It's hard to overstate Jad Abumrad's impact on the podcasting world. He created and hosted Dolly Parton's America and Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, two Peabody Award-winning shows that offered unprecedented looks at the lives of two of the most important music icons of the last century.

Before that, though, he created Radiolab, an experimental NPR show that leaned heavily on creative sound design and eventually helped redefine what a podcast could be. In the early days of podcasting, shows were often just a couple of people talking at each other at a table (some still are), or lazily repackaged radio broadcasts. Radiolab instead told deeply repor …

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For more than a decade, Apple has told other companies to build smart home devices for its platform. This week, Apple launched its own. The Apple Home Collection is a lineup of cameras, thermostats, sensors, a smart door lock, and a video doorbell, all codeveloped with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric. They arrive alongside HomeView, Apple's first smart display.

Even after 12 years of HomeKit, Apple's smart home ecosystem still felt underdeveloped, especially compared to the competition. Amazon's and Google's ecosystems support more products, and both have popular in-house brands: Ring and Nest. Apple had nothing of its own to point cu …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Rich Baris, a pollster supportive of the MAGA “big tent,” talks about how the President lost control of his movement, and why that spells disaster for Republicans.

From the moment Alex Gibney announced he was working on “Musk” in 2023, it became one of the most anticipated documentaries around – and a source of trepidation for its titular subject, tech mogul Elon Musk. But we may have underestimated how far the world’s wealthiest man and his ilk would go to prevent audiences from seeing it.

Weeks before “Musk” hit theaters, its distributor, Bleecker Street, couldn’t buy ads on TikTok, YouTube, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram or, here’s a shocker, Musk’s own X. A Hollywood Reporter story published on Sept. 25 made YouTube and Meta reverse course – a rare case of two media giants shamed into living up to their free-speech claims.

But this attempted media suppression shows “Musk” has struck a nerve, despite its namesake dismissing it as a “hit piece that misses.”

It was not lost on Gibney that at the same time that was happening, Zuckerberg, Musk and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos were dining with Donald Trump and China’s Xi Jinping at the White House. He’s confronted gravely perilous corruption and dangerous figures in previous, fearless documentaries such as  2019’s “Citizen K,” about a Russian oligarch who was crushed by Vladimir Putin, and 2015’s “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.”

What happened to Bleecker Street, then, is both familiar to Gibney and extraordinarily alarming. “You can see how a few platforms coalescing around the endorsement of what these tech viziers are doing decide that a criticism of tech power is somehow political and can’t be allowed in terms of open discourse on their platforms,” Gibney told Salon. “So that was really disconcerting.”

It’s shaping up to be a dark autumn for Silicon Valley’s villains. In early December, Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial” turns our attention to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, played by Andrew Garfield.  

Meanwhile, “Musk” was recently joined in theaters by Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning,” in which Jeremy Strong portrays Zuckerberg as a soulless ghoul prioritizing clicks over user safety. In “You Can See Everything,” notorious prankster Nathan Fielder shadows notorious (for different reasons) Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes in the days before she went to prison. 

Gibney also profiled Holmes in his 2019 work “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” which adds another layer of coincidental symmetry: Fielder’s film hits theaters on Oct. 16, the same day “Musk” opens nationwide.

But “Musk” is unquestionably a tougher watch, and given its subject’s extensive integration into the second Trump administration, it can’t help but be political.

Of course, “Musk” isn’t campaigning for anything except our need to confront the existential threat posed by one man exercising significant control over our media and our military.

A chorus of testimony from people who were once closest to Musk builds a profile of a megalomaniacal con artist. Two of Musk’s most incisive critics, his ex-wife Justine Musk and former right-wing influencer Ashley St. Clair, describe him as a gaslighter and a nuke, respectively. 

But perhaps the most damning testimonial comes from Musk himself – or rather, existing audio recordings of Musk delivered by a CGI version of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, since he refused to participate.

All of it boils down to simple questions Gibney poses at the film’s outset: How could Musk assume so much power, and why have we given it to him? I discussed those questions with Gibney, and what they taught him about Musk and our penchant for enabling men like him, in a wide-ranging conversation transcribed below.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Salon: You’ve done a documentary on Putin. You did one on Scientology, a famously litigious organization. You have a vast filmography featuring subjects who might have taken issue, or have taken issue, with what was said in your documentaries. Where does this rank in terms of threat level, legal or otherwise?

Gibney: Well, high. I mean, when just before “Going Clear” was released, the Church of Scientology took out full-page ads in the New York Times and the L.A. Times with a big picture of me, sort of denouncing me. And there were people, you know, who would pop up in dark parking lots, you know, sort of accosting me, trying to kind of destabilize me psychologically. But I think in this case, he’s the richest man in the world. He has a lot of resources… And he has this platform, Twitter, which has become a kind of Thunderdome of hate and vitriol, and that activates, you know, unpredictable characters who sometimes act on their own…

That said, I don’t want to exaggerate what’s happened to me so far. Other people put themselves at greater risk than I, in the sense that they came forward and appeared on camera.

One of the things that you said in other interviews, and I think you actually said this in the documentary as well, is that you used to be a fan of Elon Musk’s products.

I mean, I looked at him from afar. I have some history on this whole electric car thing because I was brought in long ago to help with the editing of a doc called “Who Killed the Electric Car,” which is about GM’s first foray into the world of electric cars. A woman I met on that film, Jessie Deeter, later produced a film called “Revenge of the Electric Car,” and Elon Musk is in that.  And Jessie, when she worked with him on that, was a big fan. [Deeter is also a producer on “Musk.”]

(Courtesy Bleecker Street Film / Gregg Segal)

So, you know, I had a certain connection to him. And I’m a big electric car guy. I own one — not a Tesla— but I own one, and I had a Tesla Powerwall in my house. I also sort of liked the kind of mumbling charisma that he had for a while, because he seemed like very much a regular guy. He was joking with people around on Twitter and stuff like that.

That said, he could also do unpredictable, chaotic and sometimes offensive things. But largely speaking, my view of him was positive. But I was interested in the fact that he accumulated so much power, and so that was the basis on which I dug in back in 2022.

Do you think that his ability to amass this much power is related to the fact that he is doing it in the American capitalist system, or do you think he could have done it in any other place in the world?

Well, I mean, there are a lot of intersections of opportunities for Elon Musk, and I also think he discovered, to use a phrase of his, the anomaly in the matrix for the American system. And that is money. He discovered that not only can you get a lot of money from the federal government, but if you have a lot of money, you can use it to influence sometimes how much money you get from the federal government or state governments. So I think there was that.

The other big thing is that in America we also have a kind of grudging admiration for the P.T. Barnum-like qualities of certain larger-than-life entrepreneurs, you know, and you see that a lot in Silicon Valley . . . That is a kind of cultural trope in this society for which I think we have a weakness. We sort of like to see them trick us all, though we also do like to see them go down after they’ve tricked us. So I think for all those reasons that maybe Elon was able to succeed here in a way that really exploited some of the flaws in our system and our psyche.

There’s also a propensity in our culture to believe in some superhuman aspect of genius, which I think your documentary gets at very well.

Yeah, it’s also that our weakness for money, or the power of money, in this culture also causes us somehow to think that if you’re wealthy, you’re also wise rather than just ruthless, right?

I often think of that famous line from “Citizen Kane,” where Orson Welles is joking with somebody, you know, having been very successful playing this William Randolph Hearst character, who said, “It’s no trick making a lot of money if all you want to do is make a lot of money.” Meaning,  if you’re ruthless and determined, you can make a lot of money. Doesn’t mean you’re a genius, and it doesn’t mean that you’re a tech genius either. 

