It’s really hard to take Secretary of State Marco Rubio seriously. He’s a child of immigrants who has cynically sold his political soul to the most anti-immigrant administration in modern American history, one headed by the man from whom Rubio endured humiliating verbal abuse during his failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. But Rubio is all-in for Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. Last week he was on the world stage in Athens, Greece, for the sixth U.S.-Greece Strategic Dialogue, trying to put a good spin on what he called the Trump administration’s “unapologetic pursuit of national power.” 

The hollowness and hypocrisy of this boasting is plain to see: When Rubio warns that such pursuit of power is justified because “there is war again,” it’s impossible not to think of the administration’s needless war of choice against Iran and its catastrophic impact on the global economy. Same with his attempt at celebrating Trump’s investment in the “new frontier” of “super intelligence,” the president’s favored term for the deeply unpopular products of the environmentally and economically disastrous artificial intelligence industry. The lengths to which Rubio has to go to try to praise this administration’s unpopular policies would be laughable if they hadn’t all been so harmful on a global scale.

Where does a high-ranking representative of a failed administration turn when they’re in an impossible rhetorical situation like Rubio’s? As I argued in “The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate,” there’s a time-honored and finely tuned template for trying to make the ideas that define the administration’s worldview seem respectable, natural and desirable: Linking those ideas to a period of history you believe most of your audience has been taught to admire and take seriously. A speech at the Pnyx, where Athenians once gathered for popular assemblies that birthed democracy, provided a perfect opportunity to link America First to ancient Greek statecraft. Framed against the Acropolis, Rubio trotted out a whole raft of old slogans about how lofty ideals like “heroism,” “honor,” “duty,” “virtue” and “courage” characterize both the culture of “the West” and, by extension, the Trump administration’s supposed reclamation of those “not just for our country, but for the whole of our civilization.” 

But scratch the surface of the history Rubio cited, and those ideals look about as worthy of celebration as a new data center being built in your hometown or having to pay $6 a gallon for diesel.

The secretary’s examples of Western heroism were the Spartans at Thermopylae and the philosopher Socrates, both of whom, he said, illustrate the “Western” willingness to “pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.” But the Spartan militarism that Rubio so admires came to define the city state’s culture only because they had no choice but to devote all state resources to maintaining an army sufficient to suppress the revolts of the massive number of enslaved fellow Greeks upon whom the Spartan economy depended. And the most plausible explanation for why Socrates was executed is that he had been an intellectual mentor to several of the men who ruled Athens as a violent, dictatorial junta in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian war; it was Socrates’ student Plato, who devoted his talent to sanitizing the political reputation of his teacher by painting him as a courageous free-thinker. 

Rubio mentioned the influence of Plato as a key link between ancient Greece and the founding of the United States. But Plato’s influence upon the framers of the U.S. Constitution consisted primarily in legitimizing their conception of the new nation as an inegalitarian state in which only those whom they deemed worthy would have access to political power. 

Yes, Socrates taught and Plato wrote, as Rubio said, in the Parthenon’s shadow. But when ancient Greeks looked at that temple they saw a monument not to democracy but to the wealth and power Athens had amassed for itself by its coercive, imperial treatment of their fellow Greeks. The construction of the Parthenon was funded by income from the lopsided, extortionate alliances into which Athens bullied other city-states on the pretext of providing protection against the defeated Persians coming back to impose slavery upon the Greeks. It almost seems that Rubio knows this, because his warning to Europe sounds a lot like that ancient Athenian propaganda: “The course we take will determine whether the West . . . resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline.”

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Oppression and exploitation of marginalized groups, promotion of authoritarian rule, imperial domination and wealth extraction; these aren’t aspects of “Western Civilization” that anyone should be proud of. But Rubio is, or said he is, because these are the aspects of that heritage that correspond most closely to the Trump administration’s view of the world. 

In fact, the secretary’s speech was pretty direct about this. When Rubio decried how, before Trump, “we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history,” he can only be referring to the removal of Confederate statues that served to celebrate white supremacy. His grandiose description of America before European colonization as “an open and wild land” that “became the site of a great revival of Western imagination and ambition” erased the role of genocide and displacement of Native Americans people in this process.

But why should anyone be surprised to hear something so egregiously shameful from a Trump administration official? This is the very history that Trump has worked to suppress in museums, including the Smithsonian, and national parks nationwide. 

You can sense the desperation for legitimacy in Rubio’s choice to give this speech in Athens, where he hoped the ruins of the parthenon would lend prestige to his claims. You can sense it in the fulsomeness of his praise of “Western Civilization,” as if just repeating “virtue” or “honor” enough times will paper over the corruption scandal surrounding U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle. These visual and rhetorical clichés are intended to make Trump’s policies look respectable, but all they do here is reveal the profound weakness of the administration. They can’t point to any genuinely positive accomplishments. Going into the midterm elections Trump and his party have nothing to run on. So instead we get a speech like this — a ham-fisted appeal to the die-hard MAGA base, the kind of people who actually want to live in a dictatorial, corrupt police state and to delude themselves about history. 

But polls show that group is growing smaller every day. Americans aren’t falling for it anymore.

The post Rubio’s Greece speech is MAGA’s latest classical cover story appeared first on Salon.com.

Greg Abbott is worried. After three terms as Texas governor, the Republican had every reason to believe the office was his as long as he wanted it. But Abbott is now seeing his Democratic opponent, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, get uncomfortably close to him in the polls. Suddenly, the governor has to be mindful of negative press, something he’s lost practice at in the decade-plus he’s been in office. Abbott avoided a recent campaign stop from Donald Trump, lest he be seen in the vicinity of the unpopular president or Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who appears to be facing an uphill battle in his own Senate race against state Rep. James Talarico. The governor is so concerned about his re-election prospects that he recently reversed his position on data centers, which have grown increasingly unpopular, and is now calling for moratoriums and restrictions on their construction. But one issue Abbott hasn’t budged on is his all-out war on public education.

Schools in Texas are wildly underfunded, with hundreds having to reduce students to four days a week. This is very much by Abbott’s design. As Jessica Grose of the New York Times explained on Oct. 7, the governor signed into law a voucher program whose entire purpose is paying parents to take kids out of school and put them into unregulated “alternatives” — such as private schools or homeschooling — that have no real requirements to offer children an actual education. Since local school funding is tied to student head count, this has created a backdoor way to funnel money out of already-struggling public schools. 

Even in deeply conservative rural and suburban areas, Abbott’s policy is unpopular; a June 2026 University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll found that only 33% of Texans approve of his performance on education. As Grose notes, public schools are the heart of many Texas communities, especially when it comes to high school football. (As a native Texan, I can attest that the “Friday Night Lights” lifestyle is real.) Watching the governor concoct elaborate schemes to siphon money from beloved local institutions into unregulated religious programs and homeschooling is enraging people, so much so that some lifelong Republican leaders are announcing they will be voting for a Democrat for the first time ever. It helps that Hinojosa, whose entrance into holding office was being on the Austin school board, has made saving Texas schools the centerpiece of her campaign. 

Considering education is the issue that could sink Abbott, it raises the question: Why not back down? After all, he shifted gears on data centers. But when it comes to this policy, which is undermining and could even start closing beloved local schools, the governor will not budge. To the contrary, he has burned a lot of bridges within the GOP in his war on public schools, backing primary opponents of anti-voucher Republicans in the legislature until he’d tilted the scales to get this done. 

Money is the likeliest answer. As Grose notes, Abbott’s war on education is backed by three powerful Texas billionaires — and major conservative donors — Tim Dunn and a pair of brothers, Farris and Dan Wilks. The trio made their fortunes in oil. But their single-minded hatred of public schools is rooted in evangelical Christianity.

