The moon has a brand new crater as of Wednesday, thanks to a rogue SpaceX rocket that crashed into Earth’s nearest neighbor at 5,400 miles an hour. Originally part of a 2025 mission to launch a pair of lunar landers for U.S. and Japanese companies, the rocket was supposed to fall back to Earth. Instead, it strayed off course and eventually reached its final resting place on the moon’s surface.
According to the Guardian, astronomers were unable to confirm the impact, “possibly because the impact site was close to the visible edges of the moon.” A day later, a Korean lunar orbiter captured images of the impact, but it will still take time to confirm the size of the crater, which is expected to be about 60 feet wide and 12 feet deep.
This isn’t the first time this has happened, for the record. In March 2022, a rocket slammed into the moon, creating a double crater about 95 feet wide. That object was later identified as part of China’s Long March 3C rocket, which propelled the Chang’e 5-T1 mission around the moon in 2014. In fact, there’s been trash on the moon ever since humans first landed there, which some scientists cite as evidence of the Anthropocene, a new geological era defined by how badly humans have messed up the planet and its nearby neighbors.
NEWS 🚨: A Korean lunar orbiter has photographed the crash site of a SpaceX Falcon 9 second stage on the Moon pic.twitter.com/chI8hpWdsv
Indeed, it’s difficult to estimate how space junk is currently orbiting our planet. By one count, there are more than 17,000 metric tons of objects in Earth orbit, including nearly 19,000 satellites. Every time we shoot more stuff up into space, we risk it hitting something else, as in a giant game of billiards. That threatens to create a cataclysmic chain reaction, in which every collision creates more space debris and also risks damaging satellites and space stations we’d like to keep operational. This might make future space launches unsafe (such as the planned Artemis IV moon landing mission) and could render GPS devices completely useless. If you think Google Maps is glitchy now, just wait.
This hypothetical scenario is called Kessler Syndrome, but I propose renaming it Tesla Syndrome, given that Elon Musk’s Starlink has nearly 11,000 satellites in orbit, with eventual plans to launch as many as 42,000. Musk’s car is still floating out there somewhere, too. The statistical probability of a company owned by the world’s richest man making our space trash problem even worse is high, so we’d better keep crossing our fingers for more near misses — and, just maybe, a future in which humans behave less like slobs.
On May 31, 1921, an armed white mob poured into Tulsa, Oklahoma’s majority African-American Greenwood district and began setting it ablaze. Families were driven out of their homes at gunpoint as their neighbors looted their belongings and burned their property to the ground. The lucky ones escaped the city with their lives, the less fortunate were rounded up and detained by law enforcement, and scores of men, women, and children were simply gunned down in the street.
Within the space of 48 hours Greenwood, a beacon of prosperity previously nicknamed the Black Wall Street, was wiped from the face of the earth. More than 10,000 black families were left homeless, and the death toll, tallied at 36 in 1921, is now estimated to be upwards of 300.
In all likelihood, most people who tune in to Sunday’s highly anticipated premiere of “Watchmen” (9 p.m. ET, HBO) will have never heard of this bloody, racist massacre that occurred almost a century ago on American soil.
The thought that such a crime could happen at all beggars belief to those of us who cling to the version of the American story that draws the place as heroic and just, where our greatest wrongs are made right. But nearly two weeks ago came the headlines that scientists and forensic anthropologists have begun the process of searching for the mass graves where untold numbers of murdered Tulsans may be buried.
And this is why series creator Damon Lindelof opens his part of the story with a re-enactment of that massacre that includes historically accurate eyewitness details from the thick of the nightmare. The vision of planes swooping down and dropping bombs on the screaming, unarmed citizens below, and the Klan openly hunting them, might appear to be heightened elements tossed in for dramatic effect, just part of the story that differentiates reality from fictionalized alternate history.
Except, according to records, that is actually what occurred. By air and on the ground, American citizens waged war on other American citizens, and made sure the survivors were frightened enough to stop talking about it, thereby keeping this account out of the history books.
The Tulsa massacre is the origin story of Lindelof’s “Watchmen,” an inspired, riveting continuation of the seminal comic book series co-created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons first published between 1986 and 1987.
In the original series Moore and Gibbons presented an interrogation of our relationship with superheroes and the popular notion of heroism itself with its story of people with purported superhuman abilities emerging between World War II and the 1960s and changing the trajectory of history itself.
In Moore’s and Gibbons’ history, these heroes gave the United States political and military advantage, allowing America to win the war in Vietnam, making it a state in the process, and gain the upper hand during the Cold War.
Within that history, too, are the effects of things that never came to be. Richard Nixon was never forced out of office, and term limits were abolished, allowing him to remain president well into the 1980s. After that, he was replaced by our first celebrity president, Robert Redford. It is against the law for freelance masked vigilantes to operate, and those that remain either work for the government or have gone into retirement.
The looming threat of World War III serves as the backdrop to the A-plot, a story comprised of many smaller tales and plots told from various points of view. But this overarching anxiety pitting the United States against the Soviet Union is annihilated when a gigantic squid reported to be from another dimension drops on Manhattan, immediately killing millions.
Lindelof’s continuation is intimately informed by that game-changing climax, only not in any way that the fly-by comic book consumer might immediately connect. The threat in the “Watchmen” comics mirrors the overriding fear hanging over the Reagan era, which is that of nuclear annihilation. Twenty-seven years later, in the alternate and actual histories of 2019, the all-destructive threat assumes the form of violence driven by white supremacy.
Only in this new “Watchmen,” the cops in Tulsa are the ones wearing masks, yellow face coverings for the uniformed beat cops, and more elaborate, fully immersed get-ups for its detectives. Nominally this protocol allowing the police to remain anonymous was enacted to keep officers safe; only Tulsa’s Chief of Police Judd Crawford (Don Johnson) allows his face to be seen while he is on duty.
In practice, as is quickly evidenced, this inability to be identified allows the cops to operate with near-impunity and intimidate any population it deems a threat – mainly poor whites suspected of making up the ranks of the racist Seventh Kavalry, branded a terrorist organization.