I also think Elon Musk, having seen the ascent of Steve Jobs, was sort of defining himself in that way too – or going back to Thomas Edison, who had his own P.T. Barnum-like qualities in terms of inventing a character for himself to play. It’s not just the investor; it’s the inventor.

“Musk” runs for almost four hours. Did you always know it would be that long?

No. In fact, I had a cut of the film in the spring of 2024 that was under two hours. We were moving to release that and put it into the fall festivals. Then, in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump is nearly assassinated, and Musk hitches his wagon to the Trump train. And my friends at HBO said, “You’re not done. You have to follow this story because it could go to places that you don’t expect, and having spent as much time as you have, you have to follow it to at least a moment of greater conclusion.”

So I did, and that ended up being the reason that it’s at such a length. You see patterns from the first film that then repeat themselves, but on a much larger scale, in the second film. Suddenly economic power meets political power, economic and technological power meets political power, and that is the making of an epic story.

In addition, it just so happened that as he embarked on his political project, a lot of people that I was talking to in the background, trying to persuade them to come forward, did come forward because they saw some of the more problematic aspects of Musk wielding power as part of MAGA world. That gave the story a kind of human dimension as well.

Weirdly, you know, I was having trouble kind of putting it all together, and I didn’t really get a sense of how to shape it until I watched Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” which in itself was a kind of take on the tech bros. That helped me kind of find a way forward in terms of what became a kind of epic narrative.

How so?

Well, you know, you start with a scientist who wants to do something big and important. And there’s even a sense of idealism about his ambition. But then he literally creates a monster, and the whole enterprise becomes utterly reckless and irresponsible and all about his own sort of grandiosity. Rather than a mission that might help people, it becomes about him.

What are you hoping this documentary will do in terms of making people a little bit more aware of who Elon Musk is and getting at the man behind the curtain, so to speak?

Well, I mean, it is an agent provocateur. I don’t provide a solution, but I do provide, I think, a pretty compelling story, which asks the kind of fundamental question I posed at the beginning, which is, how did this guy get so much power, and why did we give it to him? Because it’s both about him and it’s about us, and it asks some discomforting questions about how literally existential power rests in the hands of one man who is increasingly chaotic, unhinged, and seemingly pursuing power without reason. There’s a chilling moment at the end of the film where somebody asks him, “Why have you accreted so much power?” And he literally can’t answer the question…

He’s a very peculiar character who’s a chaos agent. But we’ve allowed him to become normalized in a way.

I remember writing about him being on “Saturday Night Live” and people shrugging it off, like, “Oh, it’s not that big of a deal.” But it was a very big deal. Those kinds of things make him into a character when the reality is he has massive access to power.

And he’s saying things, even on “Saturday Night Live,” that were patently untrue… Even when he says, “Did you think I was going to be a chill, normal dude?” Well, there’s a funny hidden message there, which is kind of discomforting if you really think about it. Like, if you want to drive a Tesla, be prepared to endure a lot of performative cruelty from me, including cruelty that may end up killing people. . .  That’s a pretty brutal message, honestly, for “Saturday Night Live.” But it was a joke, right? And that’s the genius, in a way, of Elon Musk: he’s constantly saying stuff that is deadly serious and a joke at the same time.

Speaking of that, the images and the joke, let’s talk about using the [CGI] avatar. I remember when the news first broke about that, someone said, “Well, I wonder if that’s Alex kind of trolling Musk back.”

I mean, it’s kind of a troll-back, yeah. In a way, it’s kind of investing in him, playing in his sandbox, because he didn’t agree to appear.

And I should make it clear, as I tried to do in the film, that what we hear from him are actual audio recordings of him. In other words, they’re not AI-confected answers. We didn’t ask AI what Elon would say. We’re taking real audio recordings, but how to couch that visually? And we took our cue, having done all this research into stuff that Elon said, from something he kept going over again: This idea that we’re likely living in a simulation. So I thought, OK, how about a simulated interview?

And yes, he’s famous for trolling people. He’s famous for creating memes. What was it he said in 2020 on Twitter? He said, you know, parodying “Dune,” he said, “He who controls the memes, controls the universe,” right? OK, well, here’s a meme for you, Elon, of you.

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What, if anything, about this documentary may help illuminate a few things for people, regardless of their political leanings, as we approach the midterms?

I mean, this should be our concern, whether you’re from the left or the right, is giving people unaccountable power. Also, this whole idea that our politics and, indeed, our Department of Justice and our Department of Defense can be utterly transactional.

We’re not getting the best that money can buy. We’re getting what money can buy. Period. In other words, the military stuff that you’re seeing is a third-rate frontier AI technology being fully integrated into our Department of Defense. And why is the worst technology being integrated? Because Elon Musk is literally paying for political advantage. So it’s a payback system, and we should all be outraged about that, left, right, or otherwise.

And now you’re seeing him trying to buy the midterms. He’s spending way more now than he did for the presidential campaign in 2024, and in part that’s to get more money for himself in the form of military contracts. But also, he knows that a reckoning is coming for him if the Democrats take over the House and the Senate, and there’s going to be a lot of investigations into him for corruption and abuse of power, taking our information, particularly possibly relating to DOGE, and doing God knows what with it.

Our whole system is built on a system of checks and balances, and the idea that the government is our instrument for making a better world, rather than, you know, making a few people rich…

But I think that what’s changed now with Trump is that the Department of Justice has become a protection racket for those who flatter and ally themselves with the president, and an instrument of revenge for those who oppose the president. You can’t depend on it as a kind of law-enforcing mechanism, and that may be the scariest thing of all. . . What we’re talking about is Putin’s Russia here, right? And if people want to avoid that, then I would strongly urge them to go out to the polls. Because this is a rogue administration that goes beyond any kind of sense of party affiliation. It’s a rogue administration that’s literally destroying our democracy.

“Musk” is playing in theaters nationwide.

 

The post Alex Gibney’s “Musk” asks why we gave Elon Musk so much power appeared first on Salon.com.

Elon Musk’s father, Errol Musk, agreed to be interviewed immediately.

From Disney Plus to HBO Max, almost every major established streaming service is experimenting with ways to get into vertical content. It's clear that these companies see video-focused social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram as existential threats. In this arms race for viewers' attention, it has often felt like everyone is trying to find new ways to exist on people's phones. But a new startup thinks that the next step in vertical series' evolution is going to take place on our wide-screen televisions.

Unlike most vertical microdrama / series streaming platforms on the market that have focused on mobile viewing experiences, Vurt ha …

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On the heels of her Emmy win for “Widow’s Bay,” the “GLOW” star reflects on her slew of new projects, growing up with actor parents, taking on Cole Escola’s role in “Oh, Mary!,” and the importance of performing with your whole heart.

Sunmi is an undeniable force in K-pop. She first made her debut as a member of the Wonder Girls back in 2007, one of the first K-pop acts to really break through in the West. The English version of their single "Nobody" was the first K-pop song to hit the Billboard Hot 100 in October 2009.

In 2010 Sunmi left the group to go back to school, but the siren call of a music career pulled her back in. She released her debut solo EP Full Moon in 2014. That began a run of award-winning releases for the pop star, including Song of the Year for "Gashina" at the Gaon Chart Music Awards.