“If you ever wonder why state laws and policies are more radical than most Texans would prefer, the answer has a lot to do with Dunn and his checkbook,” Russell Gold wrote in Texas Monthly in 2024. The same is true of the Filks brothers, who share Dunn’s dream of turning Texas into a far-right Christian theocracy.

When not throwing money at Republican politicians willing to back their Christian nationalist agenda, both Dunn and Farris Wilks preach from the pulpit, pushing religious views that are far right of even most evangelicals. Wilks led the Assembly of Yahweh 7th Day Church in Eastland County for 31 years, a congregation where women are apparently forbidden to speak in church. In 2010, he delivered a sermon where he said “our country died” when Barack Obama was elected. “I do believe we live in a nation that will start to vomit some of its people out,” he said of LGBTQ people the following year. Wilks has also preached that all gay people live a “predatorial lifestyle” and “want your children.” 

Dunn has backed efforts to rewrite the Constitution to make it more amendable to his Christian nationalist views, which reportedly includes the belief that only conservative Christians should be eligible to hold office. Like Wilks, he has zeroed in on public schools as the great enemy that must be destroyed. Their main weapon has been funding primary opponents against any Republican who opposes them, which has created a state of fear within the party. Few dare cross them — including Abbott. 

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Through his Midland Bible Church, Dunn founded Midland Classical Academy, which offers a glimpse of his preferred curriculum: anti-science Biblical literalism that will leave kids unprepared for living and working as adults in the real world. The school teaches “the authority of God over every area of life” and structure education along a historical timeline “from the garden to Mesopotamia, from Greece and Rome to the Reformation and beyond.” The intense parental involvement required by the academy sounds incompatible with allowing mothers to have jobs outside of the home. 

Abbott’s war on education isn’t just financial or limited to K-12. Republicans “have established strict state controls on what can be taught, researched, and even discussed” in universities, reports The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer. The University of Texas at Austin has been strong-armed into eliminating majors in “Africana studies, Mexican American and Latino studies, women’s and gender studies, and race and migration studies.” Political science professors have been forbidden from discussing the history of racism or the struggle for queer rights. The censorship has grown so severe that one philosophy professor was told to remove Plato’s “the Republic” because the ancient Greek philosopher mentions homosexuality. 

Abbott himself doesn’t read as a Christian fundamentalist like Dunn or Wilks. While the governor hits his minimum Republican allotment of God talk, he has also managed to evade a reputation as a rabid evangelical, despite his support for abortion bans and for forcing the Ten Commandments into classrooms. Part of it is his affect, which feels more old-school Republican than Bible-waving preacher. As a Catholic, Abbott has also managed to keep a discrete distance from the evangelicals who are the backbone of the Christian nationalist movement.

But whatever his personal beliefs, Abbott has emerged as one of the GOP’s most loyal soldiers in a movement to turn America into a far-right Christian nation. His benefactors have singled out public education as the biggest obstacle to an illiberal theocratic agenda — and with good reason. Education is power. It’s not just that kids who learn to read and think critically often leave conservative religions, though that is a big fear driving the war on public schools. It’s also that education empowers the majority of Americans who don’t subscribe to fundamentalist Christianity. 

If Wilks, Dunn and other far-right billionaires can break public schools, leaving the only options as religious education or none at all, they will turn America into a hellscape. Modern people need education to hold down decent-paying jobs, and civic participation depends on the ability to read, write and reason. A population without the benefits offered by public education would largely be left intellectually, financially and spiritually impoverished — and easier to control.

The post Who really controls Greg Abbott? appeared first on Salon.com.

Forty years ago, the United States added territory for the last time.

On Nov. 4, 1986, the U.S. entered into political union with the Northern Mariana Islands, a tiny archipelago in the western Pacific that most Americans could not locate on a map. After more than two centuries of astonishing American growth, this mostly forgotten act completed the nation’s current borders.

The anniversary is notable in light of the recent security agreement between the United States, Denmark and Greenland. After repeatedly calling for American ownership of Greenland, President Donald Trump now appears prepared to accept expanded American rights there without acquiring sovereignty. The agreement illustrates a historical pattern: The United States no longer needs to annex land to achieve its strategic objectives abroad.

Previous generations of Americans assumed that their nation’s growing power would naturally lead to more territory. And for a time it did. But as the U.S. became the world’s dominant country in the 20th century, its expansion on the map slowed, then stopped.

What changed?

In its early years, the country bounded across a continent with the Louisiana Purchase, the annexation of Texas and the conquest of California. Generations of Americans debated not whether the nation should grow, but where. More land led directly to more wealth and power as the country scooped up farmland, mineral resources and harbors. The expansion came at an enormous cost to Native Americans, who were displaced and deprived of their sovereignty, and to Mexicans, whose country lost half its territory.

America’s expansion slowed in the late 19th century as it became more selective, taking some territories while passing up others. By this time, the nation was big enough that it wanted the most valuable land, not just any land. International conditions were also changing. Most of the world was now divided by fixed borders into independent states and their colonies, and international respect for those borders was growing. The U.S. increasingly exerted control over nearby countries through military interventions and pressure on their governments, but not annexation.  

After World War II, the U.S. increasingly relied on military alliances, overseas bases, trade and international institutions to project power. Territorial acquisition was no longer necessary to achieve the objectives that earlier generations had pursued through expansion.

So how did the Northern Marianas become the exception?

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After America defeated the Marianas’ colonial ruler in the Spanish-American War, it wanted a base to project power over the western Pacific. So it annexed the southernmost Mariana island, Guam, in 1898. But America declined to take the northern islands, seeing little additional strategic value in them. By this time, America’s territorial growth was winding down.

The Northern Marianas passed from Spain to Germany to Japan, and then back to the U.S. when it captured them, along with other Pacific islands, in World War II. After the war America governed all of these islands temporarily under a United Nations trust while their residents decided their political future. After years of negotiations, most of the territory eventually chose independence as three new countries with strong defense ties to the U.S. The fourth region was the Northern Marianas.

Already closely tied to Guam by culture, kinship and trade, the majority of residents wanted to follow their neighbor’s path as a U.S. territory. Washington didn’t strongly push for this outcome, but it accepted the islanders’ decision and Ronald Reagan completed the process in 1986. After a history of aggressive expansion and conquest, this was a rare example of a territory joining the U.S. through its own free choice, rather than being pursued.

The islands became a self-governing U.S. commonwealth, similar to Puerto Rico, and eligible residents gained U.S. citizenship. They are part of the country, but not a state. Today the islands are home to fewer than 50,000 people and are best known for beaches, diving and some World War II battlefields.

 

America hasn’t added territory since, and for decades there was little reason to think it would. But Trump upended that understanding during his first term when he proposed that the U.S. buy Greenland. After his return to the White House in January 2025, he has talked about even more annexation targets, including the Panama Canal and Canada.

But Trump’s renewed interest in territorial expansion has collided with a world in which established borders are much harder to change. The international opposition to his Greenland proposal is just one of the difficulties of annexation today. The Greenland security agreement demonstrates another way forward. Rather than annexing the island, the United States appears poised to secure many of its strategic objectives without changing any borders.

Earlier presidents acquired territory because sovereignty itself delivered things they wanted: minerals, ports, military positions and control over trade routes. The modern United States can gain those advantages through military bases, defense agreements, trade relationships and alliances, without assuming responsibility for governing another population.

