you said all day, Allison!” Darnell tells her.

Doug, meanwhile, kills it on “Black Jeopardy” and seems to prove that Doug is on the same page as  Darnell and fellow contestants Keeley and Shanice…until they get to the sketch-ending category “Lives That Matter.” We don’t see how Doug answers, but since he refers to Darnell and his competition as “you people” earlier in the sketch, the viewer makes up her own conclusions.

“SNL” opens the post-monologue section of its most recent episode, hosted by Emmy winner Phoebe Waller-Bridge, with an obvious game show called “What’s Wrong with This Picture?”  that does not approach the level of sharpness as those “Black Jeopardy” episodes.

But as another unofficial TV competition sketch that runs later in the episode proves, the flatness of “What’s Wrong with This Picture?” can’t be chalked up to a lack of brand recognition. Rather, its weakness is because the joke lacked a point and barbs beyond its contestants being too stupid to see the plain-as-day errors in the pictures, such as a saw inside of a refrigerator.

Much more effective was the midday local newscast that degenerated into a contest pitting the two black anchors against the two white anchors, with each reading headlines about violent crimes and non-violent crimes, guessing the racial identity of the perpetrators and keeping a tally of black offenders versus white ones.

Even the weatherman gets in on it, announcing the upgrade of a tropical storm to a hurricane. “We’re calling this one Hurricane Chet, and that’s a white man’s name if I’ve ever heard one.” At the risk of draining the funny out of the sketch’s humor by explaining the joke, it works on several levels (ugh, I know) as a commentary on racial prejudice, internalized assumptions about minorities and crime, and the media’s role in perpetrating those assumptions via news coverage.

So this was ostensibly supposed to be a sketch about the news, that really became a game show/sporting event with race relations as the stakes.

Equally as obliquely, I suppose, will we slide into the reason for bringing all of this up in the first place: this point may provide a clue as to why the first two politically themed cold opens of the NBC sketch variety program’s 45^th season have fallen flat.  Nearly every tidbit of news yielded by the impeachment inquiry, including the event that kicked it off, has transformed an already ridiculous administration into a complete parody of itself.

Therefore any impersonation of the weeks’ events cannot match the twisted humor of what actually is occurring. An administration headed by a man who proposed fortifying our 1,954 mile southern border with a moat filled with alligators and snakes, and meant it, is already a fully realized farce. And how does one successfully and directly parody a farce? There must be a way, but “Saturday Night Live” hasn’t stumbled upon it.

Thus Alec Baldwin’s impersonation of Trump in the season premiere feels more like an reenactment with marionettes than a comic interpretation of what’s happening inside Trump’s head. Similarly, the star of this week’s opener is not Matthew Broderick, making an unexpected cameo as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, but the Parseltongue-speaking puppet snake representing Trump advisor Stephen Miller.

Beck Bennett’s imitation of Vice President Mike Pence and Kate McKinnon’s lizard-like Rudy Giuliani are the same as they ever were, and like Baldwin’s Trump, they capture the essence of the real people they’re representing. The news of the past few weeks defeats their role as a release valve.

Granted, that role has been decreasing in value for some time now. “SNL” and Baldwin’s impressions of Trump the Candidate used to make its politically topical skits must-watch late night television for the laughs.

Post-inauguration versions have varied in pointedness, becoming increasingly dependent on A-lister cameos of administration officials to make a mark, starting with Melissa McCarthy’s impersonation of Sean Spicer. These appearances and the unforgettable imitations of officials from administrations and campaigns past work because they parody isolated moments of unadulterated lunacy within a political administration running like a typical, normal circus.

It’s the reason Matt Damon killed as a pre-Supreme Court confirmation Brett Kavanaugh by throwing in a few quotes from his Senate Judiciary Committee appearance, screaming at the top of his lungs and gulping down water like the Earth was drying up. The Kavanaugh confirmation was a farce with terrible, depressing consequences. Damon’s impersonation gives the viewer the very limited comfort at shaming the devil by laughing at him.

Now that Trump’s administration has transformed from a carnival sideshow into a three-ring catastrophe, “SNL” parodies are only slightly tweaked versions of 24/7 reality, ameliorating very little. The last two cold opens gave us about as much to laugh at as an Investigation Discovery crime re-enactment.

In contrast, the edition of National Public Radio’s news quiz-as-game show “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me” that aired the same weekend as the Phoebe Waller-Bridge episode of “SNL” earned solid laughs by simply, precisely mining the Trump news cycle for laughs during its Trump Dump segment, a true-or-false lighting round.

When host Peter Sagal asked panelist Tom Bodett if the New York Times’ report of Trump requesting the feasibility of a snake-and-alligator-filled moat was true, Bodett won a point.

But when Faith Salie was asked, “True or False: On Wednesday, Donald Trump responded that the idea that he, quote, wanted a moat stuffed with alligators and snakes, unquote was ‘fake news,’” and Salie answered “true,” Sagal corrected her. “No, it’s false! He said that the idea that he wanted a MOOT was fake news.” Sagal also caught the show’s third panelist Helen Hong with a similar devil-in-the-details regarding Rudy Giuliani’s text exchange with a reporter that he was considering a lawsuit against the so-called “swamp.”

It goes without saying that I am not a comedy writer, and the live audience for “Wait Wait” likely has a slightly different notion of what’s funny than the typical “SNL” viewer. However, their taste in humor probably isn’t too far apart.

The bigger point is that a gentle public radio news quiz somehow managed to deliver a cleverer jab about This Week in Stupid than “SNL” did in its White House skit: so absurd is our situation that a person cannot accurately quote the substance of a news story without including a malapropism or an incorrectly typed description of legal action that a) does not exist, and b) could not exist. (How does one sue “The Swamp”? And what is a “jaw suit”?)

You’ll note that this was a game show about the news, in which the only prizes are bragging rights and an audience member’s chance to have Bill Kurtis provide the voice for the outgoing message on their phone’s answering service.

This isn’t to imply that “SNL” should jam all of its political parody in a faux game show format. At this point, moving the action any place besides the White House or Capitol Hill will do.

“Weekend Update” had a field day with the developments surrounding the impeachment inquiry, but neither its headline-based zingers nor McKinnon’s Elizabeth Warren could compete with Bowen Yang’s Chinese Trade Representative Chen Biao, vamping it up as the attention-loving figure in the middle of negotiations between the U.S. and China. “I’m running tariffs, so this is my time, I’m having my moment, I’m basically the Lizzo of China right now. And it turns out I’m 100 percent that trade daddy!”

So yeah – actual fake newscasts are perfect stages for parody, as are fake reality shows, fake sitcoms and fake dramas. Future “Saturday Night Live” political parodies could be more effective if they were removed from the White House and inserted in any of those other formats.

Game shows, however, have stakes and harvest tension from the factor that chance plays in each moment – the smartest player might not beat the devil, and the luckiest person can be undone by a whammy. They remind us of how unfair life is, a truth that like Trump’s moat/moot confusion, brings to mind one of the finest “SNL” sketches ever: Jesse Jackson’s “The Question Is Moot,” which aired in October 1984, a few weeks before the presidential election that resulted in Ronald Reagan’s second term in office.

Jackson’s host allows announcer Don Pardo to pose questions to contestants such as, “When is the next reappearance of Halley’s comet scheduled?” only to cut them off before they answer.

“It doesn’t matter. The question is moot. The White House is locked behind cement barricades. The President confesses he’s afraid to go to church because terrorists are after him. The nuclear holocaust machinery is moving into place. As a matter of fact, it’s moving into Brooklyn Harbor right now. They’re demonstrating down there all night long. The Battleship Iowa, carrying nuclear warheads, arrived today. So we probably won’t live to see Halley’s Comet come again. Next question: Barbara?”

Looking at the sketch now, it’s mind-boggling how relevant the issues Jackson brings up in his answers are to our world today. He talks about tax cuts for the wealthy and the expansion of the national’s poor and racial divisions before replying to another contestant’s question about whether they’ll ever have a chance to answer a question with, “The question is moot! Under the Reagan Administration, answering questions is no longer a priority. One-liners, smiles, styles, and profiles.”

He continues, “Issues like education, health care and social programs have to take a backseat to a trillion-dollar military build-up, and a $700 billion tax cut for the rich. As a matter of fact, 90,000 corporations last year made profits and paid no taxes, while people making $2000 below poverty paid taxes.”

Those “SNL” writers knew what they were doing when they placed Jackson, the third-most popular Democratic contender behind Gary Hart and eventual party nominee Walter Mondale, into this setting. All of politics is staged, and most of it scripted. Shows like “Saturday Night Live” serve to pull back the curtain and reveal the synthetic nature of the law-making and deal-forging that goes into running the country and impacting our lives. It’s all a comedy, it’s all a drama.

In this latest examination of possible law-breaking on the part of the nation’s top executive and his enablers, a head-on caricature isn’t the way to go. Efforts to game the system against the majority population have always been afoot, but now that we’re getting a sense of how brazen and ludicrous the latest examples are, perhaps the best way to take a jab that concept is a game show.

May we suggest… “Idiotest”? “The Weakest Link”? “Dirty Rotten Cheater”? The possibilities are endless, although “Jeopardy” works too.

The post How can “Saturday Night Live” parody a farcical administration? appeared first on Salon.com.

As he was coming off his tour in 1974, Springsteen was also in the market for a place to live. He eventually found 7 ½ West End Court in Long Branch, New Jersey, a twenty-five-foot-wide shotgun shack that sat a few blocks away from the beach. “I never lived in a free-standing home of my own,” he explained. “That was the first house I had ever lived in without a roommate or girlfriend, so it was kind of a big deal. It was the perfect size for me, for a kid at twenty-four. I still have a lot of affection for that house.” His previous two albums, “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.” and “The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle,” were not making the desired impact, meaning the pressure was on for this next album to be the one, or else he risked being dropped from the label entirely in accordance with his three-record deal with Columbia.

In the freedom of having his first house since he stayed behind in New Jersey in the wake of his family relocating to California five years prior, the young Springsteen did not have many possessions to move in. What he did bring with him was a spinet piano that he set up in the living room and an acoustic guitar that usually occupied his bedroom. Most of the songs from “Born to Run” were composed on that spinet piano, but the title track found its origins on that acoustic guitar in his bedroom.

There are several key features of the bedroom that provide a perfect snapshot of where the young rocker’s songwriting found influence, all of which were revealed in the October 1975 cover issue of Crawdaddy magazine written by Peter Knobler. These included a record player positioned on a table next to the bed for optimal roll-over needle drops and a disorganized assortment of motorcycle magazines and ’50s and ’60s 7” singles scattered across the floor. The main feature of the bedroom was the only piece of decor: a poster of Peter Pan leading Wendy Darling out of her nursery window to take her to Neverland, hanging over the head of the bed. One might wonder why a twenty-something aspiring rock star would choose a children’s film like “Peter Pan” to be the centerpiece of his bedroom. In my interview with Springsteen, he recalled the significance of “Peter Pan” coming from his childhood: “It was one of the first pictures I remember seeing. I remember seeing ‘Peter Pan’ with my grandmother. Mary Martin as Peter was one of the first pictures I saw in black and white. It was just a story that sort of transfixed my imagination at the time.”

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As famously told in concerts around the world as well as in his autobiography, Springsteen worked out the first stabs at “Born to Run” on his guitar while sitting on his bed. After connecting the stories, it appeared that as Springsteen was working out a rough version of “Born to Run,” he was facing the poster of Peter Pan and Wendy Darling, thus finding inspiration for the name of his latest leading lady. When I asked Springsteen about the namesake for Wendy, my theory was confirmed. “In a lot of my songs, I had a lot of different names for characters before reaching the final ones. When I was working on ‘Thunder Road,’ it took me trying a few names before I landed on Mary. In this case, I was writing the song in my room and looking for a generic name, and I looked up and said, ‘Oh yeah, Wendy.’” This confirmation opens new avenues for deeper connotations within the song. When asked if he saw the narrator of “Born to Run” as Peter Pan, Springsteen said, “No, not really, but there’s a little bit of a ‘Peter Pan’ subtext in ‘Born to Run’ if you look for it. It’s a song about searching for something better and running away. There’s this youthful eternity that you’re in pursuit of.”

While it is still being rented out regularly to tenants, 7 ½ West End Court has now been christened “The Born to Run House” by Springsteen’s fans. Given the house’s significance in forging one of America’s greatest rock albums, it has become an obligatory stop on Springsteen tours of the Jersey Shore.

The post Bruce Springsteen draws a line from “Peter Pan” to “Born to Run” appeared first on Salon.com.

And today? Barely a week after the Regency-style drama’s fourth season resumed, you’re much more likely to stumble into a “Heated Rivalry” night at your local drinking hole than any recreations of the ‘ton’s gracious luxury. Three months after the hockey romance premiered on HBO Max, the world remains obsessed with Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander, as well as the actors who play them, Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams. More accurately, as Storrie joked in his recent “Saturday Night Live” monologue, it’s women doing the pining.

Compared to Netflix’s established period hit, the prospect of two pro hockey stars falling for each other holds more heat than the forbidden affair blossoming between Benedict Bridgerton (Luke Thompson), a nobleman, and Sophie Gun (Yerin Ha), a maid and illegitimate daughter of a lord.

(Sabrina Lantos/HBO Max ) Connor Storrie and Ksenia Daniela Kharlamova in “Heated Rivalry.”

This is the first time that new “Bridgerton” episodes dropped amid another serialized romance’s cultural mania. Nobody is suggesting viewers are choosing one over the other; different as they are, their audiences overlap. Still, it can’t escape notice how quaint Benedict and Sophie’s assignations appear in the wake of Illya and Shane’s famished banging, regardless of their shared “cottage” settings. The overall ho-hum reaction to the Netflix drama’s Cinderella storyline may have something to do with how long it took Ben and Soph to smash compared to Illya and Shane’s sex-forward relationship.

But there’s also the sensation that this new season is setting us up to fully appreciate the next stage of the revolution that “Bridgerton” already began, and that the “Heated Rivalry” craze confirms we’re eager to embrace. Both shows foreground queer characters – bisexual men and women, specifically – whose attractions aren’t discounted or given short shrift.

“Heated Rivalry”’s Ilya loves men and women, so does Benedict Bridgerton — and Francesca (Hannah Dodd), Benedict’s newly widowed sister. “Bridgerton” threw coming-out parties for both at the end of Season 3, when Benedict tumbled into the sheets with the convention-flouting Lady Tilley Arnold (Hannah New) and her lover Paul Suarez (Lucas Aurelio), while Francesca married the equally introverted John Stirling, the Earl of Kilmartin (Victor Alli).

The show’s conscious racial integration of 19th-century society, which was once considered revolutionary, is now as standard as its happy endings. Overcoming the piddly obstacle of the class barrier supposedly dividing Benedict and Sophie was less of a question than a matter of which divine device would be manufactured to smooth their way to the altar.

(Liam Daniel/Netflix) Yerin Ha as Sophie Baek and Luke Thompson as Benedict Bridgerton in “Bridgerton.”

But Ilya and Shane risk far more than reputational ruin in “Heated Rivalry.” Taking their relationship public poses a risk to their livelihoods and personal safety. There’s real danger in their taboo affair, and that makes it especially hot.

Benedict’s first on-screen encounter was satisfying too, validating his stirrings for both sexes by presenting it to the audience instead of merely hinting at his orientation. Francesca, meanwhile, seems to have enjoyed John’s company more than his sexual technique.

That doesn’t depreciate their love but, rather, contextualizes Francesca’s fertility frustrations and her inability to achieve a “pinnacle,” as she put it, during intercourse. But her quiet excitement upon receiving John’s cousin Michaela Stirling (Masali Baduza) for an unexpected visit to their London home intimates that Cupid isn’t finished with those two, either.

That we’re contemplating these shows’ import in relation to each other indicates how starved viewers are for realistically developed romance and honestly rendered desire.