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“Serling” author Alan Sepinwall didn’t know it, but he was about to enter another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind and, in his telling, unexpected connections. The scene was Los Angeles, where the veteran TV critic (and, full disclosure, a friend of mine) was set to moderate a 20th anniversary panel for “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” While making small talk with series star and creator Rob Mac in the event’s green room, Sepinwall casually mentioned he was writing about Rod Serling, creator of “The Twilight Zone.”

Suddenly Mac’s face lit up. “Alan,” he said, “You have to talk to me for this book. Rod Serling is my guy. Rod Serling is a huge influence on me.”

“And thinking in my head, OK. Sure,” Sepinwall recalled. “I was deeply skeptical, but figured, all right, I will indulge him because I like Rob. We’ll see what happens.”

Once they got around to talking, Sepinwall’s doubts dissolved. Instead, he ended up seeing Mac’s shows in a whole new light. “There really is ‘Twilight Zone’ DNA in ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ and ‘Mythic Quest’ and a lot of the other stuff he’s done,” Sepinwall said. “And I kept coming across that more than anything else.”

As long as television exists, “The Twilight Zone,” which premiered on Oct. 2, 1959, is unlikely to disappear completely. Heck, Bernard Herrmann’s eerie theme song alone will outlive humanity.

But if some calamity causes the show to fade into the mists of forgetting, Sepinwall argues in his upcoming biography, “Serling: A Journey Into the Twilight Zone with TV’s First Visionary,” that its creator’s influence is forever woven into the medium. From the greatest genre series to less obvious links, like the preposterous shenanigans at Paddy’s Pub, Serling left his mark on screens large and small, and on American audiences. 

Since Sepinwall wrote the book on TV – no, really, he co-authored “TV: The Book” with fellow critic Matt Zoller Seitz – who better to break down the essence of Serling’s evergreen appeal? That’s what we did in our recent Zoom conversation about the mythic creator, writer and actor who has haunted us for most of a century by changing TV for the better.

 

 

The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

(Courtesy of Alan Sepinwall)

After researching your book, what have you found about people’s common understanding of Rod Serling and “The Twilight Zone” that might not be entirely accurate?

I think people assume that the guy who created “The Twilight Zone” and was this really creepy, ominous host must have been this very dark and tormented person. Obviously, and he had some darkness in him; he came back from World War II really scarred, couldn’t really deal with it . . . but he was also a very outgoing guy. A jokester, warm, fun dad, you know, had this idyllic childhood and was just a very popular people-pleaser kind of guy that you would not expect whatsoever from that image of him.

When people think about Rod Serling and his influence on TV, they basically associate him with genre television like “Lost.” But they don’t necessarily think of shows like “Sunny.” What are some others where you were kind of surprised to find DNA of “The Twilight Zone” on a closer look?

Well, this isn’t one I was surprised to find because it’s quoted a few times in the show, but it’s still like a less obvious one: “The Sopranos.” David Chase is obsessed with “The Twilight Zone.” One of the reasons that he wanted to become a writer was that he just thought Rod Serling was the coolest guy on the planet. So I’d say that’s one.

The work of Pamela Adlon, who did “Better Things” and a lot of other stuff. I mainly knew she liked “Twilight Zone,” but I didn’t realize the depth of it to the point where she named one of her kids after a character in a “Twilight Zone” episode.

So yeah, it’s all over the place. There are the obvious ones like J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof with “Lost,” Charlie Brooker with “Black Mirror.”  But you look at, like, “All in the Family” or “Hill Street Blues” or a lot of these other things, and it’s hard to imagine them existing in the form that they did if there hadn’t been Rod Serling in the ‘50s, and especially with “Twilight Zone,” saying that TV can be asking these bigger questions, can be wrestling with thornier moral issues, and can really challenge people to turn their brain back on and not just, you know, have it on in the background while they’re folding laundry.

One of the things you write early in the book is that he really had a jaundiced view of nostalgia.

I mean, his relationship with nostalgia was really complicated because on the one hand, he has this idyllic childhood in Binghamton, New York, you know: doting parents, popular kid, dated all over the place. Binghamton largely resisted the effects of the depression. Then he immediately goes from there to Hell on earth, fighting in the Pacific . . . And the shock of going from one to the other really affected everything he would write about for the rest of his life.

On the one hand, there’s the part of him that wishes he had never left Binghamton and wishes he could go back to this time before the war, before humanity dropped atomic bombs on civilians, before there was this constant fear of the nuclear apocalypse and all of the other things that people were starting to worry about in the ‘50s and ‘60s and the Cold War.

On the other hand, he knew that this was a bad idea. You can’t go backward; you have to move forward. And that, as good as life was for him in those moments, it was not great for other people. And he kept trying to push humanity forward. He would argue on behalf of civil rights and nuclear disarmament, and all these other causes that he cared about. So almost every time you do a “Twilight Zone” episode where somebody goes back in time, either to their own childhood or even further back than that, it doesn’t go well for them. The past is not a place you should be.

What do you think it is about the metaphorical messages within each episode that keep “The Twilight Zone” eternally relevant?

Because people are people, and we keep making the same mistakes and facing the same challenges, even if sometimes we get better about it than at other times. But you watch these episodes, and he’s asking really elemental stuff about humanity. Like being selfish versus trying to think about the world around you, or taking the easy choice versus the hard one. You know, racism, fascism — how easy it is for us to give in to the ideas of conformity, to give in to the ideas of letting someone else do all of the thinking for us.

That’s there again and again. And so you watch those episodes, and it’s like they’re 60-plus years old. They’re in black and white. The fashions are what the fashions are, and yet over and over it feels like, really, he could have written this yesterday.

“Serling: A Journey Into the Twilight Zone with TV’s First Visionary” hits bookshelves on Tuesday, Oct. 13. You can pre-order your copy by clicking here.

All five seasons of “The Twilight Zone” are streaming on Paramount+.

 

 

The post TV never left “The Twilight Zone” appeared first on Salon.com.

Cristian Mungiu's sixth feature, Fjord, concerns a family on trial. The parents seem like good people, God-fearing. They would never be accused of gentle parenting. They've just moved from Romania to a small hamlet nestled in the fjords of rural Norway. There is Mamma (Renate Reinsve), Tata (a bald and bespectacled Sebastian Stan), and their passel of children. They are an openly religious and proselytizing family. All ought to be well, only Norway in 2026 is extravagantly suspicious of the devout - their famous tolerance reserved for the secular.

Fjord starts quietly and builds subtly. We are with the family as they are introduced to thei …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The author of The AGI Chronicles says his book “was written by a very tired, overworked, under-slept human being.”

One of the great actors of the era on finding sympathy for Mark Zuckerberg, Kendall Roy, and Roy Cohn—and why the New Yorker Profile of him still stings.

Andy Beshear has a favorite song: “Universal Sound” by Tyler Childers, the Grammy-winning country artist with a special place in the Kentucky governor’s heart. That title is something of a metaphor, about connecting to a deep, abiding spirituality accessible to us all. It’s meant to be an ecumenical message — just like the one Beshear hopes to deliver.

“Universal Sound” carried him through a “nasty” reelection campaign in 2023, which ended with a comfortable victory over his GOP opponent, state Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who had been hand-picked for the race by Sen. Mitch McConnell. Amid mounting speculation that Beshear could become a leading contender in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary, “Universal Sound” may well become familiar to more voters.

Beshear’s newly published book, which is de rigueur for potential candidates seeking to raise their political profile and lay out a vision, is also stoking talk of 2028. With its title taken from the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, “Go and Do Likewise: How We Heal a Broken Country” explores how President Donald Trump and his administration have, in Beshear’s words, “hijacked” Christianity, and how the governor’s brand of inclusive faith underpins his political life, offering readers a blueprint for governing with compassion. 