The Northern Marianas may seem like an unlikely place for the story of America’s growth to end, but it is precisely their isolation and lack of global power that allowed them to quietly buck the trend. Unlike Greenland, no countries objected to their joining the U.S. Unlike the Panama Canal, they aren’t crucial to the global economy. And their small population and longstanding ties to Guam made it easier to integrate them into the nation.

Forty years later, Trump is still talking about taking territory. But whether he acknowledges it or not, the president is operating in a world where the conditions that once made annexation attractive and feasible have largely disappeared. It still looks like the distant Northern Marianas will be the final act of America’s long story of territorial growth.

The post America’s last annexation holds a lesson for Trump on Greenland appeared first on Salon.com.

It’s audition day at New Jersey’s Brook Arts Center, and everyone is a bundle of nerves. Actors dot the lobby, doing vocal warm-ups between mini panic attacks and greeting old friends from past shows. This year’s production is “Nosy Neighbors,” a forgotten musical about a New York apartment building and its kooky tenants, including its superintendent, Miss Danielle — a dreamer who, despite repairing clogged toilets and collecting rent for a living, hasn’t let the city spit her out. The role is a bit part, but features a showstopping centerpiece number, the kind of song musical theater performers eat, sleep and breathe. But for mousy housewife Mona Friedman (Julianne Moore), the size of the part or the strength of the song don’t matter. Miss Danielle seems like the right choice to audition for because the role is age-appropriate, and Mona wants to be included however she can be.

And though this might be New Jersey community theater, the standards are just as high as on Broadway. Renowned local director Jerry Blankenbuehler (Paul Giamatti) demands perfection; anything less than excellence won’t touch his stage. Mona, of course, has no way of knowing this. She’s an interloper among established thespians, a woman in her late 50s who has only just begun listening to the little voice inside her, the one begging her to step outside her comfort zone. She’s up against seasoned actors and singers who know what they’re doing, whose every step, gesture and note resonates effortlessly. Yet, somehow, that doesn’t stop her. Despite her nerves, she stands in the spotlight and sings Miss Danielle’s big number. It doesn’t matter how timidly the words might’ve come out; what’s important is that Mona did it. 

This is the brilliant way writer-director Jesse Eisenberg thrusts us into his third — and best — feature, “The Debut,” screening at this year’s New York Film Festival and premiering in theaters December 11. We meet Mona in media res, nervously tapping her shoes on the carpeted lobby floor and fretting over her audition. But instead of the traditional cutthroat audition setting, where every actor silently sizes up the competition, the Brook Arts Center fosters a warm environment. Fellow actors Stef (Halle Bailey) and Trish (Bonnie Milligan) assure Mona she’ll be wonderful. And though Mona’s audition might be far from it, that little spark of community and care is all she needs to feel like she’s right where she should be.

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Finding this sense of contentment isn’t easy. Some go their whole lives searching for it, aching to find where they belong, or what gives them purpose. The longing is what makes life beautiful and also impossible. We’re so often told in childhood that we can be anything and anyone we want to be, dazzled by illustrations of astronauts smiling through their helmets while floating in space, or ballerinas gracefully twirling while dancing “The Nutcracker.” But just as often, these turn out to be children’s fantasies — wide-eyed dreams of imaginary futures, tempered by real life. Bills must be paid. Kids have to eat. We have to survive. And in the pursuit of survival, there’s rarely time for side quests.

That’s precisely why “The Debut” is such a brilliant revelation. There’s no shortage of cinematic depictions of people getting their groove back, but seldom is the search for the self portrayed with as much tender empathy as Eisenberg and Moore have for Mona — an instant all-timer in Moore’s stacked repertoire. Over the film’s blissful 105 minutes, in which Moore appears in every scene, Mona transforms before our eyes from a diffident mother of two in an unhappy marriage into the star she always could be, though not without a few bumps in the road. It’s these obstacles that make Eisenberg’s film feel all the more realistic, accurately representing how much work it takes to find oneself, an arduous process that must be experienced over and over in different ways. As Mona discovers, the stumbles are as important as the triumphs. There is no greatness without embarrassment.

But to be embarrassed, one must first get the chance to be embarrassed. The role of Miss Danielle is Mona’s to lose, and lose she does to local legend Serena Cherry (a wonderful cameo by Bernadette Peters), who gives Mona’s big song all of the polished oomph of the Great White Way. But competition isn’t any concern of Mona’s. She’s more interested in what simply auditioning made her feel, how she came alive, if only for a brief few moments until Jerry cut her off. On a double date with her husband and their best friends, Mona, beaming, tells the group that she’s auditioned for “a musical show.” Her inadvertent gaffes with industry terminology might make her seem silly and out of her depth. But they also indicate an eagerness to learn, a will that makes Mona’s eventual callback after Serena Cherry drops out of the show seem almost like manifestation.

And, really, that’s all achieving anything in this life is: manifestation. While the word has been co-opted and corrupted by vision-board romantics and TikTok gurus, it’s still the key to making what we want happen. Manifestation doesn’t mean something we want pops out of thin air just because we think about it; it means hard work and relentless effort. And if struggling is how Mona will mold herself for the theater — stretching and shaping her performance into something worthy of the greater New Jersey area’s most prolific stage — so be it.

It takes immense skill for a great actor to convincingly play a novice performer. And because Moore is so talented — so uniquely proficient at finding the human depth at the core of all her characters — she can make Mona unforgettable. Here, Moore shows reverence not only for her own craft, but for all the hopeful idealists who pine to know what it feels like to lose yourself in someone, or something, else. As Mona goes deeper into Miss Danielle, turning a minor role into something far bigger and more unwieldy than anything she or Jerry prepared for, Moore reminds us why we lie awake at night, convincing ourselves there might be more to life. We don’t just search for something that fulfills us because we want to know what it feels like to be happy in our work or hobbies; we do it to make sense out of a nonsensical life, to understand what being a human is all about.

 

To say I can relate would be an understatement. I rarely find myself both crying with laughter and crying through my laughter in the span of the same film. It moved me deeply to be tossed headlong into Mona’s life, to sit beside someone who, one day, decided that she wanted something else for herself. I saw reflections and heard echoes of all of the reservations I had about becoming a writer, telling myself that I’d never be able to conjure the commitment it takes to write consistently, afraid that everyone else had sharper, smarter worldviews than mine — that they could see things I’d never be able to. I’d convinced myself that it would take too much time to start over, and that it wasn’t worth trying. 

But, like Mona and her fond memories of childhood church choir, I couldn’t let the urge go. It wasn’t enough to simply watch films; I needed an outlet for all the ways they made me feel and all the ideas they inspired. My life didn’t feel complete just watching other people’s art. I wanted to make my own, too. And, again, like Mona, accepting that dream as a potential reality can shift your self-perception entirely. I’m not the same person I was when I first started this, and I often feel like I don’t recognize the person who first put finger to keyboard. Getting here now — typing away while I sniffle with a cold, a life I wouldn’t change for the world — required carefully deflating a rapidly overblown ego. 

There’s a tendency to think that, because one has had any success at all, be it a musical callback or a greenlit freelance piece or a short story selected for publication, that they know best. But that’s never the case, at least not in the arts. And as Eisenberg continues to remind us that this is not Mona’s musical — that everyone in the cast and crew is just as important as she is — “The Debut” starts to sing even more beautifully than it already had. 

But “The Debut” is not only for those in, or interested in, the arts. It’s a film for anyone who has put aside their desires and told themselves it’s too late or too scary to try something new. Be it gardening, ceramics, hang gliding, mountain climbing, swimming, competitive hot dog eating (well . . . consult your doctor), photography, skeet shooting, upholstery, or even just journaling, trying anything and everything to be closer to your happiest self is worthwhile. You may crash and burn, sure. But you might also come to understand your reason for living. Either result will paint a fuller picture, widening the spotlight little by little, until everything begins to glow.