Second in the chain of command is the fearsome cloaked Sister Night, the alter ego of Angela Abar (Regina King), a devoted wife, mother of three, and bakery owner. Angela claims to be retired; a hideaway under her bakery proves otherwise.
And her costume is the sleekest and most intimidating of her band of law-enforcement besides that of her colleague Looking Glass (Tim Blake Nelson), a severe by-the-book soldier whose engulfing reflective mask renders him featureless, and hints at a streak that is equally skeptical and paranoiac.
I suspect each will inspire a few Halloween costumes, maybe and hopefully replacing the popularity of Rorschach’s mask following Zack Snyder’s 2009 theatrical adaptation. In alt-2019, the Rorschach mask is the uniform of the Seventh Cavalry, making it the equivalent of a Klansman’s hood. He’s not around to critique this appropriation of his mantle, but other original characters are, including Doctor Manhattan (referenced but not seen), the former Silk Spectre, who now just goes Laurie Blake (Jean Smart), and Adrian Veidt (Jeremy Irons), now the lord of a manor and still very much an arrogant tinkerer.
What Lindelof has achieved in the six episodes of “Watchmen” provided for review is extraordinary for its execution alone. It is dark, but it’s also exciting; grim, but also invigorating. The action sequences are stunning, as are the performances. King is a mesmerizing presence, as is Louis Gossett, Jr. as the mysterious Will Reeves, a figure who seems designed to irritate Angela at first but, owing to his age, is obviously there to give her clues as to how modern-day Tulsa connects to its past.
For all of its fantastical details, elements of “Watchmen” resemble the real 2019 too closely to be thought of as comfortable escapism. But the viewers that it hooks will be as fascinated, inquisitive, and passionate as its haters are rabid. If that isn’t a hallmark of inventive, provocative television, I’m not sure what is.
As I stated earlier, Lindelof’s “Watchmen” is not a divergence from the original story but an extrapolation – and a brutally intelligent one – of the original comic’s theories about our blind trust in authority, our misplaced reliance and trust in power, and even our concept of identity, shared and individual.
And yes, part of this has to do with the title itself, and Lindelof’s signature creative approach. The audience that knows him via “Lost” may have been flummoxed by “The Leftovers” and its insistent, unsettling interpretation of the mystery surrounding grief and loss.
What’s funny is that “Watchmen” is more straightforward than “The Leftovers” but will nevertheless confuse anyone who tunes in expecting a straightforward superhero tale, or even an obvious sequel to the comic.
“Watchmen” is very true to the original mythology – so much, in fact, that at the very least I’d advise reading a few summaries about the comic’s plot before diving into the show. This is because Lindelof intentionally steeps “Watchmen” in history: its own, and ours, and the version that answers the various “what if” questions that hold the potential to tweak the trajectory of an entire culture.
On the page, “Watchmen” liberally toys with the meaning of story and the power of perspective, but it also forces the question of whether the systems and structures we presume to be good or working for us actually are. The HBO series also does this in obvious ways, but makes answering that question more complicated and foggier as the series progresses.
But where Lindelof’s take finds the strongest and more fertile common ground with Moore’s is in the examination of history, and the difference between what actually happened and the so-called official record.
What “Watchmen” posits throughout its story is that history is only as accurate as the honesty in the edit and of the editor. In large part, history is a means of asking a culture to adopt an identity by remembering the past in a prescribed way. At its most aggressive, it demands we accept a particular point of view to the erasure of others that may blemish that perspective – essentially asking an entire nation of people to live in the heads of a select few.
That the series begins with an actual historic account that’s been intentionally kept out of the books is part of the trick, one that dares the viewer to simultaneously believe and distrust everything we see afterward. That’s very much in keeping with 2019, both the version in “Watchmen” and the one we’re living through. After all, if hate can wipe an entire town off the face of the earth in two days, an event that tens of millions never knew about, then why couldn’t squid rain down from the sky?
“Watchmen” premieres on HBO at 9 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 20.
Writing something is a bit like polishing rocks. You start with an ugly hunk of something, a phrase or an idea you’ve tripped over. It rattles against the hard edges of your brain until it gets polished and smooth. Moving the rock through finer and finer grits is time-consuming, strenuous and not always rewarding. Sometimes, the lump becomes a slightly smaller and shinier lump, marginally less ugly than it was on the ground. But like exercise and tough conversations, the process is the point. You feel better for having gone through the ritual yourself.
Boy George didn’t get the memo.
The former Culture Club frontman, whose voice adorned New Wave pop hits like “Karma Chameleon” and “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” in the 1980s, had artificial intelligence spew out an unfortunate reggae song last week that turned out to be a statement of support for Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. “You say genocide, I say war,” the song, titled “We Will Dance Again,” starts, and the lyrics seem to revel in the ugliness of the ongoing violence in Gaza. The tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths, the song claims, are “what the military’s for.”
Obvious AI tells throughout this track make clear that Boy George hasn’t just gotten lazy, he’s also lost the quality of discernment. The song’s meter is odd, and its lines are overstuffed. There are no interesting choices, no glimpses of an artist’s vision. It’s a hollow provocation over a royalty-free riddim.
Against that backdrop, a song defending and celebrating the Israeli military is nasty work, no matter who made it. The fact that no one made it, that it’s the creation of a machine that hallucinates in exchange for electricity, only intensifies the sick, empty feeling the track leaves behind.
Since Hamas militants attacked Israeli military installations and civilians on October 7, 2023, the ensuing war in Gaza has left more than 73,000 Palestinians dead. The United Nations has called Israel’s campaign a genocide. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, accusing the Israeli prime minister of crimes against humanity. Attacks on Gaza continue despite a ceasefire deal. Against that backdrop, a song defending and celebrating the Israeli military is nasty work, no matter who made it. The fact that no one made it, that it’s the creation of a machine that hallucinates in exchange for electricity, only intensifies the sick, empty feeling the track leaves behind.