Cultural analysts are still puzzling over what makes “Heated Rivalry” so enduringly popular. It isn’t simply about the sex — although, yes, it certainly helps that the cinematography and intimate choreography amplify Storrie and Williams’ physiques.

But what has taken the public by surprise is the fervor with which the audience has consumed Jacob Tierney’s adaptation of author Rachel Reid’s hockey romances – and rewatched those episodes, many times. Like “Bridgerton,” our “Heated Rivalry” obsession is related to a hollow longing for connection pervading society right now. But where viewers passionately seized on “Bridgerton” to seek relief from the midwinter malaise of the pandemic, the wave of “Heated Rivalry” fandom contradicts a supposed mass unease with eroticism.

You may be familiar with the headlines about the 2025 Teens & Screens survey finding that Gen Z collectively cringes at onscreen depictions of sex. This is a surface reading of what UCLA’s Center for Scholars & Storytellers finds regarding its respondents’ views concerning relationships. Yes, 60.9% said they want to see more representations of friendship than sex onscreen, but that is related to their lack of interest in watching toxic relationships play out, one of the tropes they’re least interested in seeing.

(Sabrina Lantos/HBO Max) Connor Storrie in “Heated Rivalry.”

Ilya and Shane place sex before emotional intimacy, which would seem to refute those findings. But so does the “Bridgerton” enemies-to-lovers model defining its opening seasons. Whatever people may say they want, tension-free romances are boring. But so are heteronormative ones, especially in a Regency-styled world, a point of agreement shared by showrunner Jess Brownell and Quinn when Brownell decided to change the character originally known as Michael into Michaela.

Francesca and Michaela’s upcoming hero romance has been in motion for some time and promises to grant queerness a front-and-center visibility that was cut short when Benedict ended his romance with Lady Tilley and Paul. And yet, “Bridgerton” also endorses Benedict’s queerness in the latest season’s sixth episode, when he comes out to Sophie.

“I am capable of caring for you, just as I have cared for women I have known who are of the ‘ton,” he says, before pointedly adding, “just as I have cared for some men whom I have known intimately. And I refuse to be at all ashamed about that.”

In that exchange, “Bridgerton” speaks aloud its writers’ dedication to underscoring Benedict’s security in his queer identity – an element it has in common with “Heated Rivalry” and its portrayal of Ilya’s unashamed libido.

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(Liam Daniel/Netflix) Hannah Dodd as Francesca Bridgerton and Masali Baduza as Michaela in “Bridgerton”

Each version of rhapsodized eroticism is grounded in a concept of relationship safety. For all the fuss over Shane and Ilya’s muscular encounters, no aspect of them occurs without one asking the other if what is transpiring also feels OK. Meanwhile, the entirety of Benedict’s relationship foreplay, like everyone else’s, is verbalized. This is also why the friendship budding between the typically flummoxed Francesca and the freewheeling, adventurous Michaela late in the season is as pleasurable to witness as it is crucial to foreshadowing the writers’ plans for those two.

How they come to love each other almost certainly won’t resemble anything we see on “Heated Rivalry.” But both stories woo us with worlds free of weaponized heteronormativity and the very real sensation of imperilment many of us are feeling. That these romances represent consideration as the ultimate seduction makes them not merely release valves, but emotionally liberating escapes. As Sophie says to Benedict in the wake of his radical openness, “Love is always a thing to be proud of. The world needs more of it.” So does TV.

“Bridgerton” streams on Netflix. “Heated Rivalry” streams on HBO Max.

The post Watching “Bridgerton” in a “Heated Rivalry” world appeared first on Salon.com.

In recent weeks, a lot of those who went along for the ride as #pizzagate expanded into QAnon — those who, in other words, had no problem believing that the former secretary of state was raping, murdering and eating children — have responded to revelations from the files with a victory lap. The files don’t validate most of QAnon’s most lurid accusations (the adrenochrome, the child-eating, the Satanic rituals), but no matter. As with every Q prediction that failed to materialize — so, all of them — believers are rebounding quickly: Okay, maybe Comet Pizza wasn’t really running a child sex ring from the basement it doesn’t have . . . but there sure are a lot of references to pizza in these files.

The Epstein files were always going to be a gift to conspiracy theorists, and have indeed resulted in a raft of brand new theories, including one that has Epstein alive and well and living in Israel. But parsing the tranches of documents — the most recent release puts the total at roughly 3.5 million pages — turns out to be making normies feel suspicious too. All over social media, people with no ties to conspiracy communities are unsettled by what they reveal: The sheer breadth of Epstein’s network, the casual references to abuse, the confirmation of everything that hid in plain sight.

There’s no order to the files themselves: No indexing, no differentiation between material evidence and uninvestigated complaints, missing files and overenthusiastic redactions — a build-your-own-conspiracy board minus the red twine. The result is that “the Epstein files are kind of like the Bible: Whatever you’re looking for, with enough confirmation bias you can find it,” says Anna Merlan, a staff writer at Mother Jones and author of the 2019 book “Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power.”

Conspiracy theories are now part of the mainstream culture and political landscape in ways that are both more overt and more quotidian, than previously. And each new one is more likely to reach an audience that wasn’t looking for it. In the summer of 2020, amidst the mounting spread of COVID, Merlan wrote a piece for Vice called “The Conspiracy singularity has arrived” that reported on the strange and unlikely alliances she had begun seeing in her conspiracy research. People who were already deep into conspiratorial belief systems — anti-vaccination zealots, for instance — were suddenly crossing ideological paths with QAnon folks; health and wellness influencers were suddenly preoccupied with 5G and 15-minute cities. “Conspiracy communities that have previously only brushed past each other like schools of fish borne along on different currents are suddenly, abruptly, swimming in the same direction,” Merlan wrote.

In the United States, the convergence of disparate conspiracy theories that began during the initial pandemic lockdown and multiplied as the 2020 election grew closer were, Merlan recalls, “being drawn together in a sort of grand unified theory of COVID, to create a single explanation for everything that was going on.” She sees this happening anew: The hydra-headed sprawl of the Epstein files is a new singularity “where everything is linked to Jeffrey Epstein, and everything comes back to the Epstein story.”

This isn’t an unreasonable response, because everything that a grand unified theory of Epstein implies — the power, the importance, the influence, the menace — describes exactly the person Epstein wanted to be. He befriended the men of science and culture he invested in because he sought out people whose worldviews he suspected aligned with his own and whom he could likely trust to keep his secrets.

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The recent four-episode series of the podcast “Behind the Bastards” called “How Jeffrey Epstein Helped Build the Modern World” lays out how the predator’s fingerprints came to be on the most consequential discourses and zeitgeists of the early 21st century, from Black Lives Matter to Gamergate to #MeToo. But Merlan emphasizes that no one should mistake his Forrest Gump–like ubiquity for impeccable timing: “[Epstein] had so much to do with so many famous and powerful people, and was involved in so many things. So part of the reason we’re seeing [the Epstein files] and going, Wow, he’s everywhere, he’s the grand unified answer to every bit of corruption that is plaguing us is because, by design, he tried to be everywhere. He worked very, very hard at it.”

“Behind the Bastards” points out, as just one example, that Epstein’s philanthropic interest in scientific research was sparked by either fear and resentment of others (transgender people, Black people) or connected to his own eugenic desires: Cloning himself, operating an elite breeding farm at his New Mexico ranch. He wasn’t interested in capital-S Science, but in funding research that would validate the beliefs he already held.

Conspiratorial thinking, Merlan points out, follows a couple of key patterns: It flourishes in times of political and social upheaval, and it tends to resonate within minoritized groups “who are systematically kept from participating fully in society.” The conspiratorial thinking of the Epstein Class was a privileged twist on the latter — a result not of being marginalized but of fear that they might be: Donald Trump was not notably interested in conspiracy theories until he began feeling personally attacked by Barack Obama’s presidency; Trump began seeding racist citizenship theories not because he was materially disempowered, but because he recognized that Obama’s success and likeability far outpaced his own.

Likewise, Epstein saw #MeToo as a problem to be neutralized because the success of any social movement in which women were treated as reliable narrators of their own exploitation would impede his own racket. Characterizing Epstein as a turn-of-the-millennium Forrest Gump or Tom Ripley or even Waldo is an easy goof, but it’s more accurate to identify him as a reactionary snowflake on high alert for any social, political or technological shift that might eventually challenge the status quo at scale. “We’ve always known that powerful men get away with sexual abuse in a way that other people do not,” says Merlan. “The Epstein files are further confirmation that there are different systems of justice and different systems of accountability for different kinds of sex criminals.”

The files are symbolically powerful because everything about them — the records of emails with well-known academics, the name-drops of those well-known academics to others, the confidence represented by his lazy, typo-strewn communication style, the sheer volume of accumulated materials — invites a reading of Epstein as omniscient, industrious and hungry for knowledge. The mechanics of searching the documents for bold-faced names play up his omnipresence, emphasizing his connections to forward-thinking industries while obscuring that he leveraged most of these connections in pursuit of regression and impunity. Epstein wasn’t an architect of democracy’s downfall; he was just one of its fluffers.

The increase in conspiracy theories that has followed the release of the Epstein files suggests that the event horizon of the files has come and gone. Now they’re just fodder for more conspiracies: Austin Tucker Martin, the man who was shot and killed at Mar-A-Lago late last month when he was discovered trying to break into the resort with a gun and a gas can, was supposedly reacting to information in the Epstein files. A decade of living in a conspiracy-pilled world has affected all of us, but the impact of a larger erosion of truth is what allowed that world to take shape.

Merlan notes that it’s common for people who might not actually believe in conspiracy theories to also not resist their pull — “Republic of Lies” is about how living in a country that has from the start been conspiracy-minded makes us more likely to either buy in or tune them out. “We know that conspiracy theories wax and wane throughout history,” she says, “and we know that periods of social stability [are] correlated with slightly less visibility of conspiracy theories, and times of social instability with more people discussing conspiracy theories openly. [Conspiracy theories] appeal to people who feel locked out of systems of advancement, who feel that the functions of American society are not working well for them. And that is true for more and more people as the wealth gap widens and other kinds of inequality get worse, as we live through this age of mass instability where a lot more people are not able to achieve what they were told was the American dream — as we see things like the Epstein files, and as we see evidence of people getting away with behavior that’s not just reprehensible but criminal.”

But just as there was enough accumulated dislike of Hillary Clinton to make #pizzagate unnecessary, in the end, to defeat her (Rolling Stone’s 2017 forensic investigation of the hashtag found that, despite the network of bots and fake social-media accounts created to push it, didn’t actually go viral until after the election), there’s no shortage of confirmed corruption within American political and social systems to make conspiracy theories fee a little redundant. We already know plenty about systems of inequality that have impacted Americans as much as any incursion of lizard people ever could. We know about FBI-led assassinations, secret drug experiments, private health insurers, the for-profit prison pipeline, media consolidation and disinformation platforming. And we certainly know that men will create all manner of chaos in their desperation to distract from their own misdeeds.

So why is the frame of conspiracy still so often the default one? Merlan thinks it’s because “conspiracy theories are a useful framing if you are looking to place blame on a specific person or group of people — and that’s always what so many of the political ones come back to. It’s how things like xenophobia work. And when the social ills we’re facing are as complicated as they are, conspiracy framing works to simplify them enough that they target a useful scapegoat.” Beyond that, the opportunity to make money from promulgating conspiracies is larger than it’s ever been. The one problem now “is that so many other people trying to do the exact same thing. It’s a problem of congestion — but it’s still making a lot of people very rich.”

The post The Epstein files are conspiracy-pilling everybody appeared first on Salon.com.

Yet again, Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela), the down-and-out heiress to a disgraced media empire, finds herself embroiled in scandal. This time, her troubles have potentially massive legal ramifications, ones that stand to implicate her and her equally posh husband, Henry Muck (Kit Harington). Desperate to repair their reputations, Yasmin and Henry let themselves be wooed by the charismatic Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella) on his quest to make the fictional payment processor Tender into the most powerful banking app in the world. But after months in their high-level posts at the company, some globe-trotting sleuthing by Yasmin’s sometimes-friend and former colleague, Harper Stern (Myha’la), has revealed Tender’s operation to be all smoke and mirrors. Yasmin and Henry are perched at the very top of a house of cards, and there’s a strong wind coming just over the horizon.

(Simon Ridgway/HBO) Myha’la and Marisa Abela in “Industry”

After 10 seconds, “Veridis Quo” fades, and the episode cuts from black to Henry and Yasmin privately assessing their next moves, analyzing how they were suckered by Whitney’s predatory charms. In the course of six episodes, the trio went from being business acquaintances to the three points of a carnivorous love triangle built on sexual deviancy, criminal blackmail and corporate espionage at the hands of Whitney’s escort-turned-assistant, Hayley (Kiernan Shipka). “Surely it was obvious that I couldn’t stand the little creep,” Yasmin tells Henry. “He was in our house, practically swallowing you.” But backtracking and regrets have no place here. It’s too late. Yasmin and Henry fell prey to Whitney and Hayley’s twisted game, compromising their judgment for physical pleasure and zigzagging across the Kinsey scale in the process.

But in “Industry,” that’s all par for the course. In the cutthroat world of finance, everything — kindness, friendship, sex — is a means to an end. The goal is capital gain, and there’s nothing and no one that can’t be quite literally massaged in the pursuit of that target. Swapping spit is as good as swapping intel, and all of the trading is done inside, if you catch my drift. If time is money, and money is power, then who these characters spend their time with directly correlates to how wealthy and financially secure they can become. Gay kisses and scenes of queer physical affection aren’t exactly titillating, or worse, made into inspiring coming-out vignettes perfectly primed for Pride season watchlists. “Industry” isn’t even particularly concerned with the now-banal sentiment that “gay characters can be flawed and bad, too!” Because it’s not that these characters are good or bad. Like the rest of us, their morality and sexuality don’t exist in a fixed state. They are as fluid as the money that controls their existence. And in a show where sex and capital are so intertwined, true intimacy has become the most precious, powerful currency.

(Simon Ridgway/HBO) Kiernan Shipka in “Industry”

When “Industry” premiered in 2020, Down and Kay were focused on young, aspiring traders, green to the game and gunning for a coveted spot on the Pierpoint trading floor. The fictional London investment bank was the epicenter of the show’s universe, the place where deals were made and trust was broken. It was the sight of plenty of sex, too. Turn on any episode from the show’s first two seasons, and you’re likely to see cocaine being boofed from someone’s bare butt in a conference room, or Yasmin encouraging her former coworker Robert (Harry Lawtey) to ejaculate onto a bathroom mirror, commanding him to lick it off. Pierpoint was where boundaries were pushed and power plays had their efficacy challenged, making “Industry” the ideal combination of “Succession” and “Gossip Girl” — the dream for anyone who enjoys when television meets at the intersection of smart and sexy.

But it was when characters stepped outside Pierpoint that things got really interesting. Suddenly, the rules weren’t so rigid. Deception had less sway on the regulated trading floor than it did in the wild, and in the seedy streets and trendy nightclubs of London, physical and financial lust blurred. In the show’s very first episode, key Pierpoint investor Nicole Craig (Sarah Parish) sexually harasses Harper in the back of her town car. When Harper recoils, Nicole sets her sights on Robert, frantic to snare a young trader in her web. It’s a despicable deed — one that will come back into the fray later in the series’ tenure — but one that succinctly reflects the show’s dynamics. Whether the viewer wants to linger on a character’s supposed sexuality is their choice. Kay and Down prefer to keep it all murky, tossing their sharp-toothed players back and forth across the sexuality spectrum with no intention of keeping them in one place for too long.

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That unpredictability isn’t for everyone. There are numerous reasons why “Industry” hasn’t exploded in the way that, say, HBO Max’s smash obsession “Heated Rivalry” has. Despite the two shows sharing a throughline of raunchy queer sex, “Heated Rivalry” is too hung up on making its queer characters likable. For all of their will-they-won’t-they indecision and steamy sexual tension, the show’s star-crossed lovers, Ilya Rosenov (Connor Storrie) and Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams), consistently play it safe.