The post “The Debut” finds joy and fear in starting over appeared first on Salon.com.

In the 1987 Nintendo game “Zelda II: The Adventure of Link,” there is a village you can visit and a home you can enter and a man in a purple shirt you can speak with. But the only thing he says is “I am Error.” I was unexpectedly delighted by this dialogue when I first encountered it on a Gamecube emulator in 2009 (I’m not that old). It felt both meta and existential, or just an amusing bug. It turned out that Error was actually the character’s name, a sort of in-joke slash translation mistake that has since become a meme akin to “Your princess is in another castle” or “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this” from the original “Legend of Zelda.”

Error is a non-player character (NPC), meaning one that the player can’t control but is usually more than just video game wallpaper. Nearly 40 years later, NPCs have come a long way, with increasingly complex behaviors and conversational dialogue that span far more than just three words. The upcoming game “Grand Theft Auto VI” is rumored to feature unprecedented complex NPCs with rich, fleshed-out personalities and backstories, while video game companies explore using artificial intelligence to let players train NPCs as they interact.

In many ways, NPCs are how many people were first introduced to AI, although in a relatively simplistic form compared to the chatbots and massive data center hogs that we have come to either love or loathe, with little room in between. Years ago, NPCs became an insult spun out of 4Chan, the anonymous online forum, to describe real people who don’t think for themselves and follow a set of cultural programming, usually illustrated by an expressionless gray cartoon avatar. The meme became popularized by chronically online cohorts of Donald Trump supporters during his first presidential term, adjacent to the idea of “Trump derangement syndrome,” both implying that people oppose the MAGA movement out of reflexive mindlessness and not, you know, because they’d looked under the hood and seen it for what it is.

It might just sound like a new way to call someone an idiot, but the NPC label has much deeper, scarier implications. On the surface, it seems like harmless video game humor, and I’m sure we’ve all had encounters with actual humans that resembled interacting with tautological machines programmed with limited responses. “There is weather today. Did you hear about celebrity? Sports.” And certainly social media, now overrun by bots, increasingly feels as if every conversation is between different viruses. These realities don’t map to every experience yet following the NPC slander to its logical conclusion can be dangerous: declaring that a person’s alleged lack of inner thinking is justification for dismissing their humanity. After all, they’re just mindless characters in a video game (and maybe reality is just The Matrix, so whatever), so it’s fine to ignore them, disenfranchise them or abandon them to a grim fate.

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Solipsism, the philosophical position that you can only experience your own consciousness, and therefore other people might not exist or have souls, is not a new idea. René Descartes believed animals were soulless, unthinking automatons, though modern neuroscience has repeatedly disproven that one. (On some level, “I am Error” echoes Descartes’ famous quip about thinking and therefore am-ing.) But now that complex AI has spilled from video games into the mainstream, it’s especially dangerous to see the NPC label has become embedded in mainstream politics, whether explicitly or not.

All this is rooted in Donald Trump’s recent campaign to rebrand artificial intelligence as “super intelligence” via executive order, posting on social media Thursday that “The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!” The idea has quickly been embraced by tech leaders, with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk saying this week that AI is “no more” and promising to change the name of his AI company, SpaceXAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX, to SpaceXSI. More recently, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos shared his approval in a Wednesday interview with Fox News. “I do like SI, because ‘artificial’ is not a very flattering thing. Like, nobody wants an artificial sweetener, artificial flavoring,” Bezos said. “Artificial sort of means fake.”

Yeah, most of us are going to roll our eyes hard at AI being “super,” but if these attempts at normalization gain ground and get pushed to their absurd conclusion, it might end in providing AI more rights than humans. (It’s worth noting Musk invokes the NPC meme often.) It’s right there in the name: “Super intelligence” is better than the old, human kind, so why shouldn’t we give these computer programs rights and defend them from regulation? That’s why stories about AI bots being put into virtual torture chambers aren’t just silly, but foregrounds the false notion that AI is capable of suffering. (Maybe don’t put bots in rooms like that anyway — at the very least, it’s a waste of energy.)

After all, AI will either become the savior of humanity or make humans obsolete, depending on what day of the week it is. Sure, this technology is nifty, even as it comes with an enormous environmental destruction. But we are still a long way from elevating the technology above regular human intelligence. But as in a two-for-one, if you can be sold on the myth that AI is superhuman, it travels along with the idea that regular humans are disposable. In other words, the tech bros are trying to turn us all into NPCs, into Errors, not least through the mass surveillance programs being used to hunt migrants and spy on protesters.

Yes, thankfully, granting above-human rights to supposedly sentient AI sentience is still a fringe idea, but we can see that changing before our eyes, not to mention we already kind of did that with corporations. Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told POLITICO that the “world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.” To further consolidate its power — or at least keep the economy from crashing — Silicon Valley wants us to believe their latest technological invention can think, reason and moralize. It’s no surprise that tech bros were recently exposed trying to convince none other than the pope that AI is conscious, but to his credit, Leo XIV has rejected this idea, saying “Algorithms lack the spark of humanity” and elsewhere warning against “losing our humanity amid a ‘paradise of machines.’”

Spending time with large language models like ChatGPT and knowing a little about how they work, it becomes clear that it’s just a really good computer program that can mirror human expression, sometimes terribly and sometimes surprisingly well. There remains zero hard evidence that AI algorithms are sentient.

Yet an increasing number of people are convinced otherwise, as seen in the controversial AI psychosis phenomenon, which makes me wonder how so many people have persuaded themselves a souped-up version of “I am Error” is a conscious being. It can feel like human interaction typing back and forth with these things, but there are always gaps where you can sense the uncanny valley, where you know it’s just a lot of math and nothing more. Perhaps, if you want to be really cynical about it, you could boil down all of human nature and biology and the emergence of consciousness into “a lot of math” as well. But our brains aren’t computers and physics has yet to fully explain consciousness — that’s why they call it a hard problem. Instead of stewing in this mystery, tech bros have gotten the metaphor backward, assigning personhood to bots while denying it to living humans. Talk about soulless.

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There’s nothing subtle about a movie where Nicole Kidman crawls on her knees to lick milk out of a saucer. And yet, Halina Reijn’s “Babygirl” is perhaps the most thematically complex and provocative film of the year, kitty-play and all — one that will continue to reveal its multitude of layers long after Sky Ferreira’s scorcher of an end credits song has dulled its blaze. 

That dissonance between Reijn’s deliciously clever writing and her narrative’s more forthright eroticism is encapsulated by the film’s outré promotional rollout. To tantalize and tease prospective viewers, the marketing team behind “Babygirl” has leaned all the way in, emphasizing the movie’s Christmas Day release in promotional materials that demand audiences “get everything you want” this holiday. Trailer drops and sneak peeks have been accompanied by milk emojis, while official stills flaunt Kidman’s costar Harris Dickinson’s back muscles.

It’s no shock that, for a film that plainly features kinky sex, the “Babygirl” marketing team would want to stress the movie’s raw eroticism to get curious viewers in theater seats. It’s a trick almost as cunning as the one Reijn pulls off in the movie itself, as she disguises a stirring work about controversial pleasure and cerebral expansion as a kind of elevated “Fifty Shades.” Once audiences get eyes on “Babygirl,” they quickly find that the movie is so much more than milk emojis, gold chains and rippling back muscles. Rather, it’s a cornucopia of titillating treats, best exemplified by the film’s incredible centerpiece scene, which features both the most memorable orgasm since “When Harry Met Sally” and gobsmacking bits of screenwriting and acting that will force you to reconsider good sex as you know it.