I interviewed Beshear last week on the sidelines of Bourbon & Beyond, the music festival held annually in Louisville, Kentucky. He spoke about a reinvigorated religious left, addressed the tricky question of whether Trump should be considered a Christian, discussed his willingness to take unpopular stands in a red state, hinted at his plans for 2028 and explained why, as a politician often compared to Mr. Rogers, his kindness shouldn’t be mistaken for weakness. (Full disclosure: My husband, the novelist Silas House, served as Kentucky poet laureate under Beshear, and I once briefly assisted the governor on a writing project.) 

This conversation, which took place in a backstage trailer vibrating from the country and hip-hop tunes emanating from nearby stages, has been edited for length and clarity.

Governor, thank you for taking the time to talk. “Go and Do Likewise” is centered around the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Bible. What do you think that story has to tell us and teach us today? 

Well, it’s a perfect story for a moment of division. So the parable of the Good Samaritan is about a man lying bloodied and naked on the side of the road, and everybody that looks like him and thinks like him and votes like him and prays like him and loves like him goes to the other side of the road, ignores him and walks on. But Jesus chooses someone who’s raised to hate that man on the side of the road — the man on the side of the road was raised to hate the Samaritan — and that’s the person he has come over, not kick the man while he’s down, but lift him up, carry him to safety and, if you read it carefully, pay for his healthcare moving forward.

But the parable of the Good Samaritan is more than just a story to emulate; it’s an instruction, because Jesus then looks at the crowd and says, “Now go and do likewise” . . . This is one of the fundamental — not teachings but instructions of the Bible. It’s for us to be good, especially when it’s hard. For us not to judge people, and at people’s worst moments, to just be good to each other.

Faith is obviously so important to you, and I’ve heard you many times refer to it as your “authentic why.” What do you mean by that?

Well, first, I would never impose my faith on anyone. I’m not somebody who thinks that my faith needs to be written directly into law. That’s Christian nationalism, and I’m against that. But I do think in an age of authenticity — when your Instagram video is important and your TikTok video is important — people want to know you, what drives you. They don’t have to agree with what drives you. They just want to see that it drives you to do good. And for me, that is my faith.

It tells me I’m supposed to leave this world a little better than I found it, and that’s one of the reasons I’m still [here]. You know, I thought that two terms as governor would be enough, and they still may be. But I see a world now that’s moving backward and not forward. And doesn’t faith call you to stand up and to speak out at that moment?

What do you think being in that position — I imagine you sitting there in Frankfort at night, weighing this [calculus] — has taught you?

First, I believe in any job that I’ve taken on. I am fully dedicated to the people of Kentucky, and when I fight with the president, it’s not because I’m a Democratic governor and he’s a Republican president. It’s because he’s doing something that hurts the people of Kentucky, and whether it’s popular or not, that was the job I took on to do my very best to move us not right, not left, but forward.

But you know, [the COVID pandemic] taught me a lot of lessons. I did what I thought was the right thing, that might not be the popular thing, the thing that would save the most lives. And you know what I found? As long as you’re willing to respect people enough to explain your why and not just your what, doing the right thing is oftentimes the politically popular thing, even if it wasn’t beforehand. People respect conviction, even if they don’t necessarily agree with it. And when you’re willing to explain why you did something, people can disagree with you but still believe you’re coming from a good place.

One thing I’ve been thinking about as I read your book is that the religious left used to be such a strong force in American politics. You know, Bobby Kennedy, all of his work —

All of the War on Poverty, even if not couched in those terms —

Yes. Bobby Kennedy’s work for social justice was rooted in his Catholicism. Jimmy Carter, famously a Sunday school teacher, spoke about his faith a lot. Even Hillary Clinton, in her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign and administration, talked about her faith and took a lot of flak from establishment media. What happened to the religious left? Why do you think it declined, or kind of went underground?

Well, what I think we’re seeing now, when you see the James Talaricos of the world, our Kansas Senate candidate [Democrat Adam Hamilton] who’s a Methodist minister and others . . .  you know, the media will always try to take something as a tactic. They’re like, “Why are Democrats talking more about faith right now?” instead of “Why are people of faith running as Democrats right now?” And I think it’s because there is such a manipulation and a hijacking of faith going on, in such a transparent manner, that people of faith are saying, “I’ve had enough.”

When you see Donald Trump hold a Bible in a way that you’re pretty sure he’s never held it, much less never read it; when he says he doesn’t think there’s any way he’s going to heaven, he doesn’t seem to be worried about it; when he walks out after Erika Kirk gives voice to the Golden Rule in such a beautiful way, and says, No, no, I believe in the exact opposite; when you see JD Vance using faith to kick people while they’re down instead of lift them up, and to judge as many people as possible — then I think people of real faith want to stand up and take that back. Or at least to provide the counterexample. I think people are tired of seeing faith used for bad in public life instead of for good, and that’s the core of why I wrote the book.

You don’t shy away from going after President Trump. You write that he “makes people feel good about themselves by telling them it’s okay to be the worst version of themselves.” At another point you say, “Trump may occasionally talk about Jesus (or ‘Two Corinthians’), but he has missed the point. Jesus lifted up the very people this Republican administration pushes down . . . Trump throws Gatsby parties with his billionaire friends, while Jesus hung out with the exact opposite. Trump clears the very people out of city parks that Jesus would minister to.” 

That’s a powerful indictment. You’re saying that the president doesn’t love his neighbor as himself.

No, he calls his neighbor “the enemy from within.” It is the most stark contrast. I think about “love your neighbor as yourself” versus the president [characterizing] your neighbor as the enemy from within. I also think about Erika Kirk saying, I forgive my enemies, and Donald Trump saying, no, I hate my enemies . . . It’s just the exact opposite of what the Bible is supposed to teach us.

At one point, you question if he even knows the story of the Good Samaritan. 

I’m not sure he does.

Christ said, “You will know them by their fruits,” right? Do you think President Trump is a Christian?

I try not to question people’s faith, because I admit that that is judging. But he is not living and he is not governing like a Christian. Now, when you think about the miracle of the fishes and the loaves in each of the four first books of the New Testament, it’s that important. Jesus, in a time of scarcity, makes sure everybody has enough. Donald Trump has repeatedly tried to take food off kids and seniors’ table [and] was willing to use starving Americans as leverage during a government shutdown. That is not living or governing like a Christian, and I doubt they ever run out of food at the White House. 

I think about the “Big Ugly Bill,” and it’s causing kids to lose having enough food, but it’s also taking doctors away from the sick. And while I think he was talking about spirituality, the actual words of the Bible — which many people believe is the direct word of God — is that Jesus said a doctor is for the sick. Yet there’s a lot of sick [people] that aren’t going to have a doctor. So Donald Trump certainly isn’t living out faith. And for those that preach that he is a person of faith, my granddad, a lay Baptist minister, always said, you know, faith without action —

Yeah, is “dead.” In the book you call for a “Great American Reset.” What do you mean by that? How would you define that?

I did not live through McCarthyism, but we have read about McCarthyism — about attacking and othering people, throwing them in jail — and Donald Trump’s doing it right now. He’s so desperate, he’s calling people communists. I mean, just blatantly ripping off Joseph McCarthy. But the president himself is doing it. But we reached a point where people said enough, and they took a breath, and we came back together and did not repeat it — at least until now. 