But there’s a time and place for that, too. Viewers deserve to see happy endings and tame love stories as much as they deserve to see bodily fluids dripping down a mirror. Still, it’s surprising that both shows stream on the same platform in America, but their audiences have yet to truly overlap. In the weeks after “Heated Rivalry” wrapped its first season, evangelists of the gay hockey show toyed with the idea of switching to “Industry,” which was premiering its fourth season in early January.

(Simon Ridgway/HBO) Max Minghella and Kit Harington in “Industry”

Yet, the show’s viewership and larger cultural conversation have yet to translate. “Industry” hasn’t received the same breakthrough popularity as “Heated Rivalry,” presumably because its gay sex is not in service of storylines about love and romantic relationships. All of the fornication in “Industry” is transactional. For Kay and Down’s characters, cash is a sexuality, and it manifests in panting, lascivious physical connections that fuel their misconduct. New York Magazine features writer Emily Gould put it best when she posted, “I’ve tried to switch hyperfixations from ‘Heated Rivalry’ to ‘Industry,’ but the problem is that, whenever characters on ‘Industry’ have sex, you’re like ‘WOAH YIKES’ and not ‘yesssssss.’”

“Heated Rivalry” leaned into its gay smut, but it drew the line at correlating sex and manipulation — funny, considering that, for half of its first season, Shane and Ilya are psyching each other out on the ice with sensual mind games. Their dynamic was far more about stimulating the viewer than surprising them. And it worked. The show garnered a massive international audience, and in that respect, flirted with progress. For a blip in this post-Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” era, when queerness is once again taboo, the counterculture went mainstream.

But where’s the fun in that? Treachery can be exciting too, even progressive. In a converse way, Kay and Down’s reluctance to be so clean, so shiny and so heteronormative with their characters is just as forward-thinking as any media that conjures a conventional picture of equality. “Industry” is leaps and bounds ahead because it refuses to define anyone strictly by their sexuality. Here, progressiveness isn’t derived from depicting queer people as singularly, unceasingly good or bad. The show also doesn’t hold its characters in some opaque sexual purgatory, either. There doesn’t have to be any big discussion about queerness or coming out because it isn’t necessary; everyone knows the score, and that knowledge levels the playing field. Anyone could be an enemy or a lover — often, they’re both. The uncertainty is what makes “Industry” so exciting, and its rare moments of real intimacy so effective.

In its fourth season, “Industry” has moved almost entirely beyond Pierpoint, consequently ratcheting up the dramatic friction tenfold. Without the narrative strictness demanded by the investment bank’s setting, anything can and will happen. Yasmin and Harper are both clamoring for stability. And though their paths diverged after they respectively left Pierpoint, their soft spot for each other remains. Whether they like it or not, walking through the Hell of finance together has bonded them forever. They’re closer than friends, but not fused like enemies. Still, Harper and Yasmin’s existences are inextricably linked, gnarled together in a helix of favors and bargains. And as this season of “Industry” reaches its big finale, the two women find that the tie binding them has shortened once again.

Harper knows Yasmin’s in deep trouble. Yasmin knows Harper’s the one who sank her and Henry into this mess — the person set to blow on Tender’s house of cards. Over drinks, they reminisce about where they started and where they’re heading. They talk about all of the things that have been left unsaid, buried by their never-ending battle of wits. Yasmin wipes her tears, and Harper puts a comforting hand on her friend’s shoulder. “Do you want to go out?” Yasmin asks. Cue the synthetic flute chords of “Veridis Quo,” scoring their mutual melancholy.

(Simon Ridgway/HBO) Marisa Abela and Kiernan Shipka in “Industry”

Few things are a better calling card for queer counterculture than a Daft Punk deep cut. “Veridis Quo” begins gently, repeating its opening chords and creating an atmosphere of soft sorrow until a drum line and a synth bleed into the song, defying the instrumental’s bittersweetness. It’s the perfect accompaniment to the sight of Harper and Yasmin, dancing together at a club, relieved to have waved the white flag, at least for tonight. As the synth grows louder, the two kiss under the dance floor’s blue and yellow lights. It’s not a coming-out scene. It’s not the beginning of a romance. It’s an indescribable closeness, more potent than any dividend. Melting into one another on the ground outside the club, smoking cigarettes, Yasmin tells Harper, “We’re here forever, even if we can’t be.”

Tomorrow, everything will go back to normal. Actions will face their consequences, and Harper and Yasmin’s closeness may be but a distant memory. But it’s because their love is fleeting that it’s special. For a brief moment, neither of them wants anything more than to be close to each other. In the cold world of “Industry,” that’s love.

The post In “Industry,” queerness is capital appeared first on Salon.com.

In the hours and days that followed, social media boiled over with rage on behalf of the “Sinners” stars, directed at the man who shouted the slur, John Davidson, the subject of the biographical drama “I Swear.” Accompanying that rage was a fresh explosion of ignorance about Tourette syndrome, the condition that caused Davidson to tic involuntarily throughout last Sunday’s ceremony.

Davidson, who has a symptom of Tourette’s called coprolalia, told Variety that he shouted at least 10 different offensive words during the awards, and the BBC censored all of them except the N-word. This happened despite the BBC airing a pre-recorded version on a two-hour delay. That gave editors ample time to discern what to excise, which included filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr. stating “Free Palestine” while accepting an award for “My Father’s Shadow,” his feature-length debut. But somehow the epithet slipped through.

I deeply empathize with Jordan and Lindo — and Davidson, who has expressed profound regret in the days since. But the person for whom I feel the most compassion wasn’t even in the room.

(Max Cisotti/Dave Benett/Getty Images) John Davidson at the 2026 EE BAFTA Film Awards

Shayla Amamiya is one of several Black content creators with Tourette’s who have made thoughtful videos explaining what it means to have this disability. Amamiya’s reaction to the BAFTAs circulated the most widely of all of them because, like Davidson, she also has coprolalia, explaining that even she has the N-word as a tic.

“Does this mean that I use them regularly? Does this mean that I mean them? Does this mean that I can control what I say? No, it does not,” she says. “That’s not how coprolalia works. That is not how Tourette syndrome works.”

For performing this service, Amamiya was hounded off the Internet. Racist trolls snipped excerpts of her statement to further weaponize their anti-Black racism. But some Black users heaped abuse on her, too, for saying, “This is not me saying that people don’t have the right to be offended. However, you can’t be offended when a disabled person is disabled.” Hence, my fatigue.

This situation is uncommon. Our nerves are frayed, leaving little patience for nuance. People of color are under siege right now, and so are people with disabilities. Tourette’s is misunderstood, and coprolalia, a symptom of the condition that leads to involuntary swearing, slurs, or other socially unacceptable words or phrases, is even more so. It only affects about 10-15% of people with the disability, according to the Tourette Association of America, yet it defines Tourette’s in the minds of many. It is possible to recognize that Jordan and Lindo should not have been subjected to a racist, dehumanizing slur while carrying out a venerated task, and that better care should have been taken to prevent Davidson from being placed in such a mortifying position.

But this furor lands at a time when even America’s president treats bigotry like a joke. So when an outburst born of misfiring neurons is heard around the world, the overwhelming immediate reaction is to pillory the person who said it, when we should be asking why the international media entity broadcasting it allowed it to be audible.

Regardless of circumstance or intent, that word’s impact knocks the wind out of a person. Where a portion of the public has gone terribly wrong is in indicting the people who have no control over saying it.

“The ableism is so painful to view, and so is the racism,” Amamiya shared in a follow-up text post. “Both sides are understood. But there should be no reason why I’m seeing people say that people with Tourette’s shouldn’t be out in public, that we should be separated, or that we should wear muzzles like DOGS. We are all human  . . . and I hate that two communities are people pit [sic] against each other.”

Knee-jerk rage and ignorance are the internet’s primary fuel sources, so it wasn’t a matter of whether the conversation about the BAFTA debacle would go off the rails, but when.

A week after the fact, most people finally seem to understand that the BBC and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts shoulder the blame for this situation. Both the broadcaster and the arts charity released official apologies, and the BBC promised to investigate the matter. Reaching that conclusion took a lot longer than it should have. On the same night as the ceremony, Lindo told Vanity Fair that he and Jordan simply “did what we had to do” at the podium before revealing that nobody from BAFTA spoke to them directly after they presented.

(Stuart Wilson/BAFTA/Getty Images for BAFTA) Host Alan Cumming speaks on stage during the EE BAFTA Film Awards

Others took issue with BAFTA’s delay in sending the ceremony’s host, Alan Cumming, to the podium to read what they deemed to be insufficient efforts to make amends: After Cumming explained that Davidson’s tics are involuntary, he said, “We apologize if you are offended tonight.”

A version of the broadcast that included the slur was also still available on the BBC’s iPlayer on Monday, leading to more apologies.

Since then, Variety published a source’s assurance that Warner Bros. execs sounded the alarm with BAFTA right after it occurred and asked that the offending word be removed from the BBC’s broadcast. That this didn’t happen has sparked a back-and-forth about culpability, with Deadline reporting BAFTA’s assurance that it made the BBC and the broadcast’s producers aware that the slur was audible shortly after Davidson blurted it.

From the audience’s perspective, and especially viewers from either or both marginalized populations at the center of this, this is yet more evidence that insult and discrimination are just part of the price of visibility and achievement. But then, as my colleague Sophia Tesfaye observed in her analysis of Donald Trump’s most recent act of televised logorrhea, bigotry is now considered routine.

Welcome to the aftermath of diversity, equity and inclusion’s demise.

Trump joked about the N-word while speaking to military officials and posted a meme depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes on his Truth Social account, expressing zero shame in either case. Under his administration, official government agencies’ websites and social media pages have parroted white supremacist slogans and propaganda. Major broadcasters give these outrages the same weight as other headlines. And the issue isn’t limited to legacy media and right-wing politicians, either. Google had to apologize when its automated news alert on this BAFTAs invited curious readers to “see more on” the offending word, hard R and all.

As BBC viewers have pointed out in the BAFTAs aftermath, we shouldn’t rule out that the broadcaster that aired “The Black and White Minstrel Show” for 20 years might not have viewed the N-word as problematic language.

After all, in 2019, the BBC took heat for reprimanding journalist Naga Munchetty for saying that Trump’s call for four non-white Democratic congresswomen to “go back” to countries “from which they came” was “embedded in racism.” A year later, the BBC aired a white person using the slur during a 2020 report about a racist attack, prompting more than 18,600 complaints. Those are just a few reasons that people question the BBC’s insistence that this was a simple mistake.

Regardless, there are folks, including Jamie Foxx, who asserted that it was Davidson, not the broadcaster, who intended to do damage. There are also disability advocates, including singer-songwriter Jamie Grace — who also has Tourette’s — who agree that he should take some responsibility.

“We have a medical condition, not an excuse to be careless. They are not the same thing,” Grace says in her Instagram response. “We’re asking for accessibility, not an open door to cause harm.”

Davidson has expressed his horror at the ordeal, telling Variety that he wondered why he was seated near one of the many microphones placed throughout the venue. Once he realized Lindo and Jordan heard that offensive tic, he removed himself from the auditorium.

He also said he’s reached out to directly apologize to Jordan, Lindo and “Sinners” production designer Hannah Beachler, who revealed in an X post that the Tourette’s advocate said the N-word in her presence as well.

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“I know we must handle this with grace and continue to push through. But what made the situation worse was the throw-away apology of ‘if you were offended’ at the end of the show,” Beachler wrote in her post. “Of course, we were offended . . . but our frequency, our spiritual vibration is tuned to a higher level than what happened. I am not [steel], this did not bounce off of me, but I exist above it. It can’t take away from who I am as an artist.”

True. But it does cloud the gleam of what should be a high-spirited award season for the people who made “Sinners” and “I Swear” — two movies about resilience in the face of violent ignorance.

Yes, it’s exhausting. An awards event that should be remembered for celebrating inclusive art and advocacy ended up confronting the audience with the unglamorous reality of the world’s ugliness — and that no amount of social status or institutional power can protect anyone from dealing with it.

The post The BAFTAs have us arguing over the wrong words appeared first on Salon.com.

Society imposes an array of restrictions on girls at an early age, many of them learned through media consumption. Pop stars like Nelly Furtado and Selena Gomez take flak from commenters for daring to gain weight, while performers such as Lizzo, Kelly Osbourne and Mindy Kaling are shamed for dropping it. Tradwife influencers advise young women to speak in pleasing tones and warn against intimidating the men in their lives. Whether the messaging is overt or implied, young women learn the expectation to dim their lights so others, mainly men, can shine.

“I try to be an inspiration to everyone,” she told “CBS Saturday Morning” co-host Michelle Miller in 2024, “but it is especially heartwarming when a young girl tells moi how much moi means to them.”

(Disney/Mitch Haaseth) Pepe the King Prawn and Miss Piggy on “The Muppet Show”

Indeed, Miss Piggy’s magnetism transcends gender: Seth Rogen, who earned multiple Emmys for his work on and in “The Studio,” recently executive produced a special 50th anniversary revival of “The Muppet Show” that pairs her with “Manchild” singer Sabrina Carpenter.

Long before all that, Gen X and Millennials came to know her through Jim Henson’s “The Muppet Show,” which originally aired from 1976 until 1981 on CBS’ prime time lineup. Miss Piggy and Kermit are at the heart of its ragtag variety show, impressing their on-and-off love story on generations of kids who had moved past “Sesame Street” but weren’t quite ready to abandon its friendly comforts. Alas, the pair’s romantic break-up became Twitter official in 2015, prior to the debut of ABC’s mockumentary sitcom “The Muppets.”

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“I’m proud we’re broken up. This is going to be great for moi’s stardom,” Miss Piggy bragged to critics at a press conference. “Now everybody’s going to want to know, ‘Ooh, ooh, who’s Miss Piggy dating? Who is she getting caught snogging with?’”

Although “The Muppet Show” made Piggy an icon, she was introduced as a chorus performer on a 1974 episode of “The Tonight Show.” That means she recently crossed into her 50s, although when CBS’ Miller asked the glamorous Muppet to confirm that, she creatively maneuvered her interviewer into agreeing that both are 25.

It’s not as if that matters, since neither time nor trends affect her.

(Disney/Mitch Haaseth) Sabrina Carpenter and the cast of “The Muppet Show”

Over her five decades in showbiz, Miss Piggy has proven to be more durable than the projects in which she stars. To see why that is, watch her duet and duel with Carpenter in “The Muppet Show” revival. At 26, Carpenter is precisely half of Miss Piggy’s age, and yet they could be fraternal twins.

Some of their resemblance is written into the script, seen in their similar costumes and nearly identical hairstyles, down to their golden ringlets. Then again, scroll through Carpenter’s many red carpet snapshots and Miss Piggy’s ever-expanding Instagram feed, and you may recognize the similarities predate the special by several years.

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Miss Piggy insists on living la vie en rose above all, including romancing herself. While her affection for Kermit is true, the great joke of their affair is that he’s often portrayed as tolerating her instead of providing the full worship she demands – nay, deserves. If his defining characteristic weren’t competence, Piggy could easily insert him into a cover of “Manchild” instead of duetting with Carpenter in a performance of “Islands in the Stream.”

But their balance of imperfections makes their working relationship inspirational, in its way. Miss Piggy’s personality is simply too much for most to handle. Her inflated self-esteem is a force of nature never wielded unkindly, unless provoked. She always has a brilliant comeback line for every situation, refusing to ever settle for second billing. And Kermit navigates this without diminishing her.

(Disney/Mitch Haaseth) Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog on “The Muppet Show”

Flesh-and-blood idols almost always fall short of our expectations. Not Miss Piggy. Sure, she’s a work of foam and fabric co-created by a man, Frank Oz, who provided her voice until 2002, when voice actor Eric Jacobson officially took over.

But she’s also a realistic ideal, unique in her ability to wear, be and do anything – including look after herself, thanks to her karate training.