By the time we arrive at this moment, Kidman, Reijn and Dickinson have done a good bit of work to make the payoff so satisfying. Kidman’s character, the incredibly successful and even more brilliant automation industry magnate Romy Mathis, has inadvertently found herself locked into a sizzling affair with Dickinson’s character Samuel, an intern at Romy’s company. During their first meeting as part of a new company-wide mentorship program, Samuel matches Romy’s slippery intensity, and his reluctance to ingratiate himself intrigues her. The pair soon engage in a series of high-stakes games where Samuel is in control. They play with one another under everyone’s noses, yet never consummate their dynamic with more than a kiss. That is until things between Romy and Samuel become so heated that neither party can ignore the magnetic pull any longer.

Samuel arranges for Romy to meet him at a seedy hotel room, a far cry from the luxury that Romy is used to and expects. She arrives before he does, and when he opens the door to meet him, she chides his behavior. “Leaving me notes, texting me, calling me, sending me milk, are you f**king insane?” Romy asks. “Keeping me waiting in this disgusting hotel? I mean, I don’t wait for anything.” Romy got to the top of her field by ingeniously developing ways for fleets of robots to automate repetitive tasks, and her sexual exploits are no different; waiting around is time wasted and money lost.

But the line between sensual restraint and true inconvenience is one that Romy has never established, and her annoyance is only confusing for Samuel, who we soon realize is just as unfamiliar with this particular energy as Romy is. He can’t tell if Romy’s vexation is genuine or just another part of their game, and tries to figure it out with a command. “Get on your knees,” he orders. When Romy immediately objects, Samuel laughs in response, himself confused about where Romy’s desire ends and where it begins. “I don’t know how to . . . is that what you want? Be honest.”

Romy tells him that she worries about his age and about hurting him, and Samuel — the shrewd student that he is — reads between the lines. “Hurt me?” he asks with a smirk. “I think I have power over you, because I could make one call and you lose everything. What, does that turn you on when I say that?” Romy holds his gaze, silently communicating her arousal, and Samuel responds by once again telling her to get on her knees. She begins, but stops herself, getting up and gathering her things to leave before stopping at the door and running back into his arms. Samuel, however, doesn’t want reluctance. He wants certainty. 

When he pushes Romy off of him, the two wrestle to the ground, playfully slapping each other and grunting. It’s a brilliantly uneasy moment, and Reijn ensures that the viewer will never quite know where it will go until it’s over. Kidman giggles and then grows timid. Suddenly, the fear that something violent will happen becomes very real, but Samuel only subdues Romy and tells her to stop so they can figure out what’s happening. He clamps his eyes closed, and when he refuses to open them at Romy’s request, she reaches up to pry open his eyelids, causing him to smile.

By now, the scene already feels like a masterwork in erotic tension, with most audiences undoubtedly on the edge of their seats. The banter between Samuel and Romy is mischievous and childlike, at once sexy and threatening before turning around again to feel wholly loving. Much in the way that Romy is desperate to understand what exactly it is she wants, so is Samuel. The lines are blurred again later in the film, when the threat of ruining Romy’s life becomes more than a seductive trick, and that inevitable turn wouldn’t be nearly as gratifying for the viewer if it weren’t for the intense intimacy established in the remainder of this scene.

Samuel helps Romy off the floor and positions her in the corner of the room, like a child in time-out. This is Reijn’s most explicit image of Romy working through her incontrovertible Freudian shame, a humiliation that has troubled her for her entire life and which has no identifiable source — despite her attempts to pinpoint it through every therapeutic treatment known to man. At this stage, Romy is unwilling to remove her clothes, so Samuel circumnavigates the traditional nude image of sex to find a different route to her pleasure. He asks her to get on her knees before unwrapping a piece of hard candy and placing it into his hand. Romy crawls forward and picks it up with her mouth, allowing Samuel to pet her like a dog. Gently, he places Romy onto the dirty hotel room floor, facing away from him, and reaches into her skirt to finger her.

What comes next (no pun intended) is one of the most startlingly crude and incontestibly incredible sex scenes in recent memory. Reijn’s camera closes up on Kidman’s face while Samuel works in the background, out of focus. We watch as Romy moves through pleasure, fear, bliss and confusion. Here, Kidman is using her powers as both a grade-A movie star and a true artist to mesmerize us, fully in service of Reijn’s vision. It’s a staggering bit of genius and one of the most unforgettable scenes in any film this year, a truly affecting look at the heady pursuit of physical euphoria. As Romy nears her orgasm, she’s terrified, and when she objects and tells Samuel that she “doesn’t want to pee,” we realize that she has no experience physically ejaculating. He quells her worries and brings Romy to orgasm, and she is immediately stricken with a massive wave of grief and guilt.

But Romy’s remorse doesn’t just stem from the fact that she’s cheated on her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas), it comes from her realizing that her husband — the person she loves the most, with whom she shares two children — has never made her feel such full-bodied pleasure. Samuel bears a power that takes hold of Romy, the kind of hypnotic sway that she’ll have to contend with eventually. But first, she sobs, crumpling into Samuel’s arms while he holds her close.

It must be said that this scene demands everything of Kidman, and she bares herself entirely without any nudity at all. It is positively thrilling to see someone act at this level, so much so that Kidman’s performance demands that the viewer shed all pretenses. It’s impossible not to admire the complex, sophisticated work in this scene, which is so beautifully constructed that it defies whatever vulgar, less refined terms that may be used to define it going forward. Here, “Babygirl” graduates from to inviting to important, blowing past the tactics that marketers used to get people to pay the price of admission. Reijn’s film is more than just an erotic thriller, it’s a landmark piece of mainstream erotic cinema that, like Samuel and Romy, relishes the opportunity to push the boundaries.

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Though writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning” fancies itself a journalism thriller, the film offers only a handful of real thrills. Fans of the subgenre, known and loved for its depiction of journalism’s slow yet effective behind-the-scenes processes, might see this as a fatal flaw. After all, isn’t a journalism thriller without tension just a drama? Perhaps. But in the case of Sorkin’s latest — billed as a companion piece to the massively successful, defining 2010 film “The Social Network,” which he also penned — the lack of twists and revelations is a feature, not a bug.

Set between 2019 and 2021, Sorkin’s film stares down the dawn of a new decade, preparing for the birth of our current web of chaos, cruelty and thinly veiled deceit. Fifteen years after Facebook first took the web by storm, the company has now grown into a conglomerate whose arms shuffle politics, culture and social mores around the world’s face like pieces on a game board. Facebook’s users are being radicalized at alarming rates thanks to algorithms that feed them extremist groups and all of their content. Facing problems everyone else turns a blind eye to, Facebook civic integrity team member Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) reluctantly begins a working relationship with Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White). At the risk of losing her job and being indicted for violating her NDA, Frances provides information droplets that eventually become the Journal’s “Facebook Files” series, exposing a deluge of damning, ethically dubious information against the company. In other words: The perfect material for someone like Sorkin.

Between “The West Wing” and “The Newsroom,” Sorkin’s indulgent forays into the sociopolitical have long been criticized for their hubris. But despite his work being a bastion of Hollywood’s overwrought liberal optimism, “The Social Reckoning” presents a similar but discernibly different picture from the ones Sorkin’s already painted. Here, Sorkin funnels his penchant for self-important sanctimoniousness through the journalism thriller’s always-intriguing lens. And though the result is sometimes stale, the banality creates an eerie dissonance between the film’s subject matter and the world outside the cinema, pitting the snail’s pace that good investigative journalism requires against an external culture that moves at 5x that speed. This same discrepancy has made the journalism thriller itself feel somewhat archaic. If audiences already know the intimate details of how a very real public leak, whistle-blow, or scandal came together, what’s left for them to learn by fictionalizing it all?