The track’s release has been a disaster for George. He split acrimoniously from Tony Pontius, the long-time manager of his record label BGP, because of Pontius’ refusal to release the song. A planned role as King Herod in a production of “Jesus Christ Superstar” was put on ice. Spotify pulled the track down for violating its restrictions around AI-generated music. Bandcamp followed soon thereafter. Boy George has dug in his heels in recent days, calling the platforms a “bunch of c**ts” as part of a steady stream of Instagram posts. His doggedness would be almost admirable, if “We Will Dance Again” wasn’t so lazy.
In releasing the track, Boy George presumably wanted to turn heads, to make a statement. But he didn’t want to do any work. He didn’t want to record multiple vocal takes of lines he supposedly wrote and believes in. He didn’t want to arrange actual instruments to better emphasize his lyrics and pro-war stance. He didn’t want to mix the track carefully to refine his statement. He could have made something that shimmers, a piece of true pop that expresses repellent ideals. It wouldn’t have been the first.
Merle Haggard’s iconoclastic “Okie From Muskogee” is considered a country classic, even though the sentiment is about as far from mainstream American thought in 2026 as can be imagined. When even right-wing commentators are pushing microdosing as a path to self-betterment, his disparaging remarks about longhairs taking LSD come off as impossibly square. But you can hear the heart in Haggard’s leathery vocals, buoyed by the sweet harmonies of his backing band. Haggard waffled over the years on whether the anti-hippie hardliner anthem was a satire of the crew cut set or a genuine tribute to his conservative father. Either way, Haggard sounds like he believes what he’s saying, regardless of whether that’s true, because of the time and effort he spent working out the song.
With 2013’s “Blurred Lines,” Robin Thicke and Pharrell set out to make a groovy single in the vein of Marvin Gaye. Though the song has been relegated to the dustbin following a widespread critical backlash and later allegations of sexual assault against Thicke by model and actress Emily Ratajowksi, who appeared in the song’s video, they were extremely successful. The song itself, creepiness aside, is a Swiss watch of a partystarter. Pharrell’s ad-libs and inserts interrupting the groove at perfect intervals to wake up the dancefloor. They arguably did too good a job recreating the shuffling, glass-clinking percussion of 1970s cocktail party classics, as they lost almost everything they’d made from the song in a subsequent — and successful — lawsuit from Gaye’s estate.
“We Will Dance Again” does none of that. It warrants no qualifiers, no deeper thought, because Boy George clearly didn’t think too hard about it himself before spitting it out into the world. He asked a machine to build him a song to support what many consider to be an ongoing genocide. When it offered him half a song, he said, “Good enough” — without even bothering to run it through a few rounds of polishing. I regret to inform you that, in 2026, Boy George won’t even tumble for us.
When Netflix announced the first-ever Chef’s Table Food Festival, bringing 70 internationally acclaimed chefs to Park City for four days of dinners, demonstrations and excursions, I felt something between excitement and apprehension.
The series changed the way I understood food. I wasn’t yet sure whether a festival built around it could preserve the reason why.
If you asked me to name the greatest piece of modern food media, I would hesitate. Without missing a beat, I would say Season 1 Episode 1 of “Chef’s Table.”
It’s not because I think Massimo Bottura is the greatest chef alive. It wasn’t only the breathtaking cinematography or the immediate fantasy of booking a flight to Modena and a table at Osteria Francescana.
I’ve returned to it so many times because it permanently changed the way I think about food.
Yes, food media should make you hungry. But the very best examples also make you care about something greater than what’s on the plate.
I was initially drawn in by Italy. Like so many Italian Americans, I grew up seeing pieces of my family’s history reflected in its food and had an insatiable desire to learn as much as I could about the country my grandparents grew up in. Watching Bottura reinterpret the flavors of Emilia-Romagna felt familiar, even comforting, but that’s not why the episode stayed with me.
I still think about it and watch it over and over again because it beautifully articulates something I’ve always believed but struggle to find the words to explain.
“Chef’s Table” showed me that food could be a lens through which to understand culture, grief, resilience, identity, and community. It showed me that restaurants weren’t simply places to eat. They were living institutions capable of preserving history, supporting entire local communities, and bringing people together in moments of crisis.
Looking back now, I can trace so much of my own career back to that realization.
For years, I’ve found myself gravitating towards stories about neighborhood restaurants, family businesses, local farmers, and food traditions — not because they’re quaint or nostalgic, but because they’re windows into something larger. These people have tangible passion and intoxicating energy for what they do. “Chef’s Table” helped open my eyes to the fact that that’s the story. Not the rare ingredients or celebrity guests, the pure, genuine joy for cooking and sharing that with others.
One moment from Bottura’s episode has lingered most.
After earthquakes struck Emilia-Romagna in 2012, warehouses collapsed around hundreds of thousands of wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano, threatening the livelihoods of the cheesemakers who depended on them. Bottura responded by creating a recipe for riso cacio e pepe and inviting people around the world to cook it with him. Nearly 40,000 participated, and all 360,000 damaged wheels were sold.
In Bottura’s hands, Parmigiano was never merely an ingredient. It represented years of labor, centuries of knowledge and an entire community’s economic survival.
One of Bottura’s most famous dishes from his three-star Michelin restaurant is the Five Ages of Parmigiano Reggiano, featuring the PDO product at five distinct aging points (24, 30, 36, 40, and 50 months). He manipulates the physical form of the ingredient to showcase different temperatures and textures: souffle, cream, biscuit, foam, and air.
The dish isn’t about the cheese. It’s about tradition and craftsmanship and protecting your community.
As Bottura says in the episode, “Cooking is an act of love.”
It’s not a love expressed through expensive ingredients or elaborate techniques just for the sake of it. It’s expressed through responsibility — to your producers, neighbors, and the place you call home.
Years after I first watched Bottura’s episode, I read Ruth Reichl’s “Why Food Writing Matters” and felt the shock of recognition. Food writing has been dismissed as frivolous or shallow — as if writing about restaurants somehow exists outside the realm of “real” journalism. Reichl had found the language for something I had understood only emotionally: food journalism belonged in the larger conversation about labor, politics, culture and power. Every person needs to eat, which means every person has a relationship with food that extends beyond the plate.