I don’t want to leave a broken country to my kids or to anyone else’s. I don’t want to leave this divided of a country to anyone else. I don’t want to leave a country where we are told it’s OK to hate each other and that your neighbor is the enemy. And so while I judge MAGA politicians, I don’t judge MAGA voters — and I don’t even use that phrase. Why? Because I want them to take a breath and to say, “OK, you know, let’s do something better. You know, this went too far. Let’s repair the wounds that we have,” so that we don’t move from retribution from one side to retribution to another side, and back and forth and back and forth, but that we get something more like what we had growing up. 

When you were talking, I thought of another scripture — “the repairer of the breach” from the Book of Isaiah, which Bill Clinton used quite a bit. That’s kind of what you’re talking about, bringing people back together, healing divides.

I feel like we’ve done that better in Kentucky than most places. I still don’t always agree with the way people vote, but if you look at where we were with [my predecessor as governor] Matt Bevin, [who was] going after everybody who is different, othering anyone and everyone, judging everyone . . . Look at where we are now. That last [presidential] election, you didn’t see nearly the signs or the flags or anything else. You saw people who, in the very least, wanted to genuinely respect their neighbors.

You talk about that happening here in Kentucky. How do you think that can begin nationally, though, when a lot of MAGA Republicans out there think, as you write in the book, that “Democrats are Satan in the flesh”?

Well, Republicans right now are costing them about $4,500 extra a year in tariffs, about $800 extra a year in gas. If they need diesel, it’s even worse. So they might think that Democrats are Satan in the flesh, but Republicans are bankrupting them. If you want to eat, to be able to afford groceries for yourself or your kid, if you want to be able to see a pediatrician for your child in your own community, you’re going to think about things a little bit different. Democrats have the chance to grab that lane. And we should be. That’s where we should want to be. That’s certainly where I’ve always governed. 

Think about a soybean farmer, and you and I both know we got a lot in Kentucky, and I’m not sure if any of them voted for Kamala Harris. But look at what’s happened to them. First, the USAID program’s eliminated. That’s one of their major clients, because if you feed starving nations, people like the United States better. Then [Education Secretary] Linda McMahon comes in, using her wrestling knowledge, to end the farm-to-cafeteria program. Then Donald Trump — and he alone decides on tariffs — throws them on China, and they stop buying our soybeans. They’re the largest purchaser in the world. They move to Brazil and Argentina.

Then he decides to get in a war with Iran that he doesn’t even explain to the American people a couple days before in his State of the Union. And now the price of diesel, which runs all farm equipment, is at an all-time high. If that’s not enough, a third of the world’s fertilizer runs through the Strait of Hormuz. So, a soybean farmer that voted for Donald Trump, who believed that was their guy, is totally betrayed, trying to decide if they’re going to plant crops at all, or if Donald Trump has bankrupted their family farm.

You’re the most popular Democratic governor in the country, according to the polls, and this book is introducing you and your beliefs to a whole other set of people, of potential voters. What are your plans for 2028?

Well, I haven’t made any final decisions, but I will say when I walked off the stage in 2023 . . . I looked at [my wife] Britainy, and I said, “Hoo, I’ll never have to run for anything ever again.” As I’m here today, I’m not sure that’s the case anymore. And I’ll make that decision later. 

But I think about two core tenets of my faith. Number one, that I am made by a loving God that calls me to love other people, and that ought to be the baseline. And number two, I ought to leave things better than I found them.  

Listen: When you’re governor of a place you love, it’s enough. It’s special. What we’ve done in Kentucky together, all of us, people of all different parties over the last seven years, [has] been transformational, and I couldn’t be more proud — and I was willing to go out on top . . .  But I can’t watch a country slide back. I can’t see progress that folks in Selma marched for 60 years ago, undone by a rogue Supreme Court. So I don’t know exactly what my role will be in the future, but I just will not leave a broken country to my kids or anyone else’s. I will not.

I want to ask you sort of a different question. Let’s say that a popular Democratic governor, who has been elected twice to that job in what many see as one of the reddest states in the country, decides to run for president. What would they offer the American people?

Well, a vision of both reviving the American dream, of proving to people [who] believe the economy is broken that it can work again. That if you work hard and play by the rules that you can get ahead — that you can take your kids on the same vacation that you went on, that you can leave your family better off. That we can fix the darn government that people look at as corrupt right now, and we can heal this divide that is such a threat to our future as Americans. And none of us enjoy — none of us wants to be mad at the person that lives across from us. I think we can get back to being, yes, an imperfect nation, but one that’s stable, [where] at least we are moving toward progress each and every day.

Right now, polls are showing that Democratic voters want fighters, leaders who are unafraid of punching back against corrupt and MAGA politicians. Some Democratic politicians are resorting to using strong language, dropping F-bombs to get their point across. You, by contrast, have built your political identity on leading with kindness. “Kentucky’s Mister Rogers” is how many people see you. One of your book’s chapters is titled “Be the Adult in the Room.” So I wonder if you think there’s room for that kind of politics in the party and America today, coming in the wake of Donald Trump.

Don’t mistake kindness for weakness. If I’m Kentucky’s “Mister Rogers” — he went up against Trump before Trump. He went up against a Republican incumbent governor that attacked him every day for four years, and the “Mister Rogers” is the one still standing. A lot of people can claim they’re fighting in different ways from the bluest of states. How many people have sued [Trump] 30-plus times from the reddest of states? How many people speak out against him when it could negatively impact their approval rating instead of positively impact their approval rating? 

You know, every day that I stand up for Kentuckians and Americans, every day that I fight back against this administration, I have more to lose than anybody else. But what’s an approval rating worth if you’re not going to use it for something? So there are different ways to fight, and here’s what I’d say to a lot of people: If somebody’s yelling, and you yell back, then nobody can hear a thing. There’s effective ways to defeat that person to fight and win. But shouldn’t we want one that will actually win in the end? And so I think that when people look at who’s fighting in the hardest of places, they see this governor. 

The midterms are about six weeks away. What do you think the Democratic Party is getting right, and where do you think it’s falling short?

I think that they are getting right how hard the world is on American families right now. I hate to use the “affordability” word, because I believe it’s becoming like a political science term. What it really [means] is that your medical bills cost too much. That’s why we forgave $250 million in medical debt here in Kentucky [via executive order]. It’s that your utility bill is going up. It’s that groceries are too much, and my goodness, gas is through the roof. We need to make sure that we’re communicating in terms that the American people communicate in. 

You said something at a recent book event that caught my ear, that the Democrats have gone too far on a few things. I’m wondering what those might be.

We went too far on overregulation. We’ve got to protect our environment, we’ve got to protect our workers. But if we make things so onerous, then it takes a long time to accomplish anything. If you believe we need more housing, and it takes that much longer to build housing, then people lose out. If it takes too long to build a factory, you don’t have those jobs that pay the good wages. So we’ve got to have a sense of urgency . . . Democrats have to design our policies in a way to get results, and if we believe truly in something, even if we’re only 80% right on what the policy looks like, understanding if we get it done faster, it benefits more people.

You come from what many observers would call the party’s more traditional wing. Right now, there’s a lot of energy behind progressives like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan, and democratic socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani. Do you think there’s room in the party for this wide range of political identities?

I think — and you’re not doing it — but I think that the media tries to put everybody in a box to have a narrative. How many people in a Trump plus-30 state that have vetoed every anti-LGBTQ+ bill that [has reached] their desk would suddenly be lumped in as a moderate? And that’s not to suggest I view myself as a progressive. I just — I don’t view myself as either. I view myself as pragmatic.