The answer, unfortunately, is very little. But just because the viewer might not learn something new by watching “The Social Reckoning,” doesn’t mean that they won’t understand something better. Sorkin’s film highlights the conflict between slow-moving reporting and the light-speed pace of modern culture, a velocity enhanced by the very tech the film has in its crosshairs. The movie isn’t so much about the Facebook leaks as it is about an era when bone-chilling data revealing a company’s malevolence isn’t enough to stop evil machinations in their tracks. Of course “The Social Reckoning” arrives too late to feel revolutionary; it would be late even if it depicted something that happened last week. Wedged in the tiny space between irrelevancy and timeliness, Sorkin’s companion piece doesn’t need to say anything new to do its job; it only has to persuade us to pay attention to its shouts.

And persuade it does — for the most part, anyway. While “The Social Reckoning” might stand in the shadow of its formative predecessor, the film confidently asserts its own merit. It’s a well-oiled machine, moving at a perfectly amiable pace thanks to Madison and White’s lead performances alongside a host of quippy, Sorkin-style side characters. (Few things in the film are more enjoyable than Betty Gilpin’s wise-cracking Wall Street Journal bureau chief.) Granted, much of this pleasantness relies on watching the movie anytime before sunset. This is a matinee coffee film, not a popcorn feature, lest anyone expect edge-of-your-seat tension.

Because, really, what’s ultimately compelling about a movie peering into Facebook’s impropriety? That’s like asking someone if they know that violence is bad, or puppies are cute. The funny thing is, though, that nowadays, surveying 10 people about those questions could easily return 10 different answers, or responses rife with caveats and asterisks. That intentional confusion and misdirection is exactly what Sorkin gestures to in vignettes of Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong), intercut throughout the film, preparing for a civil hearing about Facebook refusing to fact-check political ads on its platform. Zuckerberg is a spin artist, skilled at worming his way out of trouble by tailoring the world around him to suit the beast he created. Facebook feeds a culture where up is down and left is right, and vice versa. Sorkin’s depiction of Zuckerberg as a sniveling coward might be smug, but it’s not inaccurate. The intention is not to show the audience who Zuckerberg is — Sorkin spent one film doing that already; it’s to assess the trickle-down effect of his spinelessness.

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To do this, Sorkin compares Facebook’s reluctance to fact-check political advertising with its enthusiasm for spinning the truth to get engagement. Naturally, these two things are the same, but their effects eventually diverge, meaning that political ads are only one metric for inciting engagement. The most frightening aspect of mining engagement — the part we might not always think about — is how the tools and algorithms designed for it must change as users age out of different platforms. How do Facebook, Instagram and all of Zuck’s other spawn remain integral parts of our lives until we die if users eventually get weary enough to figure out their existence is better off without them? For publicly traded companies like these, declining engagement results in lost value.

This is the crux of Frances and Jeff’s concerns. (And, by extension, Sorkin’s film.) They want to expose the obscure operations, to implore users to reconsider their relationship with these platforms. The problem is that Zuckerberg and his cronies have the upper hand. They can change things in the blink of an eye, so imperceptibly that users will barely notice a change if at all. Journalism can’t move at that pace — not good, well-sourced, fact-checked, influential journalism, that is. When Frances hands Jeff documents that confirm Facebook knows all about Instagram’s negative impact on teenagers, she urges him, “Get it out there, before they start marketing Instagram Kids.”

 

The line chills not because something like Instagram Kids feels plausible, but because it’s already a reality. Impressionable people of all ages around the globe have direct access to the platforms that exacerbate rage and depression for monetary gain and immeasurable power. They had that access before “The Facebook Files,” and they have it today, years after those stories ran. So, what’s the point of all this? 

I’d wager the film’s purpose is not to explain, but to appeal. “The Social Reckoning” exists to make what we already know compelling again, reminding — perhaps even convincing — viewers that journalism is not only worthwhile, but critically important. So, too, are the movies that depict journalism’s procedures and how arduous and exhausting they are. Everyone’s mileage will vary, but I find the film’s matter-of-fact formal structure more convincing than not. “Spotlight” won the best picture trophy only a decade ago. And while that film far exceeds “The Social Reckoning,” I wonder whether the reaction would be entirely the same today. Haugen and Horwitz battled similarly daunting foes, and the rot they uncovered was just as systemic and frightening as the reporting. The primary difference is that the corruption Sorkin points to is unique to the digital age, where everything is ephemeral — trumped by the next headline. Maybe, he posits, we shouldn’t forget so easily.

The post “The Social Reckoning” is the journalism thriller’s last stand appeared first on Salon.com.

A few years ago, an experimental McDonald’s drive-thru system became convinced that two customers needed an almost ceremonial quantity of chicken McNuggets. As a video of the exchange showed, the number kept climbing: 240, 250, 260. The customers shouted for it to stop. The machine, unmoved, continued adding nuggets.

The clip went viral, in part because the mistake was so specifically inhuman. Someone wearing a headset might mishear an order for 26 nuggets. But one imagines that, somewhere between the second and third hundred, a person would pause to ask, “You sure you want 260 nuggets, hon?” The machine had no such reservations.

McDonald’s eventually ended that IBM pilot in 2024, after testing automated order-taking at more than 100 restaurants. Now, it’s trying again.

The company’s new voice assistant, Archy, is part of its Google-powered ArchIQ system and can take drive-thru orders in English and Spanish. McDonald’s says its early tests have topped 90% accuracy, with plans to expand the technology as part of a sweeping modernization initiative. The pitch is familiar: Faster service, fewer mistakes and less repetitive work for employees, who will theoretically be freed to concentrate on something more important.

Hospitality.

But another chicken chain is drawing a line. Chick-fil-A CEO Andrew Cathy recently told CNBC that his company has no plans to replace drive-thru order takers with AI, even as it explores ways to use the technology elsewhere. The reason, he explained, is that the chain wants its hospitality to remain “human to human.”

At first glance, this sounds like a disagreement over whether a computer can be trusted to hear “no onions” rather than “more onions.” But underneath that technical question is a more consequential one: Which parts of hospitality do restaurants think are automatable — and which are worth keeping human?

There is, of course, a genuine appeal to frictionlessness.

Sometimes you’re tired, antisocial or running spectacularly late. Sometimes you want to make a substitution to an order without worrying whether it will get lost between the person wearing the headset and the person assembling your food. Sometimes you just want to tell a box that you need fries and trust that fries will appear.

I understand this instinct completely. I’ve walked into plenty of busy restaurants where the prevailing atmosphere suggested human error was the expectation rather than the exception, and a kiosk felt like a little gift.

Nor is there anything inherently noble about making employees spend eight hours deciphering orders shouted through crackling speakers while the ice-cream machine is down and a small diplomatic crisis is unfolding in the PlayPlace. Taking orders is part of the job, certainly; trying to do it while the rest of the restaurant threatens to unravel is another matter.

The optimistic version of AI-assisted service makes some sense: Let the machine handle routine tasks. Give employees more time to solve problems, help customers and perhaps make their shifts a little less frantic.

The less optimistic version is that companies will realize they can run the same restaurant with fewer people.

McDonald’s own financial projections offer some reason to examine that distinction carefully. In its September presentation of the company’s broader “> NEXT” strategy, the chain said Archy could free at least 50 labor hours per week as the technology scales. It also projected that its larger package of restaurant improvements could generate approximately $100,000 in annual gross cash-flow benefits for an average U.S. restaurant, with most of those gains eventually benefiting the bottom line.