“Food touches everything we do. And that it is definitely a political issue,” she says, “Every election analyst has pointed to rising food costs as a major concern for voters. Yet despite the evolution of food writing over the last thirty years, consumers still have very little understanding of the forces that drive those costs.”
For the first time, I felt as though I had discovered the tradition I wanted to join.
A cohort of people who pursued and brought light to all genres of food stories. That feeling has become harder to find these days.
In today’s media, there is simply so much food content competing for our attention. Social media has democratized food storytelling in remarkable ways, but it has also created an endless stream of restaurant rankings, viral menu hacks and “must-try” lists that reward speed over substance.
Thankfully, there are still creators proving that audiences are hungry for something deeper. Nicholas Nuvan reminds me that thoughtful food storytelling hasn’t disappeared—it has simply adapted. His videos don’t stop at recommending where to eat. They introduce viewers to the people, histories and communities behind a dish, proving what the best food journalists have always known: people don’t just fall in love with dishes, they fall in love with stories.
When Reichl first took over the food section at the LA Times, she got a lot of pushback for covering international restaurants and including recipes for things like goat soup, sea slugs, and eel. She received dozens of letters lamenting the “good old days” of “American” recipes like cola-soaked pork chops, but she didn’t listen.
And isn’t that really what it’s all about? Reichl had the courage to dig deeper and show people a different side of food writing in a time when most people only read the food section for the ads. Not only were readers interested in what she had to say, she helped show people and restaurants of all cultures and styles that their food and their story matters just as much as any Michelin restaurant.
That’s why I felt a genuine sense of cautious optimism when Netflix announced the Chef’s Table Food Festival. On paper, it’s easy to dismiss it as another celebrity chef event, many of which have become exercises in exclusivity — expensive tickets, buzzy names and Instagrammable bites. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it isn’t what made “Chef’s Table” resonate in the first place.
The series never asked us to admire chefs simply because they were famous. It asked us to understand them. To understand why they cooked, where they came from and what they were trying to preserve. Fame was a byproduct of that curiosity, not the goal.
“I see [the festival] as a celebration of why we come together to eat, why we go to restaurants,” “Chef’s Table” creator David Gelb told Bon Appetit, “That’s paramount and one of the most important things that makes us human. We come together around a hearth, we tell stories, and we eat.”
It wasn’t Bottura’s technical brilliance that changed me. It was his belief that food could be an act of service. That a restaurant could strengthen a community. That a wheel of Parmigiano could represent thousands of livelihoods. And that writing about those things wasn’t frivolous at all.
“Chef’s Table” didn’t convince me to become a food writer, but it convinced me that food could be the vehicle through which I wrote about everything else.
If the festival can capture even a fraction of that spirit — if it asks us to understand not only famous chefs, but the farmers, artisans, workers and communities behind them — it will be more than another stop on the culinary calendar. It will be a reminder of what food media can offer when it chooses to nourish more than our appetites.
Perez Hilton always wanted to be famous. This is a statement of fact and not meant to make light of his self-harming incident broadcast via TikTok livestream on Tuesday—quite the opposite. Videos and images of Hilton, 48, covered in blood and cutting himself with a knife should be interpreted as a cry for help, not attention. A person can understand that much without seeing the footage.
But many who watched didn’t have a choice. Although Perez’s livestream proceeded for around 15 minutes before it was shut down, screenshots and clips rocketed across the internet, invading countless social media feeds. Some saw those disturbing images simply by picking up their mobile devices.
Fortunately, Hilton was transported from his Miami home to a hospital to receive medical attention, according to the local sheriff’s office. But such incidents have become increasingly commonplace to the point of numbing us.
While Wednesday morning Google search trends data showed that people were hunting for images of Hilton, I went to YouTube to see what he was up to in 2002. That year, he starred in a short film called “Dating Up,” which is not listed under his IMDb or Wikipedia filmographies.
He describes it in the video summary as “A short film about gay dating. In a world before Grindr!” It’s also a glimpse of the time before YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, and before the man born Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr. launched PerezHilton.com in 2004 and quickly became one of the world’s most popular, controversial and despised gossip bloggers.
I chose 2002 because that year’s most famous video captured the Feb. 1 execution of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Footage of his beheading circulated in the bowels of the internet for months, until the now-defunct Boston Phoenix published a link to it on its website, igniting furious debates about the morality and journalistic ethics of that decision.
Such discussions seem quaint in an age in which the video of Charlie Kirk’s assassination was posted to social media moments after it happened, and a gunman in Christchurch, New Zealand, livestreamed his killing of 51 worshippers at two mosques on Facebook.
An age, it bears adding, when X and Meta—Facebook and Instagram’s corporate owner—no longer emphasize stalwart moderation guardrails in the name of reducing “censorship” on their platforms.
The circumstances leading to Hilton’s distressing livestream and Pearl’s filmed execution are entirely dissimilar. But what brought the 2002 video to mind was that it marked the first time in modern history, at least that I can remember, that the public questioned what purpose watching something too horrible to fathom ultimately serves. Such discussions helped establish the difference between witnessing as a matter of civic responsibility and leering voyeurism.
Images of Sept. 11, 2001, were still fresh and traumatizing for millions who watched the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers collapse on live TV when Pearl was murdered.
But his death was an intimate injury to his loved ones first and foremost. Making it public, therefore, was viewed as a ghoulish act by many, including Salon’s former national correspondent Bruce Shapiro. “The idea that tossing the desires of Pearl’s family into the ashcan is ‘just what journalists do’ is only a cover for indiscriminate National Enquirer logic,” he said in a June 2002 column.
Months after that, the Phoenix’s media critic Dan Kennedy contended that it is our obligation to watch such difficult accounts in an essay for Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. “We turn away from such evil at our own peril,” Kennedy maintained.
The twin forces of cellphone footage and instantaneous social posting have long cultivated what is now understood to be a society-wide problem: the separation between the reality unfurling mere feet in front of us and the filter provided by electronic screens and lenses.
Somewhere in the middle, the rest of us wondered how absorbing such horror would change us, whether as individuals or as a society.