Despite such versatility, Miss Piggy has never starred in her own movie. That may soon change, thanks to Emma Stone and Jennifer Lawrence, who are collaborating on a film based on a script written by Cole Escola, the Tony-winning writer and star of “Oh, Mary!” If greenlit, it will mark Miss Piggy’s first solo feature ever.

But anyone who grew up with the chicest member of the Muppets’ ensemble cast, whether on their TVs or in their dreams, understands she’s an eternal headliner.

“I’ve basically modeled my whole look and style after you,” Carpenter gushes when she and Piggy finally meet in the recent special. To this, Piggy tartly replies, “My attorneys and I have taken notice. We will be in touch.”

She says this in jest, of course. Carpenter may be one of the biggest stars around, but even she recognizes that when Piggy’s in the room, everyone else should be thrilled to simply be nearby.

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from Salon’s culture newsletter, The Swell

• We aren’t all reading the same “Wuthering Heights”
• We still swoon for Prince’s “Kiss”
• “Fargo” at 30: How “Minnesota nice” endures amid violence and unrest

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Gen Z yearns because nothing they see around them suggests that pursuing real-life love is something they should want to do. Older generations have messed it all up, cheapening dating and allowing reality shows and celebrities to frame love as unavoidably transactional. Technology, meanwhile, has left the bar on the ground, what with the normalization of ghosting, the ever-present risk of catfishing and the promise that someone better is one swipe away, even if it’s not clear what “better” is. There’s no evidence that this generation intends to make pining their only romantic activity; it’s more that they are very content, at the moment, to luxuriate in the many conduits for yearning available to them. They are listening to Jeff Buckley, watching Celine Song films, making memes about needing more hours in the day to yearn.

Generationally, the Zs don’t seem to share much common ground with “Wuthering Heights” author Emily Brontë. But the 1847 novel, her only published work, could be considered the ur-text of yearning. So it makes sense that members of Gen Z are among those most amped for “Saltburn” writer-director Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of “Wuthering Heights,” which opened just in time, the trailer makes sure to note, for Valentine’s Day.

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In the months leading up to the release, social media, and #booktok in particular, prepped for the deluge of yearning by picking up a copy of “Wuthering Heights” — and shortly afterward realizing that the book bears no relation to the trailer for Fennell’s film, in which images of lusting, open mouths (is that? — yep, that’s someone licking a door) alternate with scenes foregrounded by sweeping gowns and dramatic horseback riding. What the hell did I just read? Are we sure this is the source material? Shouldn’t the main character not die so early? Is this even supposed to be a romance? are among the sentiments shared in innumerable TikToks whose creators sometimes seem to be taking the discrepancy between their Jacob Elordi-fied imaginations and the raw anger and outright abusiveness of the novel’s leading man very personally.

(Warner Bros. Pictures.) Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights”

For decades, there have been two distinct “Wuthering Heights” experiences. One is the dense, dialect-heavy Gothic novel, 400-plus pages of exposition told second- or even thirdhand. This version of “Wuthering Heights” is intense and slow and often one where readers find themselves having to take a break within the first few chapters to sketch out a couple of family trees — without them, it’s a challenge to follow a decades-spanning plot with a profusion of characters who in many cases share names with other characters. (There are dozens of different editions of the book; for best results, try an annotated one.) The unrelenting, full-tilt brutality of this “Wuthering Heights,” according to Brontë historian Samantha Ellis, led one critic to assert, “How a human being could have attempted such a book . . . without committing suicide . . .  is a mystery.” 

Most of its well-known screen adaptations, by contrast, are much less severe, the narration more direct, and the relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and her adopted brother Heathcliff firmly centered. In the category of books whose modern adaptations excise important context from their narratives, “Wuthering Heights” is an all-timer: Long before Fennell’s film entered the chat, the title alone was pop-culture shorthand for doomed, star-crossed obsession. MGM’s classic 1939 adaptation starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon was billed as “The Greatest Love Story of All Time . . . Or Any Time!” a pronouncement that the trailer for the new film echoes.

Andrea Arnold’s spare, hauntingly earthbound 2012 rendition captured the bleakness of the story (and, notably, cast a Black actor to play Heathcliff, whose ethnicity Brontë described as “gypsy,” but who was almost definitely not white); still, like the 1939 film, it declines to include the book’s violent second half. And Kate Bush’s immortal 1978 single, with its swooping, operatic drama, interpretive dance–filled video and ghostly narrator only strengthened the book’s rep as a tale of exquisitely tortured love. (Each July since 2016, fans of all genders don their flowiest red garments and gather in city parks from Adelaide to Amsterdam to re-enact the iconic video.)

These adaptations, along with a 2009 BBC production starring Tom Hardy, have to halt where they do because the Heathcliff of the book’s second half is irredeemable — drunk, violent and passing intergenerational trauma down like it’s a gold pocket watch. “Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights,” released in 1992, is the sole screen adaptation that doesn’t ignore the second half of the book. Ralph Fiennes, in his debut, is a trip-wire Heathcliff, a man unstrung less by love than by mania who, after the death of Juliette Binoche’s Cathy, turns his fury on his family, her family and, unfortunately, dogs.

Its trailer, in which a voiceover intones: “A passion . . . An obsession . . .  A love that destroyed everyone it touched,” is a bit unsettling to watch from the vantage of 2026, when love that destroys everyone it touches is generally understood to be suboptimal for all involved. Even at the time, the overheated language was belied by the filmic metatext of the author herself (played by an uncredited Sinead O’Connor), warning viewers in the film’s opening that her story is not one to be swooned at, but a study of unrequited love as a kind of sociopathy.

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The fact that the book is canonically the favorite of “Twilight’s” Bella Swan is a nod to the generations of pop-culture texts that inculcated The Youth with a certainty that nothing but the most glorious and tempestuous friction is worth striving for — the kind that once made The Crystals’ “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)” an unremarkable bit of 1960s girl-group sentiment. Heathcliff might have been the most overtly unhinged boyfriend adolescent girls encountered in their assigned reading list, but he was far from the only one, even within the extended Brontë universe. (Kate Beaton’s comic “Dude Watchin’ with the Brontës” will never not be funny.) “Wuthering Heights” knew what it was about, and Brontë, despite her lack of firsthand experience in love, had the scripts of normative femininity dead to rights with the book’s relentless conflation of love and torment. She knew humans tend to make the same mistakes in love again and again and somehow never learn from them.

(Warner Bros. Pictures) Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff and Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw in “Wuthering Heights”

In doing press for the film, Fennell has been clear that she never wanted the new “Wuthering Heights” to suggest that it is the “Wuthering Heights” — which is why the title of the movie itself is styled with quotation marks. “You can’t adapt a book as dense and complicated and difficult as this book,” Fennell told Fandango recently. “I can’t say I’m making ‘Wuthering Heights.’ It’s not possible. What I can say is that I’m making a version of it, [the] version that I remember of it, which isn’t quite real.”

Fennell’s emphasis on not claiming faithfulness to the text gives her “Wuthering Heights” the soft-focus gleam of the romance fanfiction that much of her audience likely grew up on. For those who create and read fanfic, rewriting stories that aren’t originally yours isn’t wanton IP infringement; they’re an extension of the formative, meaningful texts that, read over and over, feel like they become yours. Fanfiction that makes relationship and sexual dynamics thrillingly illicit is common; the genre arguably started with a Mr. Spock/Capt. Kirk pairing, after all. But consider the most successful fanfic adaptation to date: “50 Shades of Grey,” which back in the 2010s reified the belief that women don’t really want equality, but instead seek to be dominated by an exacting, cruel d-bags in sharp suits. The “50 Shades” juggernaut began as “Twilight” fan fiction. Brontë was right: We are total drama queens.

But when Gen Zs talk about their yearning to yearn, it’s not necessarily about a need to reshape existing stories to their specifications, but about whatever arrangement of words and attitudes resonates with them. It might be the “intense (but well suppressed) yearning” of Jane Austen’s “Persuasion,” or the confused yearning of the character whose lover up and becomes a nun or a mermaid or space alien, or the “half agony, half hope” kind celebrated in one romance novel Reddit thread. (“THIS WOMAN GOT HER DEGREE IN YEARNALISM” is the approving sum-up of author Lorraine Heath.)

There might even be a case to be made that Emily Brontë herself found yearning preferable to a flesh-and-blood love; it’s definitely one reason why many Brontë fans were salty that 2022’s fictionalized biopic “Emily” retconned the origin story so that Brontë herself had an obsessive love affair. But what if Fennell’s iteration of “Wuthering Heights” exists precisely because it’s comforting to think the happiest ending is made possible by a nonexistent beginning? Would that really be so bad? I don’t think so, but it also doesn’t matter: In times this uncertain, yearning doesn’t have to signal the absence of something real.

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from Salon’s culture newsletter, The Swell

• We still swoon for Prince’s “Kiss”
• “Fargo” at 30: How “Minnesota nice” endures amid violence and unrest
• David Bowie’s Goblin King still casts the longest spell

The post We aren’t all reading the same “Wuthering Heights” appeared first on Salon.com.

In matters of sex and sensuality, no one compares to Prince. His lyrics are ripe with forward descriptions of fantasies he’s had or ones he’s hungry to realize. Some he spelled out in juicy detail, like when he told us what Nikki was doing in that hotel lobby in the second line of her song. Other more radio-suitable singles leave the specifics to the imagination, like his rainy-day tryst with the girl wearing the raspberry beret.

The post We still swoon for Prince’s “Kiss” appeared first on Salon.com.

“Pretty in Pink,” released in theaters 40 years ago this week, exemplifies an ideal marriage of the two. Its opening sequence is both graceful and conspicuous; its exposition is entirely legible, yet so very charming that its plainness doesn’t matter one bit. John Hughes — who wrote the film’s screenplay but deferred direction to his collaborator, Howard Deutch — had a way of making even the obvious seem natural. As a writer, Hughes was gifted with a heavy hand and a soft touch. His early characters were consistently archetypal, plucked from the average high school experience. Scripts were packed with bad-boy rebels, spoiled teen queens and uncool misfits of all kinds. Hughes also keenly understood that, because these personalities were so familiar, his characters wouldn’t stand out to viewers unless they pushed their paradigm. These had to feel like real people with stereotypical flair, teenagers who were boxed into a category simply because that’s what high school social politics demand. And in just three minutes of exposition, Hughes and Deutch nimbly convey that Molly Ringwald’s Andie Walsh is both your conventional artsy wallflower and a singularly special young woman.

As the camera follows a suburban Chicago street sweeper along its early morning route, it stops at a modest house, perched on the other side of the train tracks. The clear shot of the tracks seems a bit transparent, sure, but it’s an effective way for Hughes to immediately let us know that Andie and her unemployed father, Jack (Harry Dean Stanton), are working class. Andie’s socioeconomic status is integral to her character. It’s part of what makes her desperate struggle for some adolescent normalcy so resonant. Yet, before she passes her high school threshold and dives into the brutal deep end of upper secondary education, it’s all cool. Andie spends her morning enjoying the ritual of building her outfit. She leisurely puts on her stockings. She pores over a drawer of unorganized jewelry to find the right piece. She grabs a perfectly pink jacket facing the opposite direction from the rest of the things in her closet. Andie’s disorganized but inventive, and that’s exactly the way she likes it.

The first time we meet Andie’s boss and would-be mentor, Iona (Annie Potts), it’s immediately clear why the two get along so fabulously. Iona is perched on a table by a windowsill, stapling albums to the ceiling as decor to liven up the record store she runs — not that the place needs much livening-up, considering Iona’s look. She’s gelled some of her hair into spikes while the rest hangs in a ponytail behind her head, as if she misremembered “business in the front, party in the back” while getting ready in the morning. Together, Andie and Iona are an unyielding, uniquely punk duo. They’re an unstoppable force up against an immovable object, a confident, funky bowler hat matched with a black latex dress. They won’t change for anyone…until, suddenly, they do. For all of the film’s expository merit, for all of the care and efficiency Hughes exhibited in creating such wonderful and instantly lovable women, “Pretty in Pink” flubs the landing. And all for a couple of ho-hum, wearisome men.

Like so much media geared toward young people in the late 20th century, “Pretty in Pink” revolves around an event in every American teenager’s life so pivotal, so life-altering and so very defining that it could make or break the entire high school experience: prom. Or, at least that’s the way the prom seems when you’re 17 — a perception that’s coincidentally fueled by the very same media. Andie wants to go to prom, but she’s not sweating it. In all likelihood, she’ll spend the weeks leading up to prom rebuffing invitations from her persistent best friend, Duckie (Jon Cryer), until reluctantly accepting just to save face.

But Andie’s hopes shift when one of the uber-popular rich kids at her school, Blane (Andrew McCarthy), strolls into the record shop one afternoon, looking for a music recommendation. Andie tosses a few flirtatious barbs across the checkout counter, inquiring if Blane will be paying with cash or an American Express Platinum card. To her surprise, Blane can take her well-meaning jabs just fine, a far cry from the stuck-up girls in her English class and Blane’s pretentious friend, Steff (James Spader), whose fragile egos bruise at a mere withering glance. This is it! This could be Andie’s man, her future, her prom date! Endless possibilities flash before her eyes. And in the same instant, Andie’s dreams of a romance with her star-crossed lover begin to cloud her better judgment.

(Bonnie Schiffman/Getty Images) Molly Ringwald, Jon Cryer and Andrew McCarthy

What’s special about “Pretty in Pink” is ironically what makes Andie and Iona’s character arcs so frustrating. These are two women who know who they are from the jump, and the audience never spends a single moment trying to discern that, either. Iona and Andie have total agency. They’re scrappy and ambitious. Creation comes naturally to both of them; playing with personal aesthetics is a means of liberating oneself from the status quo. When Andie goes to school in outfits that she made herself, and Iona greets shoplifters with a severe asymmetrical wig and a loaded staple gun aimed at the face, these decisions are not indicators of class or etiquette — they’re bold personal choices. Andie and Iona would rather go their own way than try to keep up with anyone else, and they’re not ashamed of that, no matter how many people tell them that they should be. When Andie defends herself from the girls bullying her in her gym class and gets sent to the principal’s office for it, she refuses to offer a polite apology. “I’m getting a better education than I deserve, and I’m fortunate that the good people of this community allow me to attend this school,” Andie says sarcastically. “I understand everything, Mr. Donnelly, and I don’t need to have it explained to me. I live it.”

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Hughes’ script supplies Andie with a fount of vivacious wit and self-assurance, which is what makes watching her dull her shine as the film progresses so confounding. After a bit more flirting, Blane looks for Andie to ask her out on a real date and finds her taking her lunch period in the school’s courtyard, where all of the oddball students hang out. Seated next to her, Blane quietly admits, “I’m not really into all this sh*t, you know?” For the first time in his high school career, he’s as uncomfortable as the popular crowd has made it for Andie every day of the last four years. Yet, Andie holds her head high in the hallway while Blane’s is bowed in the courtyard, dodging stares. If this is a move to level the playing field and show Andie that his interest in her reaches beyond their material differences, the least Blane could do is not disparage where she spends her time and how she chooses to spend it.

As clearly as Andie might be able to see herself, it’s far more difficult for her to see the flaws in her burgeoning romance with Blane until they become glaringly apparent. Really, that’s just being a teenager. When we’re young and dreaming of having the kind of love we’ve only read about in books and seen in movies, it’s easy to be swept away by the first decent person who offers you attention. Figuring out who and how you love takes trial and error, two things Andie and Blane both endure while trying to fit into each other’s respective worlds.

(Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) James Spader in “Pretty in Pink”

But “Pretty in Pink” fails to truly acknowledge that Andie operates at a much more consequential social disadvantage than her new boyfriend. Blane might have to brush off Duckie’s occasional curtness, but that’s the extent of his woes. Andie, however, must tolerate Steff and everyone else in Blane’s circle constantly telling her that she’s lesser than the rich kids she’s newly mingling with. She’s humiliated at parties and taunted in hallways. She has to care for her lush, out-of-work father while Blane enjoys the cushy comfort of financial stability. And despite witnessing all of this, Blane can’t bring himself to be honest with Andie when it all becomes too much for him, lying to her to save face and insulting her intelligence in the process.