Neither figure tells us precisely what happens to the employees who would otherwise be working those hours. But it does reveal how closely the language of hospitality is intertwined with the language of efficiency.

And McDonald’s has experimented with this vision before. In late 2022, the company unveiled a smaller-format restaurant outside Fort Worth, Texas, designed around customers ordering ahead through an app and collecting their food from a conveyor system. Employees still prepared the meals, but the design dramatically reduced the need for face-to-face interaction.

The concept was presented as a more convenient way to get food into customers’ hands. Fair enough. But if the great promise of automation is that it gives employees more opportunities to practice hospitality, it’s worth asking what that hospitality looks like when customers scarcely encounter those employees in the first place.

Chick-fil-A, meanwhile, has made a rather different calculation.

The company has always been unusually explicit about its values, which are rooted in the religious principles of founder S. Truett Cathy. Its restaurants remain closed on Sundays, including locations where that choice may seem commercially inconvenient like airports and college campuses. Its employees are famous for responding to customers with the relentlessly chipper “My pleasure!” The brand talks about service not merely as a function of getting food to customers, but as an expression of care.

That self-image is not without complications. Chick-fil-A has faced years of criticism over its charitable foundation’s past donations to organizations with anti-LGBTQ positions, which it said it would stop funding in 2019. Its public vision of care has not always been received as universally inclusive.

Still, the consistency with which the chain has made personal hospitality part of its identity is instructive.

And it’s not as though Chick-fil-A is technologically timid. At a Georgia location opened in 2024, food travels from an elevated kitchen to employees below on a conveyor system designed to deliver a meal every six seconds. Customers can order ahead digitally or place orders with workers in the drive-thru. The technology is decidedly futuristic, but the company has deliberately preserved a person at the point of service.

That distinction strikes me as meaningful.

Technology can expedite a restaurant’s work without necessarily becoming the face — or voice — of the restaurant itself.

Of course, a scripted “My pleasure!” isn’t necessarily more authentic than a cheerful voice generated by a computer. And anybody who has ever worked in a customer-facing job knows that hospitality, particularly of the relentlessly sunny variety, can involve a tremendous amount of emotional labor.

Employees shouldn’t have to manufacture delight on demand while working short-staffed shifts for inadequate pay, fielding customer complaints about things outside their control. A good restaurant culture takes more than telling workers to smile. It requires adequate staffing, good managers, training, compensation and enough breathing room for employees to exercise judgment.

But I think there’s a difference between demanding that employees perform warmth and creating an environment where warmth has room to develop.

Disney World, for example, has practically made an industry out of carefully cultivated hospitality. The entire experience is choreographed, from the language employees use to the way they interact with guests. Yet some of the most memorable moments happen when an employee notices something unexpected and responds in kind: A bus driver making a tired child laugh, or a character performer taking an extra moment with someone who’s been waiting all morning.

The environment is engineered. The little spark between two people isn’t.

And that’s what makes this debate about AI ordering feel more consequential than the technology itself might initially suggest.

Because hospitality isn’t entirely something a restaurant provides. It’s also something customers participate in.

Recently, I was ordering coffee at a neighborhood café, one location of a regional chain. A woman ahead of me, well-dressed and perhaps in her early 30s, was asked by the barista what she’d like. Instead of answering, she wordlessly handed over her phone. The barista looked confused. The woman sighed, tapped her screen with a fingernail and said, “It’s right there.”

It was a small moment, over almost as soon as it began. Nobody yelled. Nobody demanded a manager. But something about the exchange bothered me. The barista had asked a perfectly ordinary question. The customer seemed irritated that the answer required any effort on her part. The information existed on a screen. Why should she have to communicate it?

We’ve spent years teaching machines to understand human behavior. I wonder whether we’ve also begun expecting humans to behave more like machines.

It’s difficult to shake the feeling that something has frayed in our public interactions since the pandemic. We got used to contactless delivery, app-based ordering, packages appearing at our doors and transactions completed without speaking to anyone. Those conveniences were useful, sometimes essential. Many remain genuinely wonderful.

But I’ve also noticed more impatience. Less eye contact. An increasingly common expectation that the person behind the counter should function as an extension of whatever digital system we’ve already been using.

And perhaps there’s an uncomfortable lesson here for customers, too. We demand personalized service, but don’t always seem particularly interested in the people providing it. We want our preferences remembered, our mistakes corrected and our food ready precisely when promised. We don’t necessarily want to offer much patience, curiosity or goodwill in return.

Service workers have always dealt with difficult customers, of course. There’s no reason to romanticize some vanished golden age of American politeness. But the incremental disappearance of ordinary interactions raises a question worth considering: What happens when convenience becomes the organizing principle of our public lives?

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I keep thinking about the spaceship in Pixar’s “WALL-E,” the Axiom, where every human need has been anticipated and met. Passengers float around in automated chairs, surrounded by screens, food and entertainment. They are comfortable, in the technical sense. They are also profoundly disconnected from one another and from the world around them.

The unsettling thing about the Axiom isn’t that its passengers are miserable. It’s that they don’t seem to notice everything they’re missing.

No one individual convenience creates that kind of world. But taken together, thousands of decisions to eliminate small inconveniences can also eliminate opportunities for connection. And those encounters, however insignificant they seem, are part of how we learn to share space with other people.

A few months ago, I was shopping at Trader Joe’s when I noticed the cashier’s earrings. They looked like tiny illustrations of fish pulled from the label of a particularly fancy tin of sardines, with hooks attached. I told her I loved them. “Shrinky Dinks!” she replied.

It turned out she was a crafter. She pulled out her phone to show me some of her work, which included garments she’d fashioned out of Trader Joe’s tote bags. There were pants. Actual pants, made from the grocery store’s reusable bags.

I was delighted. Here was this woman who liked her job, or at least the store where she worked, and liked making things, and had found a wonderfully weird way to combine those interests. For a minute or two, the checkout lane became something other than a place where groceries changed hands.

It wasn’t a life-changing encounter. I don’t know the woman’s full name; her name tag simply said MB. I couldn’t tell you what I bought that day. But I remember her earrings, and the pants, and how much fun it was to meet someone who was so enthusiastic about something so delightfully specific. I wouldn’t have had that interaction if I’d been scanning my own groceries. And, importantly, I wouldn’t have had it if I hadn’t noticed the earrings and said something.

Neither of us was obligated to participate. That’s part of what made it lovely.

This is the problem with imagining hospitality as another task that can be optimized. The value of an interaction isn’t always apparent in advance, and the most meaningful parts of it often have little to do with completing the transaction.

A machine might eventually take my order perfectly. It might remember my favorite coffee, anticipate the substitution I’m about to request and move me through the line several seconds faster. On certain mornings, I’d welcome every bit of that.

But it cannot offer the particular surprise of encountering another person who has decided, for no reason other than the pleasure of it, to show me something strange and wonderful.

The real danger of automating our ordinary encounters isn’t that we’ll suddenly forget what human connection feels like. It’s that we’ll gradually make fewer opportunities for it, until its absence begins to feel normal.

Communities are shaped by the ways we participate in them. Even at a coffee counter. Even through a drive-thru window.

Sometimes that participation amounts to nothing more than a little patience, an unexpected compliment or somebody asking, Wait, is that really what you meant?

And sometimes that’s where the magic happens.

The post The AI drive-thru wars aren’t really about your order appeared first on Salon.com.