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My job is to stand up for my people and all their rights, live out my faith and to see everyone as a child of God, but [also] to solve problems. And that’s where Democratic governors are. You know, I think that this debate can play out in the House and in the U.S. Senate, where they might have different caucuses. But governors aren’t one of 50 or one of 24 in a party. You’re one of one, and your job, if you’re doing it right, is to get things done, to actually improve people’s lives. So, I can’t be as ideological as someone who votes on the amendment to the rule, right? My job has to be to figure out how to get the best results for our people on each and every day. 

Are you worried that Republican attempts to deploy terms like “communist” across the board will hurt the Democratic brand overall?

Oh, I think what the president’s doing is so hyperbolic and so transparent that people see right through it. There is only one elected official in the entire country actively engaged in socialism, and his name is Donald J. Trump. 

The definition of socialism is government ownership of the means of production, and he is the only person negotiating a U.S. government interest in a private company. But, you know, what you do is you call people the name that you’re worrying that you are, and so he’s calling people “communist.” So now that he’s engaged in socialism, which he is, what is the difference between that and communism? It is the people in charge enriching themselves, which he and his family are doing. It’s turning the police and the justice system into your own personal force, which is what he’s doing. You see in each and every one of these that the things that Trump is calling people is what he’s actively engaged in.

The post The gospel according to Andy Beshear appeared first on Salon.com.

One of AI’s fiercest critics believes the doom talk is about founders making money, not saving humanity.

“You don’t have to wait around to change the world.”

That’s Tom Morello talking about the heroes that inspired his song “Date Night,” featured on his new solo album, “Everyone Gets Everything They Want.” “Date Night” is the story of the Oversteegen sisters, Truus and Freddie, and their friend Hannie Schaft, three young Dutch women whose act of patriotism and rebellion during WWII involved utilizing their feminine wiles to (among other things) seduce Nazis and lure them to their deaths. Unless you’re into feminist history, this is probably the first time you’re hearing those names; it’s definitely not well-known lore. So how did Morello end up writing a song about the Oversteegen sisters?

“It’s an unknown story,” Morello agreed, speaking with Salon last month. “It’s a story that deserves to be told. For years, I kept waiting for someone to make a movie about it. Nobody did. So I actually shopped a movie about it, called ‘Date Night,’ and no one was interested.” 

He continued, “And I thought, ‘Well, here’s the difference between my line of work and that line of work. In that line of work, you’ve got to get some stuffy studio executives to write a check for $50,000,000 in order to bring a story to life that someone might ruin with a poor director.” He pauses. “I’m going to write the fu*king zonk, you know what I mean? And it’s going to arrive tomorrow. And it’s going to be exactly like I want to tell it.” And zonk it is, indeed; “Date Night” is an exhilarating, high-velocity, uplifting song with a surprisingly singable chorus. It would have sounded fantastic over a movie’s closing credits. 

“It’s a story that’s just been in me for a while and deserves — especially at this particular historical juncture — a telling of how people can stand [up],” Morello said. “You know, not all heroes wear capes, and sometimes it’s an attorney who stands up for the right thing. Sometimes it’s a student who stands up in class for the right thing. And sometimes it’s three teenage girls who have had enough of the Nazis occupying their country, and they stand up for the right thing. Now, that’s a fantastic story and all, but now you need some badass riffs and a guitar solo to go with it.”

The badass riffs in this particular case are courtesy of Roman Morello, the 15-year-old son of our interviewee, who joined his dad’s band when he was 13. Morello the Younger is all over the record, but this isn’t a party trick — he’s also sharing co-writes on five songs. Morello Senior explains that Roman began playing guitar during the pandemic “and kind of got his 10,000 hours in early.”

But when your dad is famous, he’s still your dad. How do you negotiate professional boundaries with a 15-year-old? Morello laughs. “So the first crazy thing is, when you’re playing with this little kid, he’s your son in your band, and then the weirder and crazier thing is when it just becomes normal. Like, he’s just a dude in my band now, you know what I mean? I just count on him. He’s super professional. He blows the roof off the place when you give him the nod, and he’s cute as a button.”

Spoken like a dad! But this actually brings us back to “Date Night.” “Another thing about emphasizing the efficacy of youthful endeavor in changing the world is the riff of the song was written by Roman,” Morello explained. “And I sit and listen outside his door and poach his best riffs as they come out. But this was one where I was like, I’ve been looking for a home for this riff, and then that riff merged in a song that we’re both very proud of.”

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Another element of “Date Night” is that the lyrics tell the story from the point of view of the women. It’s not necessarily a perspective one expects to be accompanied by the kind of scorching guitar riffs adorning “Date Night.” Morello explained his approach: “I was trying to find my way in and how, in three short verses, do you get the picture of the art and craft of killing Nazis when you’re an occupied teenage girl in the Netherlands. I’m very familiar with the history of all three of them in the particular cases, and in the particular case we’re talking about, they needed that guy’s uniform, they needed his papers and they laid the trap.” 

He continued: “But their story is more expansive than just killing some Nazi officers in the woods. It was a lot of collaborators they went after as well. And at this historical juncture, that is something to think about. They rescued Jewish children from persecution and hid them from the Nazis. They destroyed Nazi infrastructure. And Hannie [Schaft, who was caught by the Nazis] was 14 when she started this.”

“And I’m constantly reminded — I did my senior thesis at Harvard on student movements in South Africa. And the people that changed the country were 14, 15, 16 years old. These girls [in ‘Date Night’] were 14 to 19 when they began their guerrilla warfare campaign against the fascists,” Morello said. “And I think it’s just a reminder that you don’t have to wait around to change the world. It’s been done within the immediate past by people who are no different than high school students down the block.”

Beyond this one song, there’s a lot more to think about on the rest of “Everyone Gets Everything They Want.” It is packed full of the kind of loud, vibrating guitar noise you’d expect to hear in a Tom Morello joint, and that’s not a criticism: when you have your own distinctive sound, you should absolutely make prodigious use of that particular talent. “Beth from Electronics” is a hard rock overture, an introduction that makes it clear to the listener that in case you think this is another folk-based protest album it informs you in short order (literally — it’s just 43 seconds long) that it absolutely is not. 

“Adjourn It” is a duet (more like a duel, actually) with System of A Down’s Serj Tankian, with Tankian taking the exhortative choruses while Morello’s droll baritone narrates the verses, playing the villain. The two trade off against a background of quieter rhythmic burbles (bass courtesy Roman Morello) and louder, more martial riffs, a neat slicing guitar solo and a bridge with a racing drum-and-guitar interlude that wouldn’t be out of place in a thrash metal song.

 

There are quieter songs — “quieter” being relative here — like one of two ballads on the record, “I Am Not Yours To Command.” It’s Morello half-speaking, half-singing against a gentle piano melody that emotionally underscores the song’s message of quiet defiance: “Maybe you can save me/Maybe you can’t/Maybe you can liberate me/Nah, I’ll take care of that.” The title track balances ringing classic rock chords mixed with Morello’s trademark Bomb Squad-esque riffs against a half-spoken, half-chanted narration and a white-hot guitar solo. It sticks in your head long after you finish the album.

This record is, somehow, Tom Morello’s first official rock ‘n’ roll solo outing, despite everything that’s preceded it. It’s because Morello is a musical polymath who has utilized his fame to allow himself to make whatever kind of music he wants to be making: from Rage Against the Machine to Audioslave, from the Nightwatchman to Prophets of Rage, to his now-ongoing role as third guitarist in the E Street Band to the Street Sweeper Social Club (his project with Boots Riley), to the EDM-influenced improbable collaborations released under the moniker The Atlas Underground — there’s more, but it’s enough to give you the basic gist.