While Iona’s love interest isn’t quite so blunt, her transformation certainly is. When she begins dating the owner of a local pet shop, Iona immediately falls in step with her yuppie new beau. Hurt and in desperate need of her friend, Andie goes to see Iona to ask for her ruffly pink prom dress, a keepsake she promised Andie if ever she wanted it. But when she arrives at Iona’s apartment, Andie is shocked to see that a coiffed perm, light makeup, a sensible suit and a string of pearls have replaced her friend’s beehives and gelled spikes. “Either it’s all those drugs I took in the ’60s, or I am really in love,” Iona says, relenting that she looks like somebody’s mother. And, to Andie, she is.

Iona is the sweet, sage maternal figure Andie fiercely craves but won’t admit to wanting. But that doesn’t mean that she has to look matronly, either. Iona and Andie are such a perfect mother-daughter match because they have similar personality quirks and sartorial appetites, a genuine family resemblance. Neither of them needs to tone it down for the world to like them — something Hughes’ script conveys so plainly by how quickly the viewer falls for this dynamic duo. And yet, both Andie and Iona shirk their individuality for stability, leaving those singular, oh-so-charming elements of their characters in the dust when wealthy men come calling.

Granted, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. The film’s big ending — where Andie finds Blane alone and ashamed at prom and decides to take him back, culminating in their final kiss — wasn’t part of the final script. “Pretty in Pink” originally concluded with Andie and Duckie together, sharing a dance at the prom, which test audiences disliked so much that they booed the screen. Cryer claims the reaction made Hughes worried that viewers would perceive this finale as an encouragement not to cross class lines. Ringwald, on the other hand, felt it never made sense for Andie and Duckie to end up together in a film told like a Cinderella story. Months after the film’s initial production wrapped, a reshoot was scheduled for the new, crowd-pleasing ending.

While the new conclusion made some sense for Andie — a lovestruck teenager still trying to balance perspective with hormones — Iona altering her appearance so drastically for a man remains uncharacteristic. Love makes us do crazy things, but watching both women deflate their shoulder pads and play the smiling girlfriend directly conflicts with the character arcs and emotional beats throughout the film, even if it’s how the story must inevitably be structured. The final ending doesn’t make “Pretty in Pink” a poor film by any means, just a product of its time. Mainstream teenage romances of the ’80s were fashionable and predictable. Audiences wanted happy endings, and far more often than not, they got them. And even though these characters deserved far better than the screenplay their era would allow, it doesn’t mean their impact is for naught. When starry-eyed “Pretty in Pink” devotees think of Andie and Iona, we think of their looks, their personalities and their willingness to fight for themselves. (Alright, maybe their hair, too.) Those are the elements that have made these characters such iconic, powerhouse examples of individuality for 40 years and counting, and they’re the same ones that will keep “Pretty in Pink” an indelible part of culture forevermore.

The post The women of “Pretty in Pink” deserved better appeared first on Salon.com.

Miss Piggy was honored with the Sackler Center for Feminist Art’s First Award Wednesday, joining a long list of powerful women like Sandra Day O’Connor, Toni Morrison and Anita Hill.

Despite being a puppet, Elizabeth Sackler, the founder-namesake of the awards told MSNBC that Piggy completely fit the bill: “We’re talking about tenacity, strength, intelligence, strategy, a sense of humor… She also believes that who you are is all you need to be and [to] really go for it.”

The award, according to the center website, is given to women “who are first in their fields” and was presented to Piggy by Gloria Steinem and Sackler at the Brooklyn Museum.

“She has spirit. She has determination. She has grit,” Sackler told USA Today. “She has inspired children to be who you are — and this squares very directly with feminism.”

While all of this mat be true, not everyone was super thrilled to see a Jim Henson “Muppet” walk away with the title apparently — particularly, one whose feminist values have been called into question many times before. MSNBC notes her leech-y relationship with Kermit, as well as a recent interview in which Piggy explicitly states that she is “not a feminist.”

Piggy addressed the naysayers, as well as her own backpedaling on the “f-word,” in her acceptance speech: “As of today, I am a feminist,” Piggy announced.

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In April 1970, Paul McCartney announced The Beatles’ disbandment to a stunned world. But as Neville’s documentary makes abundantly clear: while music lovers across the globe certainly mourned The Beatles’ breakup, few suffered its heartbreaking aftershocks to McCartney’s extent. His saving grace proved to be his wife Linda, whom he married in March 1969. Linda had not merely been there to stave off the post-Beatles doldrums. She had helped him to conquer the significant depression that he experienced in the wake of the disbandment, a period in which he increasingly relied on alcohol to sate his aching soul. He also admitted in a 1974 Rolling Stone interview that he leaned more on Linda, saying, “I don’t think I have that many [friends]. No one went against me or anything, I think I isolated myself a bit.”

“Man on the Run” is chock-full of unseen archival footage — the kind that McCartney aficionados will relish as Neville paints a revealing picture of the musician’s post-Beatles challenges. And to his documentary’s great credit, Neville doesn’t deal obliquely with Linda’s role in Paul’s post-Beatles life. Neville takes the matter head-on, addressing Linda’s 1970s-era critics — and there were many. As for Linda’s prominence in his music and in Wings, Paul admitted that while “she did just kind of appear out of nowhere” as part of his musical image, “she was the main help for me on the albums around that time. She was there every day . . . So I think all this business about getting Linda in the billing was just a way of saying, ‘Listen, I don’t care what you think, this is what I think. I’m putting her right up there with me.’” For her part, Linda understood her place without reservation. “I’m not here because I’m the greatest keyboard player,” she explains in “Man on the Run.” “I’m here because we love each other.”

As the filmmaker behind the acclaimed “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” and “20 Feet from Stardom,” Neville has a well-honed knack for getting to the heart of our most cherished stories. In its finest moments, “Man on the Run” does precisely that, shedding new light on the ways in which McCartney staged his remarkable 1970s comeback. And what a strange renaissance it was. As Neville explained during my recent interview with him, “Paul’s solution [after The Beatles] was the unlikeliest of solutions — moving to a farm and removing himself from rock ‘n’ roll and having kids. He had to begin at square one and get to square 100. But The Beatles also started that way. There were some great things that came out of that period, and there were some missteps, too — but the missteps were as important as the hits.”

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Focusing on McCartney’s first decade in the wake of The Beatles’ disbandment, Neville allots significant attention to the musician’s grit and determination during the formation of Wings, which underwent several lineup changes in the 1970s. As the documentary makes clear, the tide began to shift for McCartney when he came to recognize his role as Wings’ band leader. In many ways, “Man on the Run” is the narrative that unites us all — our personal tales of growing up. “And I thought,” Neville explained to me, “that that’s an interesting story to tell, you know, because if you’ve been a famous Beatle since you were 16 or famous since you were 20, it freezes you in a kind of adolescent state. You see this with lots of rock bands.” With The Beatles juggernaut out of the picture, Paul was suddenly forced to figure it out: “What kind of person am I? What kind of husband, what kind of dad, what kind of artist?” said Neville, “and I thought those were interesting questions that Paul was trying to answer.”

It’s a powerful story, to say the least, and Neville handles it in “Man on the Run” with great aplomb. In many ways, rebuilding his life and finding himself in the wake of The Beatles’ disbandment may be McCartney’s finest moment. And no less than John Lennon would agree with the filmmaker’s position. In one of his last interviews, Lennon admitted, ”I kind of admire the way Paul started back from scratch, forming a new band and playing in small dance halls, because that’s what he wanted to do with The Beatles — he wanted us to go back to the dance halls and experience that again. He did what he wanted to do.”

And as McCartney’s post-Beatles renaissance reveals, harnessing his ambitions has made all the difference.

The post The risky reinvention of Paul McCartney appeared first on Salon.com.

Punch’s reintroduction to the zoo’s troop of macaques has been rocky and very public. When videos of Punch curling up with the toy on the concrete floor of the zoo enclosure went viral, well, people had feelings — most of which can be summed up by the phrase “I WOULD DIE FOR PUNCH,” which has pervaded social platforms in varying degrees of sincerity and satire in recent days. We are all, forgive the phrase, Punch-drunk.

(David Mareuil/Anadolu via Getty Images) Baby monkey named Punch finds comfort with a stuffed animal

Typing “Punch the monkey” into search engines triggers a shower of animated hearts featuring Punch’s face cuddled up against his fuzzy friend. The zoo has been swarmed with visitors clamoring to see Punch, and IKEA outposts worldwide have sold out of the plush orangutan. Jon Stewart roasted the baby monkey, to mixed reviews; Punch’s mother is being read to filth in YouTube comments; and a notorious duo of d-bags tried to buy him as a pet. Every aspect of Punch’s ordeal and the viral fame that has followed is a reminder that the times we live in are uniquely dystopian, venal and disheartening — and that a majority of us think we have no choice but to accept it. For Punch’s sake, and our own, we might want to reconsider.

We don’t have to relate quite so hard

“My mental state is currently 50% staring at the horizon like a Werner Herzog penguin and 50% Punch the Monkey defending his stuffed toy against the world. There is no in-between,” wrote a commenter on one clip of Punch, in hyperbole both performative and familiar. For almost as long as there’s been an internet, it has been ruled and animated and possibly held together by a shared need to look at cute animals several times a day at minimum. Even in increasingly divisive times, cute animals are our common language, offering points of connection and escape routes for disagreements. (Your friend’s dating a MAGA chud and hanging out with them is excruciating? Bummer — but until they break up, your friendship can survive on Moo Deng memes.)

It’s not just that we love the LOLcats and the good dogs and the self-involved birbs and the octopuses who are too smart for this nonsense: They are avatars that let people connect, empathize, flirt and vent while avoiding vulnerability. Remember the viral fame of the IKEA monkey? In the 2012 photo that kicked everyone’s heart in the shins, the little guy in a shearling coat was framed staring balefully into the middle distance out the window of the Toronto-area IKEA where he’d been abandoned. The undeniable intersection of cute, sad and stylish launched a thousand reaction memes. (Darwin now resides at a primate sanctuary in Canada where he lives a peaceful, camera-avoidant life.)

But keep in mind, when your/my eyes fill with tears watching little Punch rush to his orangutan for comfort, what might look to us like bullying is how primates establish their societal hierarchies. “All troop dynamics are complicated, and macaques’ can be especially intense,” says Colleen Reed, one of the primate keepers at the Oregon Zoo. “When we’re watching [Punch clips], we project human emotions onto [him]. It’s challenging not to because primates are so closely related to us. There’s a reason why people are having visceral feelings watching him get pushed around, compared to watching hyenas fighting.”

(David Mareuil/Anadolu via Getty Images) Baby monkey named Punch with a companion

We don’t have to have monkeys as pets

It’s been a good few months of not having to know what Andrew Tate is up to. Unfortunately, the manosphere’s favorite sex pest didn’t want to miss a chance to exploit another living being, and after Tate and his brother Tristan saw Punch, the latter hopped onto X to write, “Which Zoo owns this monkey. @Cobratate and I will buy it. 250,000 dollars. I am NOT kidding.” Though the post prompted a collective Nah, bro, even writing it says a lot about the Tates’ unwavering confidence that the world is as mercenary as they are, and that everything has a price.

Unfortunately, in the case of the exotic-animal trade, it’s often true. Trafficking exotic animals, from tigers to reptiles to birds and beyond, underpins a staggering amount of organized crime globally. The United States alone is one of the world’s largest markets for them: Lack of regulation makes exact numbers difficult, but a December 2025 report from the Center for Biological Diversity estimates that “more than 248 million animals were captured from the wild and imported into the United States to be kept as pets from 2016 to 2024.” They are sold at exotic-pet shows, on the dark web, through shady roadside zoos like “Tiger King” Joe Exotic’s, and by wildlife traffickers.

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They are often sold to people who are unequipped to take care of them: Recall Justin Bieber’s pet capuchin monkey, Mally, who was confiscated by German customs officials in 2013 after the 21-year-old brought him to the country on a private plane, with no documentation. (“People are always like, ‘Why did you get a monkey?’ If you could get a monkey, well, you would get a f**king monkey, too! Monkeys are awesome,” said Bieber in 2016, when he began talking about getting another monkey.)

U.S. laws on owning exotic animals vary from state to state, with patchy oversight, and smaller primates — “because they’re so cute and so tiny and they seem like they’re going to be very easy”— are regularly sought as pets, says Reed. “What’s frustrating for people in the sanctuary and zoo world is that these animals are social individuals; they live in groups. When you see a human with one monkey, that is not good for that monkey.” (Looking at you, Man in the Yellow Hat.) The federal Captive Primate Safety Act, which was introduced in Congress this year, would put a stop to the breeding and selling of monkeys as pets, so call your reps. Tell them Punch sent you.

We don’t have to erase birth mothers

Why Punch’s mother abandoned him isn’t clear, though the zoo’s staff acknowledged that she was a first-time mother who gave birth during a heat wave, both high-stress situations. The little guy’s plight is heartbreaking. But it’s likely his mother’s was too, and her absence is particularly resonant in the United States of 2026, where erasure of birth mothers is a key tenet of forced-birth enthusiasts and the current nominee for Surgeon General thinks contraception is “disrespect of life.” During oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested that safe-haven laws have effectively made the need for abortion access obsolete, insinuating that there’s little difference “between, say, the ability to get an abortion at 23 weeks, or the state requiring the woman to go 15, 16 weeks more and then terminate parental rights at the conclusion.” (It’s only 15, 16 more weeks, after all; it’s only the state controlling your body.) Like her fellow justice Samuel Alito, Barrett wants nothing more than to increase “the domestic supply of infants” mentioned in a footnote in Alito’s leaked draft opinion.

(David Mareuil/Anadolu via Getty Images) Baby monkey named Punch with his stuffed monkey friend

In her 2024 book “Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and The Privilege of American Motherhood,” Dr. Gretchen Sisson examines the coercive, monetized private-adoption industry that continues to perpetuate Baby Scoop–era tactics that paint birth mothers as callous and irresponsible. It’s flourishing under a powerful Christian Right that has since added baby boxes to its list of why abortion is no longer necessary; their logic, per Sisson, is, “If we just take the babies from these families and move them to these other families, then we don’t need to provide insurance coverage for infertility treatments. We don’t need to invest in vulnerable and young families. We don’t need to make abortion accessible or affordable. We just introduce adoption, and the ‘problem’ is solved.”

Punch’s birth wasn’t a political hot potato, but the same narrative that erases birth mothers pervades expressions of sympathy for him — what kind of awful, cruel mother could spurn little Punch! “When you see a quick clip online, you’re not getting context about the whole group” of macaques, says Reed. Punch’s mother remains with the troop, but she may or may not accept Punch as he’s re-integrated. “Reasons for rejection depend on the type of primate, but also the individual,” says Reed. “This could have been a very low-ranking female who was trying to protect herself. Without knowing the group dynamics, we can’t say.”

We don’t have to profit from misery

The pathos of Punch and his orangutan, of course, is what’s had so many people glued to their screens. In his landmark 1950s-era experiments on attachment, primate researcher Harry Harlow found that the baby rhesus monkeys he separated from their mothers at birth sought more comfort from the inanimate mother covered in soft toweling than the wire one that dispensed food. Seeing Punch run to seek comfort from a plush animal with no capacity to actively nurture him is likely the thing that we’re most viscerally responding to. And it’s what makes the misery profiteering that has followed Punch’s viral fame seem especially tasteless.

IKEA hasn’t been able to keep up with the demand for its $19 Djungelskog stuffie, which began flying off the shelves after Punch went viral. The number of them that have since popped up on eBay and Etsy in the past few days — some prices above $100 — suggests that many were snapped up by opportunistic stuffie scalpers. In the meantime, the company launched a new ad that features the sold-out toy being cuddled by a Punch-like plush monkey with the copy “Sometimes, family is who we find along the way” and the social-media tagline “We’re ALL Punch’s family now.”

(Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images) ‘Djungelskog’ orangutan plush toys seen in IKEA

Elsewhere, a chintzy drop-shipping site that calls itself the “official” Punch Monkey retailer is selling “Team Punch” t-shirts, mugs, stickers and more. A children’s book with a title that reeks of AI (“The Baby Monkey PUNCH: How One Tiny Monkey Showed the World Bravery and Resilience — Picture Book About Making New Friends and Overcoming Loneliness for Kids”) is now on Amazon, and more slapped-together merch. Fast Company reported on Thursday that “Savvy e-commerce sellers are capitalizing on the viral video of the moment. Can we blame them?”

We can. And we should: Capitalizing on Punch’s distress, exploiting his vulnerability and commodifying a situation that might not end the way people want it to would be ghoulish even if the proceeds were going to wildlife conservation. (That’s not what these drop-ship hucksters appear to be doing — though, from a look at IKEA’s Instagram account, the retailer might well be shamed into doing so.) Meanwhile, the marketing industry currently high-fiving IKEA’s quick pivot to misery commodification are equally culpable, like the Instagram Reel from a company called MarketingMentor enthusing that “Punch just gave IKEA millions of dollars in free marketing, making it one of the smartest PR moves of 2026.” (First of all: Calm down, it’s still February.)

There is an opportunity to harness the energy of the millions of people anxiously waiting for the latest developments in Punch’s saga to drop, and it can be about more than profit: meeting this moment can involve advocating for better habitats, joining advocacy initiatives for macaques and other primates and even just learning more about wildlife conservation. The past week has shown that there’s a little bit of Punch in all of us, so let’s help ensure that the future holds fewer stories like his.

The post Punch the monkey deserves better. And we do too appeared first on Salon.com.

When J.D., who has long moved on from Sacred Heart Hospital, surprises Turk with a mid-shift visit to their old stomping grounds, Turk puts on the usual jokey front, crouching so old J-Dizzle can leap on his back for one of their signature “Eagle” flights. Turk’s bad back makes it a brief sortie, but the attempt confirms that their friendship remains fundamentally intact.

Still, when J.D. finds out Turk’s interns secretly refer to him as Dr. Bummer, he realizes his Big Dog may be burying some of his pain.

“God, I wish this guy would die all at once instead of in tiny little pieces,” Turk blurts out while operating on a patient, one of the many small dramatic turns that anchor “Scrubs” in reality. Like many men, Turk is lonely, and like many mid-career doctors, he’s also burned out. No matter how many times Turk advises the man he’s just treated to take better care of himself, he tells J.D., Turk knows he’ll be performing another amputation on him.

“There’s no joy. None,” Turk says, holding back tears.

(Disney/Jeff Weddell) David Gridley, Ava Bunn and Jacob Dudman in “Scrubs”

“Scrubs” being what it is, the joy returns in short order. Realizing that Sacred Heart is where he belongs, J.D. relinquishes his quiet life as a concierge doctor to return to the trenches with Turk, Turk’s wife Carla, the hospital’s head nurse (Judy Reyes), and his ex, Elliot Reed (Sarah Chalke).

However, their wacky little world is no longer what it once was. Anyone who watches “The Pitt” knows that, as do the many who refuse that call – including more than a few medical professionals. When your job requires you to squelch your anxiety while caring for another person’s life and health, the last thing you may want at the end of your shift is to watch a show about a similar workplace enduring one of its most stressful days.

“The Pitt” is a decidedly post-pandemic drama. “Scrubs,” meanwhile, resumes under the spiritual guidance of its creator, Bill Lawrence, the man responsible for two broadly cherished comedies born within and in response to the pandemic: “Ted Lasso” and “Shrinking.”

But Lawrence’s reputation for thoughtfully centering stories about healers and healing in wells of humor began with  “Scrubs,” which aired for seven seasons on NBC before moving to ABC for its eight and ninth. Where “The Pitt” inspires awe at what its doctors achieve with a paucity of resources, time and patience, “Scrubs” lampoons the absurdity of a corporatized medical system steadily grinding down doctor and patient alike, zigzagging between J.D.’s mundane narration and the fanciful flights whirling in his brain.

People either love the sitcom’s cartoonish flourishes or despise them. (Or perhaps that was more of a problem when it originally aired and had the poor luck of existing in proximity to shows employing similar conceits, namely “Ally McBeal.”)

For those in the latter camp, there is the standard issue broadcast sitcom goofery of NBC’s “St. Denis Medical.”  Even that show doesn’t stray too far from what it’s like to practice medicine in an era when science and certified expertise are vilified, and tempers run short.

(Warrick Page/HBO Max) Katherine LaNasa and Tina Ivlev in “The Pitt”

In the first season of “The Pitt,” an angry man fed up with waiting for care sucker punches a nurse. But rage spikes in quieter places too, like the Oregon burg where “St. Denis Medical” is set. One episode starts with a doctor bleeding from a gash on his head; he tells his colleagues that he was assaulted on his way into the building.

“Fun fact, healthcare workers are five times more likely to face violence in the workplace,” shares Allison Tolman’s supervising nurse, Alex, in one of the show’s mockumentary-style confessionals. “And there was a state bill to address this, but it failed. On the bright side, they did pass a bill to rename a bridge after Jeff Bridges. So that’s cute.”

Like “The Pitt,” “St. Denis Medical” and “Scrubs” distill the unique relationships between doctors, nurses and patients. It’s just that comedies take sunnier roads to similar destinations.

J.D. and Turk’s interns are green and shallow, but even the social media influencer in their ranks has helpful knowledge to share. The professional rivalries are real, as J.D. finds when his hiring as Sacred Heart’s new chief of medicine gains him a nemesis in Joel Kim Booster’s wonderfully shady Dr. Eric Park. So are the dilemmas created by split-second decisions and the resultant issues rippling outward.

Interns must learn how to address their patients carefully and honestly, both out of a sense of empathy and to shield the hospital from legal liability. That’s been true since J.D. and Turk’s first day at Sacred Heart, 25 years ago, when J.D. remarks to himself, somewhat despondently, that the hospital devotes more time to an onboarding seminar on avoiding legal liability than passing along tips on the best patient care.

Perhaps with this in mind, J.D. adopts a more humane approach when he counsels a frustrated charge. “We do the most good we can in a single shift, and then, as hard as it is, we go home,” he says. “That is the job.”

(Disney/Darko Sikman) Joel Kim Booster, Anna Maria Horsford and Zach Braff in “Scrubs”

The personnel we follow in “The Pitt” are archetypes, while J.D., Turk and Elliot are distinct and familiar comedy figures. But that doesn’t necessarily flatten one more than the other.

Every 15-hour shift spent with the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital’s staff affirms how human these caregivers are. When a recent episode shows its unsinkable charge nurse, Dana (Katherine LaNasa), tending to a sexual assault victim, there’s nothing saccharine about her work. Her apprehensive patient hits a breaking point nevertheless, frantically fleeing the exam room while Dana is procedurally required to remain. And Dana takes that pause to let a sob break through her hard surface. Just for a moment.

Subplots like this have granted “The Pitt” a kind of cultural essentiality. This week, in fact, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni hailed the second season currently unfolding over a 15-hour shift on Independence Day, calling it a civics lesson.

“Above all, it’s a study of people under intense pressure — as they are when a pulse is fading, or when a nation is fraying — and the importance of muddling through and making things better, no matter the odds, no matter the obstacles,” he writes.

But Bruni easily could have been talking about Sacred Heart Hospital, whose staff vacillates between bridging the compassion gap between medical professionals and patients and managing our expectations. “Scrubs” recognizes that most of a doctor’s hero moments can be tedious, as J.D. observes while languishing on hold with an insurance company. Characters on “The Pitt” and “St. Denis Medical” contend with similar frustrations, demonstrating that needless bureaucracy is bad for everybody’s health.

(Justin Lubin/NBC) Allison Tolman as Alex and David Alan Grier as Dr. Ron in “St. Denis Medical”

A quarter of a century ago, J.D. and Turk’s program supervisor, Dr. Kelso (Ken Jenkins), directed them to treat the insured and boot the uninsured. Now that J.D. holds the old man’s job, he faces the fact that insurance carriers struggle to afford the medicine they need, too — and their professional caregivers don’t have time to help them navigate the system.  As J.D. explains in one of his signature interior monologues, doctors are required to see five patients every hour to maximize profits. “It can feel a bit . . . mechanical,” he says, lapsing into a frenetic fantasy that pictures his interns as a NASCAR pit crew tending to a gurney-bound patient as if they’re a malfunctioning machine.

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This is why “Scrubs” and “The Pitt” have captured the audience – each is, in its own way, a careful examination of how we treat each other. “Scrubs” simply takes more license to find the joy in that as a matter of purpose, since Sacred Heart’s doctors realize they have a duty to fortify the next generation’s outlook, along with that of the audience.

When an intern tells a patient that he believes kindness is the best medicine, J.D. tersely interrupts his blue-sky meliorism with a cold splash of reality. “Actually,” says a straight-faced J.D., “medicine is the best medicine.”

Some also make that claim about laughter, although “Scrubs” proves humor to be more of a coping tool than a cure. But when the American nightmare that is our healthcare system gives us so little to laugh about, that’s enough to see us through.

“Scrubs” airs at 8 p.m. Wednesdays on ABC and streams the next day on Hulu. “St. Denis Medical” airs at 8 p.m. Mondays on NBC and streams the next day on Peacock. New episodes of “The Pitt” stream Thursdays on HBO Max. 

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story gave an incomplete detailing of the series’ network history. The story has been updated.

The post The uplifting medicine of “Scrubs” appeared first on Salon.com.

It was. And suddenly it’s everywhere. A quick review of Google Trends confirms that searches for “house burping” were a flat line from 2004 until the end of 2025, when searches spiked almost 90 degrees between November 30 and December 31. By mid-January, the headlines had arrived: “What is house burping and why are some people doing it?” “Should we all be ‘house burping’?” “Should you ‘burp’ your house during winter?”, “House burping: a detox trend for your home?” and “House burping sounds absolutely wild, but it really works.”

All of them dangle the possibility that those who click will be rewarded with a jolt of esoteric, game-changing knowledge. The one headline that cut right to the chase, from “Today,” was “What is house burping? Inside the trend of airing out your home,” — the very wording of which points out that this process already has a recognizable name. It just isn’t one that’s likely to go viral on #TikTok: As YouTube creator Feli from Germany explains, lüften is an age-old practice that’s so ingrained within Germany’s public-health measures that not doing it can constitute a lease violation. Much of her video is just marveling that lüften is now a fact of everyday life in one country and hyped like the invention of fire in another. But ultimately, it makes sense. America’s Puritan origins entwined tidiness with morality, morality with aesthetics, aesthetics with value and value with purpose — in everything but name, house burping hits all the marks.

That said, if there’s one thing Americans do well, it’s rebranding. We’ve recast the torture of prisoners as “enhanced interrogation,” upgraded bog-standard reactionary beliefs to “dark enlightenment” and polished up precarious, poverty-wage work as a shiny gig economy. Social media’s co-optation of lüften wasn’t necessarily inevitable, but it fits seamlessly into TikTok’s paradigm of claiming a pre-existing phenomenon as a new discovery, giving it a cutesy name, and adding it to a list of trends, from product overloading (aka bulk buying) to laundry stripping (pre-treating stains) that never fail to aestheticize order, elevate hygiene and exalt productivity.

Cleaning hacks are an internet staple, so when #CleanTok became a thing, I assumed it was a repository of up-to-the-minute hot tips until one friend set me straight: “It’s about watching other people clean, seeing what products and tools they use,” and buying them via handy links. Going from viewing to buying is increasingly frictionless. Multinational hygiene and personal-care behemoth Unilever even joined forces with #CleanTok in 2023 to rebrand the soap opera.

The long, linked history of morality and cleanliness is rife with racism, misogyny and ableism. It’s also not history. The 2006 study “A clean self can render harsh moral judgment” by scientists as the University of Toronto concluded that because those preoccupied with cleanliness  “may not only feel dirt-free, but also morally untainted,” leading to an “elevated sense of moral self” that “can in turn license severe moral judgment.” American service media’s house burping hype might be less about trying to match TikTok’s relevance than about never missing an opportunity to reaffirm that cleanliness is next to godliness — and that neither is socially neutral.

This makes the sheer number of #CleanTok videos (roughly 3.5 million, with an estimated 95 billion views to date) and their prevailing aesthetic (beige-and-white IKEA minimalism) feel unsettling: Scrolling through so many videos that feature the same kind of woman (young, white, athleisure-clad) editing the same kind of cleaning regimens with the same kind of beats and captions that draw the same kinds of comments can feel like trying to escape an uncanny valley of Clean Girls. Isn’t there anyone out there in the wilds of #CleanTok dusting the cobwebbed eaves and re-grouting the bathroom of a dark, ancient, possibly haunted house?

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It happens, my friend assures me, but it requires some searching. In her experience, the #CleanTok viewing sessions most likely to result in actual cleaning are ones that reward a kind of interchangeable, mirror-image uniformity. “They’ve got the Scrub Daddy, I’ve got the Scrub Daddy. They’ve got the fridge penguin, I’ve got the fridge penguin.” Until recently, she stood on chairs to dust moldings, high shelves, and the tops of picture frames. #CleanTok reminded her that telescoping dusters exist, and she hasn’t stood on a chair since. “It’s just satisfying,” she concludes.

“Satisfying” is a recurring #CleanTok byword deployed in hashtags (like #satisfyingcleans) if not in the videos themselves (like “SATISFYING DOOR CLEAN HEYYYYY”). #CleanTok became one of TikTok’s most popular genres in part thanks to both the escalated hygiene measures and the necessity of dependable zone-out material required during COVID lockdown. But I’d also correlate it with the late-2010s emergence of the “oddly satisfying” genre of short-form social-media content in which close-ups of soap cutting, taffy pulling, pressure washing and more served as both visual nerve tonic and mesmerizing diversion. #CleanTok and #oddlysatisfying converge at the node of aesthetic rightness sometimes called the Goldilocks Effect: Individual tastes vary, but there’s a reason the show “How It’s Made” ran for 32 seasons.

“Satisfying” is also a common hashtag in the #CleanTok subgenre known as #sundayreset,” whose videos of laundry folding, mirror squeegeeing and rug-vacuuming might lead one to think they are just another flavor of cleaning video. Nope: According to a 2025 Good Housekeeping explainer, the Sunday reset is “more than just tackling routine chores: a Sunday reset can benefit you mentally and leave you feeling refreshed for the start of the week.” In other words, it’s more than cleaning. It’s a larger, more complex form of self-actualization that just happens to involve a lot of cleaning. It’s a day of rest rebranded as a productivity ritual with a checklist.

Scrolling through the #sundayreset hashtag is a lot like scrolling through regular #CleanTok: Beige-on-white interiors, decisive clips of vacuuming and dusting, breathy soundtracks (Olivia Dean’s “Baby Steps” appears to be the unofficial #sundayreset anthem) and narration/captions heavy on terms like “mindful,” “soft” and “self-care.” I ask my #CleanTok friend where #sundayreset” falls on the satisfaction continuum. “If everything is in its place, you’re not rushing around trying to find stuff you need.” (She also theorizes that the #sundayreset is itself a rebranding of the aggro, almost militaristic regimens that were once the province of productivity hackers like “The 4-Hour Workweek” author Tim Ferriss and an industry of techbros whose innovations in outsourcing Business Insider described in 2015 as “tech to replace their moms.”)

The #sundayreset, some of its proponents suggest, is a proactive framework that helps stave off the free-floating anxiety of the Sunday Scaries. But Julio Vincent Gambuto, author of the 2023 manifesto “Please Unsubscribe, Thanks! How to Take Back Our Time, Attention, and Purpose in a World Designed to Bury Us In Bullsh*t” thinks that resets are less about intent than about impact: “It’s important to draw a distinction between resetting that truly allows you to restore your mental, emotional, and physical energy, and resetting that zaps it or that actually winds you up to be more efficient and productive.”