Twenty-four years ago, it was very easy to turn away from something you had to go digging for in the first place. YouTube would not exist until 2005. Instagram’s founding happened five years after that. TikTok turns 10 this year.
In the years between those companies’ founding and now, social media has given us plenty of opportunities to take up those debates again. But when such content is widely available, and we have so little choice as to whether we can avoid it, conversations about the ethics of it all seem like a luxury.
In exceptional cases, disseminating footage that’s hard to stomach serves a noble objective. Graphically violent video pouring out of 2011’s Arab Spring uprisings opened the world’s eyes to the deadly state violence people suffered under the repressive regimes of Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria and other Arab nations.
In the United States, bystander videography has been bringing incidents of police brutality into American living rooms since at least 1991, when Los Angeles resident George Holliday captured cops viciously beating Rodney King on videotape. But the first cellphone equivalents to go viral were the 2009 videos of a police officer fatally shooting 22-year-old Oscar Grant III in the back at Fruitvale Station in Oakland.
And the list of people whose last living, breathing moments were captured on cellphone videos and shared with the world has only gotten longer. In 2014, the nation watched Eric Garner suffocate to death as a New York City police officer subdued him using a prohibited chokehold. In 2016, Diamond Reynolds filmed the moment that a police officer shot her boyfriend Philando Castile to death during a traffic stop in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and posted it to Facebook Live.
In 2020, 17-year-old Darnella Frazier recorded Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. And earlier this year, multiple bystanders recorded the shootings of Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti, footage that contradicted Trump administration officials’ claims that Good was a “domestic terrorist” and Pretti was an “assassin.”
In all those incidents, bearing witness galvanized the public. The international furor over Floyd’s death sparked nationwide protests and briefly mainstreamed the Movement for Black Lives. Videos of Good and Pretti’s killings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents turned all eyes to Minnesota, leading to the ouster of Kristi Noem from the Department of Homeland Security.
At the same time, our social media algorithms were not as loosely regulated a decade ago as they are now. Teams of human moderators once employed by all the major platforms have been gutted. Nobody should be shocked to know that the easiest place to find Hilton’s self-harm videos is X. As for TikTok, a spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, the platform relies on automated moderation systems. They flagged Hilton’s alarming livestream within minutes, closed other live streams within 90 seconds and banned the account, the spokesperson said, but its removal was delayed by what was characterized as “a moderator error.” (TikTok previously banned Hilton in 2020 for violating its community guidelines. At the time, his account had 1.6 million followers and averaged 10 million views per week.)
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The twin forces of cellphone footage and instantaneous social posting have long cultivated what is now understood to be a society-wide problem: the separation between the reality unfurling mere feet in front of us and the filter provided by electronic screens and lenses.
Knowing this, the fact that the top search terms on Wednesday morning indicated that people were looking for images of Hilton’s self-harm instead of contextualizing reporting is telling but, sadly, not surprising.
Lurid real-world footage of people harming others or themselves is being served directly to us whether we want to see it or not. What we might debate, as we did 24 years ago, is what that’s doing to us.
When Graham Platner ran for Senate, he came with an irresistible, dream candidate profile: a plainspoken veteran and man of the people who was ready to change careers from oyster farmer to politician. Platner, who turned 40 during the campaign, found immense support from other male Democrats close to his age who saw his campaign as the breath of fresh air the party needed to stay relevant. Even when his many skeletons came tumbling out of the closet — the Nazi tattoo, the Reddit posts, retweeting far-right podcaster Stew Peters and others — they only doubled down in their support. Each scandal was followed by another high-profile endorsement from a senator or influencer. Only when women accused him of rape and sexual assault did they finally drop their support, leading to his exit from the race in July.
The Platner fiasco revealed how a subset of male Democrats show symptoms of a midlife crisis. Typically, a man’s mid-life crisis occurs between his 40s and 50s when, having achieved a stable economic and sociopolitical status, a new generation emerges that threatens to replace him. He becomes depressed, irritable and restless. The cultural stereotype is that rather than accept this as a natural consequence of aging, he seeks to recapture his youth with rash impulsivity by purchasing an expensive red sports car, or having an affair with a younger woman, or changing careers on a dime without any idea of the scrutiny that comes with those who make such a shift — i.e., from oyster farmer to senator.
Politically, the midlife crisis expresses itself as an attraction to ideological extremes, represented by the trope of men growing more conservative with age. Sen. John Fetterman, once a darling of the progressive elite who embraced him as the leftier-than-thou alternative to center-left Rep. Conor Lamb in the 2022 Pennsylvania Senate primary, has become every Democrats’ face on the dartboard for embodying this exact stereotype. Fetterman’s conservative shift could have stemmed from how his staunch support of Israel amid rising sentiment toward Palestine within portions of the Democratic base pushed him further away from the party, leaving him susceptible to Republican overtures. But given that he had already displayed signs of an erratic and hostile personality before arriving in the Senate, his change feels of a piece with his past behavior.
However, in today’s political climate, Fetterman’s rightward drift makes him something of an outlier, as the Democratic midlife crisis now expresses itself as a shift toward the far-left, even if it means compromising one’s previous positions and alienating the audience that brought them to prominence.
The most public examples of this are the “Pod Save America” hosts Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor and Dan Pfeiffer — a.k.a. the “Pod Bros” — who first jumped on this bandwagon in November 2024 when they interviewed far-left streamer Hasan Piker on their podcast. Bringing on Piker — who, by coincidence, is the same age the Pod Bros were when they founded their parent company, Crooked Media — got people talking about them again, even if the talk was that the podcast had jumped the ideological shark by hosting someone who has been accused of caping for communists and terrorists.
Since his first “Pod Save America” appearance, Piker has traveled to China and Cuba to defend their regimes, and he recently deployed Vladimir Putin-like language when he called the Soviet Union’s collapse “a catastrophe” at a Yale political union meeting in April. But the Pod Bros have interviewed him multiple times, even inviting him to Crooked Con, their Washington, D.C., convention, in November 2025, where he appeared on a panel alongside MS NOW’s Symone Sanders-Townsend and Fox News’ Jessica Tarlov.