Morello can do whatever he wants, and he does, up to and including the curation of his upcoming Power To The People Festival in October (“A Day of Peace, Love, Justice and Music”), along with launching a charity in honor of his late mother: The Mary Morello Memorial Project. Fans of RATM may recall Mary Morello’s now-legendary introductions of the band in its heyday (usually “The best fu*king band in the universe”), but they also just as likely know about her work as a social justice activist who also founded the anti-censorship organization Parents For Rock And Rap at the height of Tipper Gore’s PMRC hysteria. 

To continue on the subject of family, what did teenage rebellion look like in the Morello household when he was growing up? Morello chuckled. “As far as teenage rebellion, Mary Morello is the most rebellious person I’ve ever met in my life. You can’t outflank her, in any way, shape, or form. Really, the only conflict we ever really had [of] that sort of a stereotypical teenage rebellion is when I got my driver’s license. I didn’t have a curfew before my driver’s license. I did have a curfew after my driver’s license. And this, to me, felt like an injustice greater than apartheid. How have we taken rights away from this angsty teenager? But my mom and I were always very much politically aligned, and it was a real blessing to have been raised by somebody like that.”

“Everyone Gets Everything They Want” isn’t a concept record; even if all of the songs are essentially sharing the same themes, none of which are new to Morello: change and justice, injustice and fighting back, righting wrongs, the simple act of standing up and saying something isn’t right. That’s not nothing, even, and especially in 2026, when many artists prefer to remain silent. 

And sometimes defiance is a small gesture, like who you invite to sing on your record, which in peacetime is an artistic action, for fun or a simple desire to collaborate, but nowadays could also have larger meaning and impact. In addition to the collab with Serj Tankian — another musician making loud noises who is also an advocate for social justice — there’s also a collab with Belfast’s Kneecap, who rap in Gaelic and English on the blistering track “Unconquered.” It’s probably the strongest song on the record.

It’s not necessarily surprising that artists with a reputation for being politically outspoken would join forces, but it’s not like there’s a newsletter they all belong to, and while Kneecap have an international reputation, they’re not as well-known by a general public. When asked how they first came on his radar, Morello explained, “I actually became aware of them a couple summers ago. I was getting a tour of West Belfast by some veterans of the Troubles. And we ended up late night at this tiny bar . . . and there was just this huge graffitied “Kneecap” next to the bar. I didn’t even know what that word meant. Over the course of the next week or so, I learned there’s these youngsters from West Belfast who really like drugs; you know, that was the first thing I learned about them. And they were kind of a popular band.”

“All of a sudden they were able to find in their lived experience, and history of occupation and oppression, the courage as these young rappers who — the first things on their minds might have been more cocaine oriented than, you know, Middle Eastern politics-oriented. But they just absolutely stood up fearlessly in a way that reminded me of the best of Rage Against the Machine, of speaking truth to power regardless of the consequences, and unequivocally standing up for what they believe in and putting their, their music, and their lives on the line. That’s the dangerous kind of rock ‘n’ roll that I want to be involved with.” 

He continued, “We made an absolute banger, an absolute banger . . . they [asked], ‘Any direction?’ And I said, I think there were three directions. One is it’s got to be called ‘Unconquered.’ Two, it’s got to be a song that either one of us could open a show, open or close our shows with. And three, it’s got to have a hook that people, regardless of their political persuasion, are gonna have to go, that’s a fu*king banger.”

The riffs on “Unconquered” are incredibly satisfying and will probably result in the kind of response Morello’s hoping for, where he’s going to reel in folks who will then turn around and complain about what they mean, the way every one of Morello’s even slightly political social media posts has at least one response from an allegedly now-former RATM fan, somehow newly surprised at the guitarist’s mindset. Morello laughs. “I’ve been doing that for 3 decades. That’s my wheelhouse: disappointing fans when they find out what the songs are really about.”

Morello summed up this project by talking about everything that preceded it: “This is the 22nd album of my career, right? And is the first Tom Morello solo rock album. It really is. I’ve done collaborative rock albums. I’ve done band albums, I’ve done folk and Americana records, but this is the first one that is intentional — over the course of the last five or six years, I’ve been playing with my spectacular backup band, the Freedom Fighter Orchestra. Whereas in the past, my touring has been compartmentalized. This is the folk tour. This is the EDM-influenced art house tour. This is the Prophets of Rage Tour.”

He continued, “And of course, the last five, six, seven years, I’ve been embracing the totality of my career. Like, those Rage Against the Machine riffs, I love those, and I’m going to play them, and the world needs them. They’re in the DNA of rebels of all ages. Chris Cornell, I miss him every day, and I want to pay tribute to him and hear the crowd sing those beautiful melodies that he wrote, you know? I embraced the Nightwatchman stuff — that was such an incredibly richly satisfying second act for me, to be able to, in my mid-30s, become a singer-songwriter. And so I want all of those elements, but first and foremost, it’s got to be a devastatingly kick-ass, rip-oriented, guitar-solo, tearing-your-head-off, rock and roll album. That’s what we’ve made.” 

The post Tom Morello wants to make dangerous rock ‘n’ roll again appeared first on Salon.com.

Kathy Griffin apologizes in advance for all the noise. On the day we connected by phone, she expected a lot of activity in her Malibu home, including air-conditioning repairers and the usual four or five yapping dogs. “It’s mayhem,” she said.

We’ve all been there. Regular viewers of her YouTube series, “Talk Your Head Off with Kathy Griffin,” can actually picture it, since every episode is shot in her home, on her couch, with Griffin and that week’s guest snuggled up to a pooch pile.

“It’s the cutest thing: they see the lights being put up and then they just take the seat on the couch,” she said.

Team Griffin, she says, is a very bare-bones operation. When Griffin decided to jump into the video talk show arena, she initially thought she’d need a whole shiny studio before shooting the first episode in her living room. People like it, she says, because they feel like they’ve been invited over to her house. And it’s catching on.

“The only way I know that is it doesn’t get like a gazillion views, but I’m in the Daily Mail and Page Six pretty much every two weeks,” she noted. “It’s funny, they finally figured out that if they want to get me in trouble and keep bringing me up about how, you know, anti-Trump I am … all they have to do is watch the half-hour YouTube show, and they can get all the sound bites.”

Since we’re talking to and about Kathy Griffin, we can’t rightly quote the old saying that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Nine years ago, the bad press about a photo of Griffin holding a mask made to look like the bloodied head of Donald Trump nearly ended her.

Overnight, the “My Life on the D-List” and “Fashion Police” star transformed into a national traitor.

While it would be terrific to liken her fate to that of Deborah Vance on “Hacks,” at least Jean Smart’s diva got a Vegas rebirth. Griffin, the woman who played Carnegie Hall five times, couldn’t book a show anywhere. That meant going for eight years without income, dropping from the D-list to a comedy blacklist and, as she confessed in her 2024 comeback show “My Life on the PTSD List,” a suicide attempt.

What I’m saying is, do not whine to Kathy Griffin about cancel culture. She’s lived through it, not the version stand-up bros claim to have suffered during their latest Netflix specials.

That makes her unique among all those commenting on the Macklemore and Ed Sheeran situation. When we spoke, the news had recently broken that billionaire stadium owner Robert Kraft pressured Sheeran to cut Macklemore from his tour following a performance of his protest anthem “Hind’s Hall,” punctuated with a “Free Palestine” declaration.