Cheyenne Solis echoes the point in a recent essay, writing that “When social media works with hustle culture, we’re made to feel like we’re chronically behind. Every free moment is a chance to catch up to the pace of everyone else as the prevailing message rings, ‘I can rest when I’m done (or dead).’” An experiment in dedicating her Sundays to rest rather than playing catch-up led Solis to embrace anti-hustle, noting that “By taking a day of rest, whether or not everything on my to-do list is done, I’m engaging in a courageous act of detangling productivity from my self-worth.”

TikTok’s endlessly iterating rebrands distract from hidebound norms and expectations (say, that women are naturally drawn to the domestic realm in which love requires aesthetic perfection). Their vocabulary echoes corporate jargon because treating corporations like people inevitably means that actual people are treated like underperforming assets in perpetual need of optimization.

This hasn’t always been the case. There was a time when, for instance, people made fun of Martha Stewart because she and the media empire she built were so unashamed of suggesting that goodness was achieved by way of relentless tidiness and vigilant domesticity. The triumph of lifestyle branding that’s been normalized via Food Network superstars, celebrity wellness gurus and social-media cleanfluencers is our new normal, and the world is clamoring for the next Martha.

The reaction to Julia Fox’s impromptu 2023 video tour of her cluttered New York City apartment, by contrast, showed how quickly the pendulum swings: Some viewers appreciated the sight of a thoroughly un-zhuzhed celebrity apartment, but the ones who didn’t were quick to call Fox a neglectful mother, mentally ill and “a lowlife.” Did watching the video stress my #CleanTok pal out? “It did. But seeing the way people judge her character was actually worse.” Rebrands are always a compromise: Staking a claim to a new trend means disrespecting the generations-old custom it co-opts; tethering well-being to domestic productivity re-inscribes narrow gendered beliefs.

For Gambuto, the solution seems simple: “True wellness starts when we unsubscribe from the notion of ‘always on.’” A reset that’s more than performative will require that social-media producers aren’t expected to be social-media products. In the meantime, I’ll settle for more details about that fridge penguin. 

The post Why we’d rather watch strangers tidy than do it ourselves appeared first on Salon.com.

Dunk (Peter Claffey) seems more indignant and heartsick than frightened that no one will join him, as if the soul of knighthood is at stake rather than his own body. When he strikes Prince Aerion (Finn Bennett) in an outburst of protective rage, Dunk believes he is fulfilling his vow to defend the weak and innocent; anyone who takes his side in his trial of seven against Aerion, regardless of true motive, is publicly accepting the sanctity of those vows and Dunk’s moral righteousness. Those people would have had plenty of time to weigh their chances. That is much unlike Dunk, acting out of sheer impulse on the night he heard Tanselle (Tanzyn Crawford) scream.

Dunk, a hedge knight who cannot abide the strong preying on the weak, might have intervened regardless of his romantic feelings for Tanselle, the Dornish puppet master who treated him kindly. Nevertheless, from a semantic perspective, this particular relationship complicates the act as one of pure knighthood; after all, the vow of a knight does not say to “defend the weak and innocent . . . especially if you have a crush on them.” But George R.R. Martin abhors a perfect soul, and loves a human heart in conflict with itself and the world. “What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms, or the memory of a brother’s smile?” Maester Aemon, Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell) and Aerion’s long-living brother, asks in “A Game of Thrones,” Martin’s first Westeros novel. “We are only human, and the gods have made us for love.” Dunk, somehow, has stumbled into a way to fulfill both duty and love, for true duty, and indeed any moral value a person holds dear, is the fruit of their own spirit, not a mere abstraction they remember but cannot understand.

(Steffan Hill/HBO ) Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell in “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms”

In the world of Martin’s books, even the most duty-bound characters must find their compass in the shadow of life and memory. Ned Stark cannot bring himself to tell King Robert of Joffrey’s illegitimacy, because he is traumatized by dead Targaryen children wrapped in bloody cloaks; Brienne of Tarth wanders the Riverlands for a vow made to a woman now dead, because a life of ridicule has turned her inwards in a quest to embody a true and loyal knight, even without recognition. Later, alone and faced with the choice of a losing battle against seven brigands or abandoning a group of frightened orphans to their fate, Brienne decides that she has “no chance, and no choice.”

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Brienne is technically wrong, of course. She could have fled if she really wanted to, just like Dunk could have stayed in the tent with Raymun Fossoway (Shaun Thomas) rather than going to Tanselle and committing lèse-majesté. On the matter of survival, though, she speaks for Dunk and countless characters who risked and suffered death to save the lives of others. For Dunk, leaving Tanselle to Aerion would have meant killing the knight within himself — a spiritual suicide that would render his continued breaths both meaningless and tormented.

Men like Lord Bracken and Prince Aerion feel no such internal stakes. Flaunting their knighthood as a mark of status but discarding it the moment it requires true honor, they treat their vows only as an invented tradition, a set of rituals to legitimize their own power. Dunk is almost certainly lying about his own legal status as a knight — a theory further confirmed by a scene of Dunk acknowledging himself as a fraud, then another of him unsuccessfully asking Arlan of Pennytree (Danny Webb) to dub him. Nevertheless, this man, grown out of Flea Bottom’s gutters, appropriates the tradition by holding his vows as a representation of lived reality, rather than as a mere ritual or badge of social class. Duncan the Tall walks knowing what it is like to be small, hungry, and powerless, but also unburdened by the pragmatism and vanity of power and wealth, which so often buries a noble’s sense of morality and love.

Martin writes in “The Hedge Knight” that Aerion “could vanquish Ser Duncan the Tall, but not Dunk of Flea Bottom.” In this instance, Martin refers to Dunk’s brawling instincts, but the line is just as true for the hedge knight who offers up his common body to be battered for his vows, while most lords of Westeros sacrifice their spiritual integrity to protect their own material interests.

Dunk’s impulsive willingness to die for a doomed cause gives the trial its tragic weight, but it is Prince Baelor (Bertie Carvel) stepping onto the field that provides its institutional blessing, proving honor can survive, in some form, at the pinnacle of Westerosi society, and it was Dunk’s selfless courage that earned him a dragon’s allegiance. Baelor, a politician and a feudal dynast, might understand on some level that by fighting with Dunk, he is, in his own way, upholding the dignity of the crown and keeping the commoners placated. But in a world where brutality or indifference often provides an easier, less immediately dangerous path, Baelor putting himself in danger for a hedge knight is exactly the kind of noblesse oblige that Dunk feels is worthy of his loyalty.

For the hedge knight who inspired Baelor’s intervention, the motives are more reflexive. Martin, a self-described romantic, likes to reward characters such as Dunk who perform good deeds without expecting reward. Sansa Stark, in moments of natural, sometimes self-loathing empathy, offers mercy to people she should fear or despise, and finds reciprocation in their own warped forms; Ned Stark, the father who surrendered his precious honesty to protect Sansa from Joffrey’s wrath, receives his own posthumous gift: the unshakeable loyalty of bannermen who will die for his children. Dunk, though wounded and despairing of Baelor’s death, wins his trial and becomes a legend that characters in “A Song of Ice and Fire” recall as a true knight.

(Steffan Hill/HBO) Peter Claffey in “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms”

Baelor’s grieving son sees Dunk differently from those characters. “Baelor had it in him to be a great king,” Valarr (Oscar Morgan) tells Dunk in the season finale. “Why did the gods take him and leave you?” Maekar (Sam Spruell), Baelor’s younger brother, later tells Dunk exactly what he sees in the future: “Each time a battle is lost or a crop fails, fools will say Baelor would not have let it happen . . . but the hedge knight killed him.”

Dunk wonders if the realm will need a hedge knight’s foot even more than a prince’s life. For all his introspection, Dunk wrongfully justifies his own survival as a transaction — a king-to-be traded for a commoner. Baelor did not don his son’s plate and fight for an innocent man because the gods demanded a trade for the future; he did it because to do otherwise would have tarnished both the standing of his just rule and the same man Valarr and Maekar are mourning. Even Maekar’s political analysis cracks when confronted with the visual of Baelor standing in the mud with borrowed armor, fighting off Duncan’s foes, and of the assembled commons cheering for the hedge knight. Baelor of all people knows the smallfolk would react poorly to their beloved prince letting injustice beget more injustice. A single, highly public moral failure could undo everything.

While the motives that drive a knight are often human, political, or both, the logic is as miraculous and irrational as a muddy hedge knight crawling out from under a fallen dragon. Not everyone has it in them to be a knight like Duncan the Tall, Brienne of Tarth, or even Sansa Stark. But in a society that consistently punishes good people, simply trying to make the songs real is worthy.

The post In Westeros, the soul outweighs the body appeared first on Salon.com.

The songs on “Highway of Diamonds” span from the early ’60s to almost the ’90’s (“Oh Mercy” is the most contemporaneous of the albums represented, with Bettye LaVette’s brilliant “Everything Is Broken”) and the renditions themselves extend across an even larger continuum; some — like the Staple Singers’ “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” — were recorded not long after the originals, but there’s representation in every decade here, which points to the kind of longevity and relevance that any songwriter would envy. Not every presentation is a home run, but they’re all worth more than a few listens.

As the liner notes explain, Dylan is the third-most popular covered songwriter ever, outranked only by The Beatles and Duke Ellington. And an interesting way to approach listening to this volume is perhaps to try to envision a world in which Bob Dylan was making his living as a songwriter, selling his songs alongside the other tunesmiths who’d set up shop in the Brill Building. That’s hard if not impossible to do, given the presence of some of these songs in our lives, but it’s a fun exercise to try to detach the recording from history and evaluate it as a song or as a performance.

Bettye LaVette continues to shine as one of our most underrated interpreters and performers, with a version of “Oh Mercy”’s “Everything Is Broken.” This version gets to the white hot heart of the composition, and sounds as though LaVette truly heard what Bob was trying to say, and came back with, “Oh, this is what you mean, baby.” The directness of the production on this cover does away with Daniel Lanois’ layers — which in 1989, and for Bob, weren’t necessarily bad directions — but they did clutter the message a little, which also may have been intentional.

Nina Simone, even in 1969, carried a power and presence that she had well earned at that point, and her interpretation of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” feels more grounded at a soul level, so she can simply (okay, it’s not simple, but she makes it seem that way) drop right in and quietly — but powerfully — inhabit the composition, whereas Bob delivers it at a full jittery throttle. You can hear the differences in lives and backgrounds and upbringing, of men and women in the ’60s, of class and Jim Crow, it’s all in there. They’re both equally enmeshed in the piece; they’re both bringing their own individual mojo, and it’s utterly fascinating to hear what she heard and let her take you in the side door on this song so you can see it through her eyes.

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The timbre and phrasing of Cassandra Wilson’s 2002 rendition of “Shelter From The Storm” is beautifully grounded in jazz principles, and one could imagine Joni Mitchell taking the song apart in the same manner and sticking the delivery with the same power and pathos that Wilson does with the “Blood On The Tracks” highlight. She retains the delicacy of the instrumentation, but introduces a gorgeous complexity that, in someone else’s hands, would be too much, but here, simply enhances the vocal delivery. It’s not as sharp as the original, but it retains the same hope and promise you hear in Dylan’s voice.

Anything the late Jimmy Scott attempted turned into magic, and that’s exactly what happens here with his cover of “When He Returns,” the closing number on 1979’s “Slow Train Coming.” But Scott’s genius was his ability to hear elements and aspects of compositions that others could not even imagine. The sparse, traditional jazz arrangement is performed by a minimal ensemble (although of course Dylan is only accompanied by piano on the original), and it works not because of its novelty but because Scott’s approach to the song is more complex; you feel like he has a relationship with the person he’s singing about, while for Dylan it’s still more conceptual. It could be a praise number or it could be a love song.

Natalie Cole can sing anything, and her version of “Gotta Serve Somebody” is lovely, but it does not bring anything particularly new to the conversation. She’s singing a song that was written to be a gospel song from a record that was intended to be a gospel album, but she smooths out all the edges, and presents a solid argument that someone could have probably had a hit with it within the praise music world, if it hadn’t been originally written by Bob Dylan (or if Bob Dylan hadn’t become “Bob Dylan.”)

There’s a valuable clue in the credits for Billy Preston’s version of “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”: “Arranged by Paul Riser.” Paul Riser, of course, is the legendary Motown arranger whose work you know from songs like “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” and “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” or Diana Ross’ “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” So it’s that massive, textured world-building that you hear in the background here, and the arrangement suits Preston’s crossover style between soul and pop perfectly — but in the process, it loses a lot of the grit of the original, and in doing so, subtracts most of its power. His vocal performance almost saves things, but he goes for the big and bright because it’s a style he was a master of. And while it’s not delivering what the original delivers emotionally, it’s still a fascinating example of both Preston and Riser’s gifts.

Funnily enough, Mr. Riser was present at a recent conversation with George Clinton held at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History (prior to a celebration of Clinton’s music at the Detroit Opera House back in January), where there was a specific discussion about how much Motown and George Clinton carefully observed and borrowed whatever they could from Dylan, specifically pointing to the rhythms within his vocals.

The great Solomon Burke can sing anything and his interpretation of “The Mighty Quinn” still meets that criteria, but there’s not enough substance for him in the song or the arrangement for it to sparkle. Similarly, “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” meets the same fate, but when Merry Clayton recorded this variation in 1975, we were in the tail end of flower power and she wasn’t the only singer hoping that a rousing sing-a-long chorus of “Everybody must get stoned” might encourage the same music fans who adored her presence on the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” or Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” It’s just not that deep of a song and it doesn’t lend itself to creative reimagining the same way other numbers on this compilation do.

A much stronger contribution from Clayton can be found in her featured vocal on “The Times They Are a-Changing,” taken from Lou Adler’s 1969 project, “Dylan’s Gospel.” This project, billed to “The Brothers and Sisters,” was a group of talented LA session musicians drafted by Adler, including Clayton, Gloria Jones, Clydie King, Carolyn Willis, Oma Drake (among many others) performing gospel arrangements of Dylan’s most popular songs at the time. (The project was a dismal failure commercially, but was re-released in 2014 by Light In The Attic.) Here, on “Times,” Clayton has the right material along with the right space and support to exercise her instrument to its best capabilities. On the original, Dylan firmly asserts, but the arrangement here is a full-throated declaration and a celebration of the progress made at that point in history.

A 2017 interpretation of “Every Grain of Sand” — the beautiful closing number on the last Never-Ending Tour outing — thanks to Lizz Winstead is gorgeous and soaring, and does the artist and composition justice; the Bo-Keys’ cover of “I Threw It All Away” (from 1969’s “Nashville Skyline”) sounds more vintage than it actually is (2016) but it’s still well-executed; and gospel stalwarts the Caravans beautifully inhabit “Blowin’ In The Wind,” a version recorded back in 1966 and a reminder of Dylan’s presence and participation in the civil rights movement. Again, the compilation’s temporal breadth and depth is definitely a highlight here; there are no clunkers and no choices that feel like stretching to fill out a two-disc set.

There are other huge names here — Aaron Neville (“Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight,” from 1983’s “Infidels,”), Sarah Vaughan’s classic rendition of “If Not For You,” and of course, the Staples Singers’ version of “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” interpreted in classic Staples fashion, adding a country-gospel reading that brings a distinguished solemnity while vanquishing some of Dylan’s own darkness. (Their stunning reworking of “Masters of War” is on the first volume of this series and you should hunt it down if you haven’t heard it.)

There’s a scene in Martin Scorsese’s “Rolling Thunder Revue” documentary where Dylan is speaking about Allen Ginsberg and how Ginsberg had achieved heights that no other modern poet had, and he explains that the role that poetry once filled was now instead taken up by popular song: “We still remember those lines today,” he said, referring to poets at the level of recognition of Whitman. Dylan didn’t quote himself in that particular riff, but he could have, and “Highway of Diamonds” is absolutely another piece of evidence in that regard.