Given their embrace of Piker, it’s no surprise the Pod Bros were also among the most ardent backers of Platner, defending him like an expensive red sports car.
Given their embrace of Piker, it’s no surprise the Pod Bros were also among the most ardent backers of Platner, defending him like an expensive red sports car. When the news broke about his Nazi tattoo, they invited him on the show to explain himself. Ben Rhodes, the former Obama aide and host of the Crooked Media podcast “Pod Save the World,” even penned a lengthy New York Times op-ed on Platner’s rise, lauding him as a voice of the anti-war movement. In the wake of the rape allegations, Favreau issued an apology for his defense of Platner; Rhodes, as of this writing, has not. (Rhodes did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Other elected officials within this age bracket have dunked their big toes in populist waters despite being elected as moderates in red states, such as Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego, or as so-called center-left “Normie Democrats” in blue states, such as Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy. Both men have been mentioned as contenders for the 2028 presidential nomination, but absent a campaign announcement, their leftward shifts are the equivalent of focus group testing on a national scale. Granted, neither Gallego nor Murphy have alienated their constituencies with these ideas, but it’s a far cry from their personas when they were first elected.
Since arriving in the Senate in 2025, Gallego has gone on the lash against big corporations and monopolies. In a speech for the American Economic Liberties Project, a left-wing think tank, in September 2025, Gallego said “anything that empowers the consumer, the everyday person, is going to be a very popular message . . . It can win in any cycle, in almost any state, or environment.” He has continued this crusade, recently endorsing a $20 minimum wage and speaking out against the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger.
Murphy, who entered the Senate only a month after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, made a name for himself as one of the body’s most outspoken gun control advocates. But in a May 2025 interview with “The Atlantic,” he seemed a bit sheepish over this, arguing that by emphasizing social issues over economic ones, Democrats risk losing voters who might be more receptive to economic messaging. “I own part of that responsibility,” he said.
In addition to being spoken of as a potential 2028 contender, speculation is rampant that Murphy is positioning himself to lead the Democratic caucus after the midterms. Once known as a bipartisan negotiator, he has pivoted to a harder line, telling the Connecticut Mirror in November 2025, “I just don’t think that’s the job right now . . . I think I would be committing sort of political malpractice if I was operating this year like I’ve operated in the past.”
The psychological phenomenon of the midlife crisis masquerading as populism does not occur in a vacuum. Social media has exacerbated it, with algorithms making it easier to gain popularity by taking extreme viewpoints, as Piker has, than to represent the center-left, as the “Pod Save America” crew did for years. Moving toward extremes also has the potential to produce rewards. For pundits and influencers, that could mean boosting their voices and incomes. For politicians, it means the chance to swell their campaign coffers — even though he isn’t up for reelection until 2030, Murphy’s campaign PAC, Friends of Chris Murphy, had $11.5 million cash on hand as of June 30 — and, better yet, position themselves for future elections, regardless of whether the shift is sincere.
However, the less sincere that shift is, the greater the fallout when it turns out to be for naught. Watching Graham Platner’s campaign implode was like watching that expensive red sports car get totaled. You felt bad for anyone who got harmed. But if you’re honest, you also loved watching the guy dumb enough to buy it fume over the futility of his impulses. But the harder you laugh, the more you have a responsibility to not do what he did. Otherwise you could wind up behind the wheel.
On Wednesday morning, shortly after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won the hotly contested Michigan Democratic Senate primary in a slender victory, the Republican Party let slip the dogs of war. Barely 15 minutes after the Associated Press called the race for the unabashed progressive and first-time candidate for federal office over the centrist Rep. Haley Stevens, Donald Trump was crowing on Truth Social that the 41-year-old El-Sayed’s win was “great news for the Republican Party.” The newly minted Democratic nominee, he wrote, is “a Communist loser who hates Jews and Israel.”
As he has for 10 years, the president set the tone for the rest of the GOP.
By the noon hour, the National Republican Senatorial Committee had fired off an attack ad that led with Islamophobia and recalled the attempts from some quarters to define a certain Illinois senator who carried the name Barack Hussein Obama. “Abdulrohman Mohamed El-Sayed,” the ad began, making a point to use the candidate’s full name, an obvious move to launch the process of otherizing him to voters in Michigan and across the country, “[is] the most radical Senate candidate in America.”
But the day’s vilest moment came three hours later when Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who has always demonstrated a willingness to go there, invoked the T-word in a brief interview.
But the day’s vilest moment came three hours later when Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who has always demonstrated a willingness to go there, invoked the T-word in a brief interview as he boarded an elevator after voting to confirm Dr. Erica Schwartz, Trump’s controversial nominee to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The guy was basically a cheerleader for 9/11,” Tuberville told me, linking El-Sayed to a comment made by the popular far-left streamer Hasan Piker, with whom the candidate campaigned, that “America deserved 9/11.” (When asked in April by POLITICO about Piker’s remarks, El-Sayed characterized the question as a “gotcha game” and said “I’m not here to disavow people’s views”; Piker later apologized for the comments, calling them “inappropriate,” “messed up” and a failed attempt at satire.) “I mean, come on,” Tuberville continued, “the country’s changed, but it hasn’t changed this much to put people in [office] that are basically terrorists.”
When I asked if he was calling El-Sayed a terrorist, the senator replied, “I say he’s got the ability to become one.”
Tuberville has the political incentive to make such inflammatory remarks; they will play well to Republicans in Alabama, where he is running for governor, and he has no grand designs on national office. But they and the GOP’s larger response to El-Sayed’s win reflect another emotion that is running throughout the party. Although Republicans got the Democratic opponent they professed to want for former Rep. Mike Rogers, who lost a Senate race to Elissa Slotkin in 2024 only by the thinnest of margins, they are also scared — and with good reason.
El-Sayed has got game. When I approached his campaign for comment on Tuberville’s remarks, I was directed to an exchange he had on Wednesday night with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, in which he addressed the Republican onslaught.