And Griffin didn’t mince words. “I am just a D-lister . . . but I have been under more pressure than Ed Sheeran,” she said. “I know what it’s like to be pressured by authorities to change something you’re doing in your art or what you do for a living.

“If I can stand up to the president of the United States and the Department of Justice and the Attorney General of the United States, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and the Secret Service, and say ‘No, I’m doing what I want,’” Griffin offered, then so can everyone else.

“It’s time that all public people with a platform grow some balls, because I had to in 2017,” she added. “And let me tell you, the cheese stood alone.”

That crucible reforged Griffin into a political phoenix. She’s hitting 50 cities on her “New Face, New Tour” circuit and has a Palm Springs residency set for early 2027.

Griffin still has plenty of stories about her run-ins with Hollywood names. But her foray into topical talk has lit a fire in her spirit. Of course, while that territory is relatively new to her, Griffin’s male peers have been welding their routines to politics for years now without being ruined by the resulting blowback. Dave Chappelle’s anti-trans punchlines, for example, played a role in emboldening politicians to enact discriminatory policies against that community. Griffin called Chappelle’s case a tricky one because while she doesn’t love his views, she still considers him to be a friend. Besides, “He got like ‘fake canceled,’ but he didn’t get Kathy Griffin-ed, which is the ultimate.”

No question that on every level, stand-up comedy has gotten meaner over the last decade. Perhaps that’s changing, I suggested to Griffin. She agreed, to a point. The appeal of slinging around epithets for shock value is waning, but the country is still very divided.

“I feel like a lot of these Joe Rogan-type bros are really fighting actual evolution and progress,” she said. “Comedy is a fluid art, and I really believe strongly you have to change along with it; you’ve got to go with it. And in my case, I try to drive it in my little storytelling way. … I don’t tell hacky one-liners that their buddies wrote for them backstage. I write all my own material. It all comes out of my life. I tell stories that are all true.

Griffin continued, “So I think these comics that are complaining about use of language or where to try to sneak in this naughty word – that’s just childlike behavior or, like, trying to get away with something to see if you can. And there’s a place for that where you don’t have to use words that were used during the murder of people that came before you to have the privilege of even standing onstage.”

Then she pauses. “Listen to me, all angry today!” Griffin joked.

But she didn’t sound angry, simply real.

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Honesty has always been Griffin’s superpower, and in this new chapter it lends her the air of a happy warrior. When Griffin speaks with “Talk Your Head Off” guests about, for instance, the effects of media consolidation or what a political candidate stands for, she takes pains to pause and make sure her audience knows the who, what and why of it all.

Griffin can’t assume the average “Talk Your Head Off” viewer thinks the old guys running it all have the same level of celebrity as, say, her friend Cher. And yet she has a gift for making politics relatable without enraging rhetoric since, as she points out, political figures are celebrities too.

As for the residual costs of exercising her right to offend back in 2017, Griffin confirmed that some of her shows still draw protesters. But these days they’re less of a threat than just material.

“They’re so pitiful because they’re usually just, like, 20 people,” she said, “and they’ve detailed their car where there’s a picture of Trump, but he looks like Rambo. They’ve painted it on their actual vehicle.

“I mean, they’re always fun to film,” she added, “so please watch my socials.”

“Kathy Griffin: My Life on the PTSD List” is available to stream on YouTube.

 

 

The post Kathy Griffin still won’t stay silent appeared first on Salon.com.

Fans des 90er-Jahre-Kinos und von Arcade-Action mit Retro-Tugenden haben lange darauf gewartet, nun ist Terminator 2D – No Fate auf PC, PS4/5, Switch, Xbox One und Xbox Series X|S erschienen. Das Spiel von Bitmap Bureau lässt euch die Handlung von Termiantor 2: Tag der Abrechnung als Run-and-Gun im Stil von Contra nacherleben – in der Rolle von Sarah Connor und dem T-800 in der Gegenwart und als John Connor in der Zukunft.

Passend dazu veröffentlichen wir die Aufzeichnung eines Interviews, das Jörg Langer auf der Gamescom 2025 mit Mike Tucker führte, seines Zeichens Mitgründer von Bitmap Bureau und Design Director von Terminator 2D – No Fate. Das Gespräch wurde auf Englisch geführt, Jörg fasst die Aussagen von Mike immer wieder kurz zusammen. Mike Tucker verrät unter anderem, wie Bitmap Bureau an die Terminator-Lizenz kam und teast mögliche Portierungen für Retro-Konsolen an, die schon für frühere Titel des Studios wie Xeno Crisis produziert wurden.

Bei unserem Schwestermagazin GamersGlobal.de erschien derweil Kai Schmidts PC-Test von Terminator 2D – No Fate. Kai mag Kino und Arcade-Spaß und hatte entsprechend seine Freude mit der Spielumsetzung des Klassikers, aber ihm fehlt doch etwas in seinem Meinungskasten:

Die Steuerung funktioniert klasse, es gibt genügend Abwechslung, und die Action flutscht wie ein gut geöltes Maschinengewehr. Wäre Terminator 2D – No Fate damals in den 90ern erschienen, hätte es heute wohl einen Platz auf meiner Liste der besten Spiele aller Zeiten inne. Dieser nicht vorhandene Nostalgiefaktor ist es allerdings, der mich am Ende ein wenig zurückhaltend bleiben lässt.

Die Arcade-Action ist ohne Zweifel gut, aber mit nur etwa einer Stunde für einen Story-Durchgang auch ziemlich kurz. Und nach drei Durchgängen mit zwei Entscheidungen hat man alles gesehen. In diesem Zusammenhang möchte ich euch unbedingt ans Herz legen, nicht auf der leichtesten Schwierigkeitsstufe zu spielen. Unbegrenzte Continues klingen zwar verführerisch, doch das Spiel wird durch viel zu leichte Gegner und generell weniger Gefahren auch stark verwässert.

Terminator 2D fehlt es neben Inhalten auch an Motivation. Klar kann ich mich nach der Story mit Boss-Rush und Time Attack beschäftigen oder durch harte Arbeit das Cheat-Menü freischalten, doch das ist nichts, was mich längerfristig an das Spiel fesselt. Klassiker des Genres motivieren mich längerfristig vor allem mit Koop-Modi für zwei Spieler. Ein Contra 3 kann ich beispielsweise jederzeit einlegen und trotz kurzer Spieldauer mit einem Gleichgesinnten auf der Couch zocken. Das macht Spaß wie eh und je. Terminator 2D bietet sich durch seine Struktur natürlich nicht unbedingt dafür an, würde aber deutlich an Wiederspielwert gewinnen und seinen doch recht hohen Preis besser rechtfertigen.

Alles in allem ist Terminator 2D nicht ganz so gut wie das ähnlich gelagerte Neon Inferno, aber keinesfalls schlecht und meilenweit von dem Schund entfernt, der seinerzeit zum Filmstart auf den Konsolen erschien!

PRO
+ Gegner, Gegnerverhalten und Gefahren variieren pro Schwierigkeitsstufe

+ Durchspielen schaltet neue Modi, alternative Enden und ein Cheat-Menü frei

+ Detaillierte Pixel-Art-Hintergründe und liebevoll animierte Figuren

CONTRA
– Nur 45 bis 60 Minuten pro Durchgang und nach dem dritten Durchspielen habt ihr alles gesehen

– Maximal zwei Abschnitte mit dem T-800 (der zudem nicht Arnies Gesicht hat)

– Fahrsequenzen recht dröge

 

Den ganzen Test mit 4K-Video findet ihr auf GamersGlobal. Und was haltet ihr vom neuen Werk von Bitmap Bureau?