The post The musical dialogue between Bob Dylan and Black America appeared first on Salon.com.

This may be a strange and foreign idea for some to parse, but it’s true nonetheless. Despite popular opinion, the filmmaker behind “Promising Young Woman,” “Saltburn,” and her latest movie, a loose and playful adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel, “Wuthering Heights,” is not out to get the audience. Yet, Fennell’s penchant for narrative subversion and her almost teenage-like preoccupation with sex, drugs and perverse paraphernalia continues to alienate a growing portion of very vocal, very agitated viewers. And with the polarizing and extreme response to Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” it seems this animosity has reached its crest. There are opinion pieces galore claiming Fennell “got it all wrong,” video essays asserting that the film is “the worst adaptation of all time” and that Fennell should “apologize to Emily Brontë.” (How one would go about apologizing to the ghost of a 19th-century writer is beyond me.) And those don’t even scratch the surface of the sentiments being tossed around on social media. If one is random, two is a coincidence and three is a pattern, then this third round of divisive reception confirms that Fennell’s work will be continually met with raised eyebrows and closed minds no matter how good — or, more importantly, how interesting — her films are.

That’s a real shame, considering how interesting Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is if you can divorce yourself from the film’s source material, as its writer-director does with palpable glee. Her take is a maelstrom of splendid beauty and doomed love, colliding at a feverish pace that makes the fidelity to Brontë’s book moot. This is Fennell’s vision, her creation. Its bones are the same, but its cells are different. Why, then, is Fennell’s adaptation of a classic met with such ruthless scrutiny, when another recent Jacob Elordi-starring remix on an equally beloved, oft-remade tale — Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” — was lauded by both critics, viewers and awards bodies alike?

(Warner Bros. Pictures) Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff and Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw in “Wuthering Heights”

Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” pivots the novel toward fantastical anachronism and open-hearted femininity, while del Toro’s “Frankenstein” is a dour, dark spin that blunts the sentimentality of Mary Shelley’s book for an adaptation that plays more like a superhero origin story. Both filmmakers chose to make Elordi their 6 ‘6 muse, using his imposing stature to their gain — strong and rugged as Fennell’s Heathcliff, while towering and intimidating as del Toro’s Creature — and the cinematic story arcs for both characters regularly deviate from their respective novels. Despite these and other glaring similarities between these films released just four months apart, only one movie was met with virulent animosity from the jump, and somehow, it wasn’t the worst movie of the two. This isn’t just the latest layer in the longtime double standard for films made by women compared to those made by men; the reaction also indicates a frightening lack of curiosity among stubborn viewers unwilling to consider a reality beyond a prevailing narrative.

But how did this idea that Fennell is some hollow provocateur with subzero artistic talent even begin? How is it that, in the span of six years and three films, she’s become cinema’s most toxic and piled-on filmmaker? Fennell hasn’t done anything wrong, per se. Tastelessness is not punishable by law, and neither is adapting a beloved novel however a filmmaker sees fit. Creative liberty is not a felony any more than dreadful digital imagery is, and if it were, del Toro should be the first one charged for making “Frankenstein” — a fantasy that’s supposed to stir the soul — look so flat and unimaginative. But I digress.

This saga’s gnarled roots stretch back to 2020, the year “Promising Young Woman” was released in theaters, and a year worthy of its own case study on its impact on cinema alone. Fennell’s first feature-length effort premiered at Sundance in January of that year and was slated for an April release until the pandemic halted the world, and with it, the theatrical release schedule. With movie theaters closed for most of the year, distributors were forced to postpone theatrical releases or pivot to new streaming models. When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced it would consider streaming films with releases previously scheduled before the pandemic, many studios pursued the latter option. Nevertheless, “Promising Young Woman” had a small theatrical opening over the winter holidays, making it one of the few films that audiences could see in its intended format, which, if we’re honest, probably led to some overly effusive reviews.

(Ken Woroner/Netflix) Jacob Elordi as The Creature in “Frankenstein”

But “Promising Young Woman” was an outlier. While some distributors opted for the streaming option, most held films until theaters could reopen safely and viewers felt comfortable returning, hoping to recoup whatever financial investment they could after an uncertain year. Naturally, the pool of films shortlisted for the 2021 Oscars looked much different than it otherwise might have, making that year’s nominees both thrillingly diverse and completely atypical. Though “Promising Young Woman” was received well by critics, there’s no guarantee that, without the effects of the pandemic, it would’ve garnered five Oscar nominations, including best picture and directing. In the end, Fennell took home the statue for best original screenplay, cementing her prowess in Oscar gold — and turning herself radioactive forevermore.

In the years that have followed, “Promising Young Woman” and its once glowing reputation have soured. The ending, which I won’t spoil here, has become a lightning rod of controversy that cannot be destroyed, no matter how much acrimonious electricity it attracts. And because Fennell is an Oscar-winning writer, her work has since been judged against that standard by detractors who don’t consider the extremely specific circumstances of the year she won. Conversely, the film’s awards-favorite status awarded Fennell a blank check, which she’s used to keep doing what she does best: making films that piss people off.

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But upsetting viewers has never been Fennell’s exact intention. A true provocateur shows, not tells. And Fennell’s entire career in filmmaking thus far has been about telling. Whether in interviews or the context of her films, Fennell doesn’t shy from the fact that she enjoys themes that flirt with impropriety or visuals that push the limits. She’s forthright with her interest in depravity, and as such, her films make no effort to conceal their degeneracies or shock the viewer. The most surprising thing Fennell could do at this point is tone down her overt freakiness, which she does in “Wuthering Heights” with as much assurance as she wrote the bathtub-licking scene in “Saltburn.”

It’s not that Fennell isn’t good at playing the rabble-rouser, as many have alleged. (She is, in fact, great at it, considering how many people she aggravates by simply making a movie.) Rather, she is not given the same grace as her contemporaries. As a woman working in big-budget, mainstream film, Fennell’s boldness is mistaken for trashiness; her feminine gaze is confused with a typically masculine gratuitousness. Most telling of all: Those chafed by “Promising Young Woman” haven’t given Fennell the impartial second chance that her male industry colleagues receive time and time again. Instead, she’s been stamped with a red “V” for “Vacuous” and labeled cinema’s number-one fraud, regardless of the merit, improvement and commitment to refining her vision demonstrated by her two most recent films.

Fennell’s reputation precedes her by a mile, which makes the filmmaker’s decision to adapt “Wuthering Heights,” a novel she’s loved and cared for since she first read it at 14, all the more bold — and dangerous. By taking on Brontë’s book, Fennell was doomed to stare down millions of overly pedantic literature sticklers, people who prefer their adaptations pure and untainted. Any major decision that fell outside of Brontë’s story and character arcs was bound to be picked apart by the vultures. And in just a little more than a week after its release, almost every element of Fennell’s film has been criticized. The costumes. The soundtrack. The narrative changes to fit an alternate interpretation. The casting. (Granted, complaints about Fennell’s colorblind casting — poorly justified by Fennell herself — are the most valid of the bunch.) It seems there is no one thing anyone can agree on when it comes to Fennell’s version. This constant bickering only leads to an inescapable level of discourse that serves the false perception of Fennell as the raging provocateur she is not.

(Warner Bros. Pictures) Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights”

One particularly confounding and repeated grievance is the film’s title. More and more versions of “If you don’t want to adapt literature faithfully, call it something else,” are popping up online daily. Fennell has already addressed this, noting that her film is stylized with quotation marks around the title because it’s her own vision of the book, inspired by how she imagined it as a teenager. Her film also isn’t far enough from the source material to warrant a full name change; it’s more “Romeo + Juliet” than “Clueless.” Curiously, this was not a prevailing gripe about “Frankenstein,” despite del Toro changing the ending, altering the inciting events of the Creature’s creation and adding new characters while changing the textual behavior of key others. Microbloggers weren’t taking del Toro to task over his title, nor were they criticizing harmless anachronisms that better fit the version of the story he was trying to tell. If Fennell’s idealistically romantic and aesthetic-minded “Wuthering Heights” is a perversion of the source material, one could just as easily say the same about del Toro’s “Frankenstein”: a less violent, way more maudlin reading of Shelley’s novel about fatherhood and trauma cycles, rather than othering.

That wasn’t the case. Articles comparing the book to del Toro’s adaptation highlighted the changes but stopped short of outright criticizing his film or his skill as a director — an integral part of every conversation surrounding Fennell. Meanwhile, the sumptuous imagery and amiable pacing of “Wuthering Heights” trounce del Toro’s ghastly slog of a film. Fennell couldn’t alter the nature of Heathcliff and Cathy’s relationship without being lambasted, but del Toro could make his Creature into an immortal, regenerating super-monster and remain acclaimed. Del Toro’s work is just as overwrought, just as bogged down by ideas and just as keen to emphasize style over narrative substance as Fennell’s. And yet, “Frankenstein” was met with an air of prestige, while “Wuthering Heights” has been treated like a guilty pleasure.

Fennell is an easy, privileged target. She’s white, she comes from money and her first film ended on a controversial note that has stuck to her ever since. There are things to criticize about her and her work, and, no question, these criticisms should be lodged when appropriate. But when examined against another, more seasoned and more widely beloved filmmaker like del Toro — one who, it should be noted, takes as many risks as Fennell does — it’s difficult to see what makes Fennell the hack, other than latent misogyny and a predilection for kink. Just because a filmmaker does something with one film that a viewer may not jive with doesn’t mean their work should be refuted forevermore. If that were the case, no one in Hollywood would ever work again. Still, Fennell’s critics spend weeks decrying her as a hack and review-bombing “Wuthering Heights” on the movie-logging platform Letterboxd before they even have a chance to engage with her film.

That may be the most disturbing aspect of all. Whether people enjoy Fennell’s work is a matter of personal taste. But refusing to keep an open mind and stay curious about a film simply because of a filmmaker’s reputation for (relatively tame!) smuttiness is detrimental to the cinema that Fennell’s critics purport to uphold. “Wuthering Heights” may not be to many people’s taste, but what Fennell has done is irrefutably interesting. She’s made something different from your typical adaptation, a movie that brings a fresh perspective to a very old and frequently retold tale. How very frustrating that so many people have closed off their minds and hearts to the film before they’ve even seen it, or before the credits rolled. Such baseless reticence only makes us more defiant and less inquisitive. Social media might be the modern watercooler — the dominating force of cultural conversation — but taking its narratives as gospel without considering art for ourselves only reinforces our worst instincts and upholds the systems that a surprising, offbeat and altogether different film like “Wuthering Heights” rallies against.

The post The “Wuthering Heights” double standard appeared first on Salon.com.

How did this polar change happen? Two words: Guy Fieri. That’s right, the so-called rock-n-roll comfort food king — but more accurately the extremely unhealthy-looking, ear-splitting maniac who thinks he’s fronting a college garage band circa 1995.

Let’s break this down. One of my biggest pet peeves is the way local news reporters talk. They deliver news to viewers like we’re all 5-year-olds, with their excessive use of alliteration and disproportionate pauses between words. Guy Fieri has adopted this local-news-reporter intonation and cadence, except Guy is also shouting for some reason. He is incessantly screaming at us to eat concoctions such as beer-battered meatball sandwiches, wrapped in a pizza and deep-fried in lard. What’s for dessert? A sheet cake dipped in pancake batter, dunked in butter frosting and sprinkled with Pop-Tarts. In short, Guy’s trying to kill us. While Michelle Obama campaigns for Americans to make healthier food choices, the Food Network relentlessly promotes Guy Fieri – a guy who wants us to combust via consumption of highly processed inedibles.

Yet, despite being a grown man with a penchant for Billabong clothing, Guy shouldn’t incur all the blame. The real fault should be assigned to the people who gave this madman a platform from which to spout his nutso rants.

The Food Network’s programming schedule should be populated with the pacifying voices of Ina, Martha, Nigella, even Mario Batali. Instead we get Guy Fieri screaming at us to adopt a diet that will at best yield diabetes. I get it – Guy won your first “Food Network Star” competition so you had to give him his own show. Yet, unless I’m mistaken, you only had to give him one show. Instead he is all over Food Network’s primetime programming. Guy not only hosts “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives,” very loudly referred to as “TRIPLE D!” — which seems to run repeatedly from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. — but also now appears on at least six other shows on the Food Network. In addition to “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives,” Guy can also annoy you while hosting “Guy’s Grocery Games,” “Guy’s Big Bite,” “Rachel vs. Guy: Celebrity Cook-Off,” “Rachael vs. Guy: Kids Cook-Off,” and “Food Network Star.”

And please note how Guy isn’t actually cooking on any of those shows. Considering the slop he tries to pass off as palatable, this is actually a blessing. However, he’s still there, in our face, gorging himself and ranting like an imbecile on fire. Perhaps this is why there has been a mass exodus of genuinely talented chefs, such Jacques Pépin, Sara Moulton, Ming Tsai, Lidia Bastianich and others, to more esteemed networks like PBS. They just couldn’t compromise their brand integrity and personal dignity for the sake of those lucrative Food Network tie-ins.

Just look at the “personalities” that now populate The Food Network – Guy, Rachael Ray, Sandra Lee, Bobby Flay. Did the head of their programming issue a mandate to seek out the most supremely irritating people who may or may not be able to cook decent food to host gimmicky competition shows interspersed with confessional interviews à la “Real Housewives”? And the little “cooking” there is left on the Food Network consists of soul-terrorists such as Sandra Lee bursting with pride because she came up with the ingenious idea of sprinkling some oregano on a can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew and calling it “a quick way to make dinner.” The last bastion of your former self, Ina Garten, might ask, “How bad can that be?” And the answer, Food Network, is: very.

Farsh Askari currently lives in Boston, where he is a research and staff associate at Harvard Business School. He received his bachelor’s from UC Santa Barbara and his master’s from Harvard. He writes a blog about his past struggles with severe OCD, http://ocdmemoirist.blogspot.com/.

The post How one man destroyed the Food Network: Guy Fieri has made culinary TV into a viewer’s hell appeared first on Salon.com.

The three-time gold medalist for Team USA broke her left leg when she crashed during the women’s downhill competition earlier this month. Vonn has been providing regular updates on her recovery on social media. In a video shared on Monday, she explained her numerous injuries and the surgery that allowed her to avoid an amputation.

“Basically, I had a complex tibia fracture. I also fractured my fibular head, my tibial plateau — just kind of everything was in pieces,” she said. “And the reason why it was so complex was because I had compartment syndrome, and compartment syndrome is when you have so much trauma to one area of your body that there’s too much blood and it gets stuck and it basically crushes everything in the compartment. So all the muscle and nerves and tendons, it all kind of dies.”

Vonn said the quick thinking of Dr. Tom Hackett helped her avoid the worst outcome.

“Dr. Tom Hackett saved my leg. He saved my leg from being amputated. He did what’s called a fasciotomy, where he cut open, like, both sides of my leg — kind of filleted it open, so to speak — let it breathe, and he saved me,” she said.

Lindsey Vonn is out of the hospital 2 weeks after her crash in the Winter Olympics 🙏

Vonn says she 'almost had to have her leg amputated' due to compartment syndrome – a condition where increased pressure within the muscles restricts blood flow

(Via @lindseyvonn) pic.twitter.com/DWMSlvjHBJ

— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) February 23, 2026

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The 41-year-old had already retired from skiing once due to injuries. She made the decision to return to the world stage in 2019, following a full knee replacement. Just days before the 2026 Winter Olympics, Vonn tore her ACL in a crash at a World Cup downhill event in France. She opted to delay surgery on the ligament to compete in her final Olympics.

Vonn said Hackett was only present at the Olympics because of her decision to compete with the injury.

“If I hadn’t had done that, Tom wouldn’t have been there [and he] wouldn’t have been able to save my leg,” she said.

The post “Filleted it open”: Vonn reveals how doctor “saved leg from being amputated” after Olympics crash appeared first on Salon.com.