“There are people like J.D. Vance or Donald Trump or Mike Rogers, who want to define America as being too small to include some kinds of people, and they point to my name, they point to my faith, they try to insinuate that somehow I’m less American because of those things,” El-Sayed said. “They want America to be small. I believe that America is big. It’s open-minded. It’s big-hearted. It can include any of us, regardless of how we pray, regardless of where our families come from, regardless of who we love or how we identify. That’s the America we’re building. And I think America, in Michigan in particular, has an opportunity to remind us just how big we are.”
Although El-Sayed has never run for federal office, these are not the words of a political novice. He is a gifted communicator, able both to make open-hearted, aspirational appeals and channel anger at billionaires and elites, a needle Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for all of his influence on the Democratic Party, has never quite been able to thread.
But unlike eloquent politicians known to be showhorses, enjoying the social media clips from their media hits, El-Sayed is a workhorse, and this combination makes him formidable. One reason for his primary win is that he simply outworked Stevens, visiting over 110 cities, according to his campaign, holding over 500 public events and, in the process, building a genuine movement. This tenacity, along with rallying cries of “Medicare for All” and getting money out of politics, helped him overcome the opposition of the Democratic establishment and over $60 million in spending by super PACs supporting Stevens.
Nevertheless, after the race was called for El-Sayed, the Democratic Party quickly coalesced behind him and he was reportedly fielding calls from former Vice President Kamala Harris, former Transportation Secretary — and Michigan voter — Pete Buttigieg and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
The stakes are high. Polls taken before the primary showed El-Sayed trailing Rogers by a larger margin than Stevens. Democratic control of the Senate runs through Michigan, and as many have pointed out, El-Sayed’s win has teed up a first-of-its-kind test: whether a progressive can win in a swing state that narrowly voted for Trump in 2016, went for Biden four years later and returned to Trump in 2024. El-Sayed will need to be even more nimble than he already is and avoid giving the GOP talking points.
Despite generous overtures to Stevens and assurances to the Jewish community El-Sayed made in remarks on Wednesday morning after the race was called, there are intraparty divisions left to heal. He must set to work convincing centrist and moderate Democrats, Black voters in urban areas and suburban voters, all of which Stevens carried, as well as disaffected independents, that he is worthy of their vote. The race will be tough, but it is winnable, even as he continues to face GOP efforts to define him on their terms.
Responding to a reporter who asked about how Republicans are deploying his name in their attacks, El-Sayed said, “That’s the only play they got.”
Whether that’s true or not, between now and November, we’ll see if it works.
Additional deaths involving Delaney Hall, a private immigration jail run by The GEO Group in Newark, New Jersey, has sparked renewed calls for the closure of the notorious 1,000 bed facility even as the Trump administration dramatically increases arrests and detentions across the nation.
On Saturday Aug. 1st, 41 year-old Edwin Lopez-Cornejo died while in custody. Multiple press reports and Lopez-Cornejo’s mother maintain that Lopez-Cornejo, a father of a 12-year-old girl, who suffered from chronic illness, died from medical neglect after he was refused treatment. He had been in the United States for 20 years and was taken into custody on his way to work.
In a statement shared with CNN, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that Lopez-Cornejo “experienced a medical emergency while in ICE custody,” and GEO Group staff “responded immediately and called 911 for emergency medical services.”
After the confirmation of Lopez-Cornejo’s death, Rep. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) disclosed he had learned of a third death in late July in which the detainee experienced a seizure not long after arriving at Delaney Hall. According to Menendez’s account, GEO Group and ICE officials told him they called for EMS and the unidentified man was taken to University Hospital where he died. His name and additional details have yet to be disclosed.
Back in December 2025, 41 year-old Jean Wilson Brutus died while in custody in Delaney Hall. At that time, 30 people had died in ICE custody across the country that year.
Unlike the high profile violent confrontations witnessed in Minneapolis that sparked massive street protests and culminated in the murders of Renee Good and Alex Peretti, ICE is now utilizing non-law enforcement databases for programs like Medicare to target and apprehend thousands of people who are actually in this country legally. In fact, scores of American citizens have been abducted off the street and detained.
Since Delaney Hall re-opened as a private immigration prison at the start of the second Trump admin, grassroots groups like NJ Pax Christi and Eyes on Ice NJ have had a humanitarian witness at the site located next to the Essex County Correctional Facility in the Ironbound section of Newark.
At least 22 people have died in ICE custody in 2026, with close to four months still to go in this year.
Back on May 9, 2025 masked federal agents abducted Newark Mayor Ras Baraka off of a public street outside the private jail, only to release him later that day after a mass non-violent protest. While charges were dropped against Baraka, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice continues to prosecute Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) on charges related to that day that could result in a 17 year jail term. McIver, along with Rep. Robert Menendez Jr. (D-N.J.) and Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), who were also on site at Delaney Hall that day, insist they were there only fulfilling their constitutionally-protected oversight duties.
The city of Newark has been pressing for The GEO Group to permit a fire inspection and obtain a certificate of occupancy for the sprawling private jail. Back in 2021, activists had successfully lobbied the state of New Jersey to prohibit municipal and county governments as well as private facilities from entering into new contracts with ICE to house immigration detainees.
Private jailers like The GEO Group successfully challenged the legislation in court. At the time, the Biden administration was holding more than 26,000 detainees nationwide at more than 120 sites. Multiple press reports indicate the Trump administration is now holding almost three times that number at over 450 facilities in all 50 states, Washington D.C. and in U.S. territories. In July, ICE reported it had arrested 51,000 people, the largest number in the Department of Homeland Security’s history, according to ABC News.
On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump pledged to target millions of U.S. residents and “deport them so rapidly” he would “rescue every town that had been invaded and conquered.” In that same campaign, Vice President JD Vance advanced an admittedly completely fabricated story about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio kidnapping and eating their neighbors’ domestic pets. The claim was so outrageous that local municipal officials and Ohio’s Republican Governor Mike DeWine spoke out on behalf of Springfield’s Haitian residents, who they said had filled jobs in the rust belt town that had actually helped revive the local economy.
At least 22 people have died in ICE custody in 2026, with close to four months still to go in this year. That does not include the multiple fatal shootings just since Trump was sworn in for the second time. According to the Guardian, last month’s fatal shooting of 52 year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was the 10th such fatal ICE shooting since Trump regained office.
In an interview with WBAI Pacifica Radio, Rep. Analilia Mejia (D-N.J.), who has been in Congress for less than three months, recounted that in her multiple visits to Delaney Hall “what was clear was that there were individuals being detained with chronic health conditions that were not receiving the kind of care that is necessary and mandated by their doctors.”
Lack of access to timely medical care has been a long standing and well-documented complaint throughout the ICE system and private contract immigration prisons across the nation.
Over the Memorial Day weekend, 300 detainees launched a hunger and labor strike at Delaney Hall. Under the GEO Group business model, detainees maintain the private jail for a dollar a day. Earlier this summer, large crowds of protestors converged on Delaney Hall in support of the hunger strikers.
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) ICE agents stand guard in front of protesters outside Delaney Hall which is being used as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center on May 26, 2026 in Newark, New Jersey.
While New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill has been a vocal opponent of the private jail and was turned away when she initially came for a visit, she did call out the New Jersey State Police at the height of street protests outside Delaney in solidarity with the hunger strikers.
The move marked a significant escalation and came after the Trump administration threatened to suspend the processing of international flights at Newark Liberty International on the eve of the World Cup, in which New Jersey had invested heavily.
Henry Craver, writing for the American Friends Service Committee, described GEO and ICE’s repressive and violent response to the show of solidarity for the hunger strike.
“In one incident guards tried to remove a strike leader soon after the strike began,” Carver wrote. “When other detained people formed a human shield around him, armed officers returned in force. They swept through multiple units, physically assaulted people, and deployed tear gas. People in those units told AFSC that they struggled to breathe for hours after.”
Carver continued: “The retaliation escalated in the following weeks. Hundreds of detained people have been transferred out of Delaney Hall to facilities in Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Pennsylvania — far away from their families and communities.”
With a Republican Congress very much under the control of Trump, efforts at oversight of ICE and the private prison system that has expanded significantly has been left to the Democrats, who are in the minority. Grassroots efforts at the municipal level have been far more effective in galvanizing resistance to the creation of new immigration prisons.
State lawmakers also have a mixed record when it comes to reigning in ICE’s mass deportation strategy. A federal judge recently struck down New York State’s legislation to prohibit federal agents from wearing masks while letting stand a provision that prohibits town and county governments from entering into so-called 287(g) partnership that deputizes local police to enforce immigration laws.
“I need to say that every single American should be paying attention to what’s happening here — our government is treating a set of people with such impunity, with such inhumanity it is costing them their lives,” Mejia said. “Now we can debate our positions on immigration and immigration reform but I think it is fair to say that essentially sentencing people to death is not what the American people are calling for or want.”
Mejia continued: “It is imperative that at least the state of New Jersey is pushing hard to make sure that our state officials have full and unrestricted access to these detention centers to ensure the well being of these individuals. These are human beings.”
Trump has repeatedly described undocumented immigrants as “animals,” “illegal monsters” and “gang members” staging “the largest invasion in the history of our country.”
These claims, which have been the way the Fox media complex frames the immigration, are easily debunked by study after study that found immigration into the U.S. is actually associated with lower crime rates.
Abdul El-Sayed isn’t worried about Islamophobic attacks on the campaign trail.
The progressive Democrat who just won a hotly contested primary in Michigantold reporters on Wednesday that he’s willing to take smears on the chin, saying that name-calling and bigotry is “the only play” in his opponents’ playbook.
“That’s the only play they got,” he said. “They’re going to point at me. They’re going to point at my name like, ‘Well, he’s different.’ That’s the best you got?”
The former public health director has stuck to a platform centered on affordability at home and an end to foreign entanglements. He said that Islamophobia is a cop-out because his opponents don’t want to debate substantive issues.
“You can’t actually talk about what you want to do?” he said. “My name is not raising your gas prices. My name is not taking us to war. My name is not the reason you can’t afford groceries.”
El-Sayed will face Former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers in the upcoming midterms. He encouraged Rogers to come up with a better line of attack than his identity, because he doesn’t think his Michigan voters will bite.
“I’ve been an Abdul in Michigan my whole life. This is the best place in the world to be Abdul,” he said. “Michiganders are big-hearted, they’re open-minded… [They’re] sick and tired of BS politics coming in to divide us.”
While Jeffrey Epstein’s island or his various mansions get a lot of attention, the late sex offender and financier’s New Mexico Zorro Ranch was also allegedly the site of extensive abuse and criminal activity. Now, in a lawsuit filed Wednesday, the Department of Justice and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, are accused of “stonewalling” New Mexico’s criminal investigation of Epstein’s activities at the ranch outside of Santa Fe.
New Mexico’s Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who is behind the lawsuit, argues that the DOJ unlawfully withheld records, therefore delaying justice for victims. The lawsuit accuses Blanche and the DOJ of perpetuating “that disgrace” of failing to investigate or hold Epstein accountable before his death. The suit requests the court to order the DOJ to provide the requested unredacted records.
“USDOJ and Acting Attorney General Blanche are refusing to facilitate the investigation of state law crimes by hiding information about Epstein and his co-conspirators from Attorney General Torrez and state law enforcement, when New Mexico is one of few jurisdictions that still may have an opportunity to hold Epstein’s associates accountable or otherwise provide some sense of justice to survivors,” the lawsuit reads.
Meanwhile, New Mexico’s legislative “truth commission” released its first report on Zorro Ranch Wednesday, but the 119-page document offers little in the way of new revelations or recommendations. It draws heavily on news reports and what has so far been released from the Epstein files, but does underscore numerous hurdles the investigation has faced.
“Those in law enforcement most responsible for protecting New Mexicans from Epstein played a passive role in investigating him, letting others in Miami and in New York do it. As a result, the conduct of Epstein and his co-conspirators in New Mexico went unexamined and unpunished,” the authors conclude. “Going forward, this commission endeavors to uncover the truth so many for too long were blind to.”
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