In mid-September, Chinese scientists announced a breakthrough in extracting hydrogen and fresh water from the ocean with about 15% better energy efficiency than older techniques. Their research, published in Nature Energy on Sept. 15, underscores that China continues to dominate in the renewable energy race, generating so much that the country can’t even use it all. As Reuters reported in August, “China turned away enough clean energy to power Mexico ​for a year in the six months through June as its grids hit their limits.” At the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on Sept. 8, Youyuan Huang, executive vice chairman of BTR New Material Group, the world’s top maker of battery anode materials, said “China’s grid is a very strong and stable one . . . but we’ve installed too much green energy.”

Boy, the U.S. could sure use some of that excess juice. Currently, this country is embroiled in a self-inflicted energy crisis, largely a result of President Donald Trump’s war against Iran, that is sending deep ripple effects across the globe as oil prices spike. In the U.S. alone, diesel prices have risen around 70% since before the war began on Feb. 28, hitting a record $6.52 on Sept. 22, and in the last two months, at least 16 trucking companies, both large and small, have been bankrupted. The world’s richest nations are trying to staunch the bleeding, recently vowing to release up to 100 million barrels of diesel and crude oil within four months. But on Monday, Amin Nasser, CEO of Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, cautioned that this is little more than a Band-Aid and that long-term supply issues remain. Until the Strait of Hormuz “fully reopens and confidence returns, the crude reality is that pressure at both ends of the barrel will intensify,” Nasser said at the Energy Intelligence Forum in London.

Some “crude reality” would be another nice-to-have for those helming U.S. policy. The rising fury against the war and high energy prices threatens to clobber Republicans in the midterm elections. So the Trump administration is frantically trying to drive down diesel prices, first by floating the idea of banning exports. This tactic, criticized as “unwise” by some oil executives, has been abandoned for now, but at a Monday rally in Nebraska — where Trump also seemed to promote the idea of Iran attacking two California cities — he signed an executive order promoting the use of red-dyed diesel. Normally reserved for agriculture operations, red diesel is exempt from highway fuel taxes, but experts caution that expanding its use probably won’t help much because major fuel suppliers are unlikely to go along with it. For one, the taxes are only deferred, meaning companies could end up paying them later. But red dye, when used, can also gum up tanks and fuel systems. “We do not expect most reputable diesel retailers and fuel marketers to do this,” the Society of Independent Gasoline Marketers of America and the National Association of Truck Stop Owners said in a note to their members, citing “limited upside.”

On Friday, Trump announced his latest bid to reduce prices: buying oil from Russia. Shortly afterward, the Treasury Department issued a temporary license allowing Russian diesel to be supplied to the global market. Though details were scarce, this undermines the president’s own sweeping Russia sanctions law he signed last month. Regardless, it doesn’t look like it will do much to lower prices. “It’s kind of shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic,” Michael Lynch of the Energy Policy Research Foundation, told the Associated Press. “If we get diesel from Russia, basically it means that their existing customers are not going to get it and they’ll have to go somewhere else, and that will keep the price basically where it is now.”

With diminishing options — besides the obvious one of ending the Iran war immediately, which Trump can do whenever he wishes — the administration’s primary strategy is to blame everyone else. On Monday, he repeated claims on social media that Ukraine is most at fault for high oil prices thanks to their continued attacks on Russian oil refineries, and that “What’s driving up gasoline is no longer the Strait of Hormuz.” The president also said the closure of oil refineries in “blue states” is part of the problem. 

 

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has also spread these claims, appearing Oct. 4 on “Face the Nation” to blame Ukraine and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the latter for closing two refineries. (In fact, Newsom had nothing to do with the refinery closures.) Wright insisted that fuel prices will drop soon, as Trump has been claiming for months now. He also said that Trump was warned before attacking Iran that it might create an energy crisis — “he was well aware of the risk to energy flows that were coming out of the Persian Gulf region” — but the president insisted it would all be worth it to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

Wright has been especially busy lately trying to instill a sense of optimism around the energy sector, dismissing climate change as a non-issue while laundering Trump’s vision of “energy dominance.” All of this is remarkably myopic. Half of it is an artificial war against renewable energy projects, including the cancellation of almost $8 billion in Biden-era clean energy grants, and using specious claims about “national security” to cancel offshore wind projects. The other half is accelerating oil, gas and coal extraction while slashing protections for endangered species threatened by drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. But here’s the rub: Neither approach has made fuel cheaper, and it doesn’t seem that will change any time soon.

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There’s little wonder why: Wright founded Liberty Energy in 2011, one of the fossil fuel giants that led that decade’s fracking boom, and he has attacked renewable energy projects almost as enthusiastically as Trump, saying they can never fully meet increasing energy demands. China and other countries have conclusively proved that false, but it’s not an either-or situation. Despite being the world’s No. 1 renewable energy producer, China is also rapidly expanding its coal industry. “The growth of renewable electricity is not incompatible with maintaining, and sometimes developing, fossil-fuel capacity,” science and technology historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz explains in his 2025 book “More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy.” 

In other words, human energy consumption is rising so fast that we’re continuing to grow all energy sectors rather than entirely replacing fossil fuels with renewables. (That’s not great news for the climate, of course.) But only the U.S. is leaning quite so hard into 19th-century fossil fuels instead of 21st-century solutions.

Why would the Trump administration push so hard for retrograde technology? Perhaps it’s time to admit that the president actually has no interest in driving down consumer prices or the cost of living, let alone ending the war, whether it hurts his party’s electoral chances or not. Trump is deeply invested in oil and gas companies, which have enjoyed obscene profits throughout the conflict. As Reuters reported in late September, “The ​five largest Western oil companies — BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies — are expected to report combined third-quarter profits of around $53 billion, according to RBC Capital Markets estimates, up from $48 billion ‌in the second quarter and more than double year-earlier levels.” 

Trump has caught plenty of these profits, with an August report from the Joint Economic Committee finding that the president “owned as much as $45.6 million in oil and gas company stocks in 2025, a portfolio that is now worth as much as $61.1 million given the surge in oil and gas stocks driven by Trump’s war in Iran.”

No wonder Trump continues to hint that the Iran war will heat up again after the midterms: He has a vested interest in keeping it going and inflating gas prices, so maybe it makes sense to call his bluff here. After all, truckers may be dropping more than $1,000 every time they fill up, or losing their jobs entirely, but the ultra-rich aren’t feeling much stress from all this. They are well positioned to buy up bankrupt trucking companies and jack up prices, further consolidating their monopolistic or oligarchic power. It’s the classic “shock doctrine,” in which corporations exploit disaster conditions, created intentionally or not. 

It would be more sensible to follow China’s lead on renewable energy, just as it would probably be smart to retreat on Iran rather than get entrenched in another forever war. But that just wouldn’t generate such spectacular windfall profits for Trump or those in his orbit. The solution is to nail these people to the consequences of their decision. They don’t want to end this crisis, so we must make them.

The post Trump gets richer while gas prices soar appeared first on Salon.com.

The American presidency is one of the most stressful jobs there is. Presidents famously age during their terms, often starting off looking hale and hearty and, by the time they’re finished, appearing tired, more lined and a whole lot grayer than when they started. So it’s understandable they would need to recharge by getting away from Washington from time to time. 

Donald Trump has made a habit of this, regularly jetting to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, and his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, for extended periods of time in lieu of Camp David, the famous presidential getaway nestled in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. Now, according to a recent report by the Washington Post, he is seeking to create a permanent official presidential retreat in Florida at his Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach.

This would be an unprecedented move, even though it isn’t unusual for presidents to crave time away from Washington. According to the White House Historical Association, many of the early presidents left the White House in the summer because they believed that the white fog that formed on the nearby marshes was a deadly white gas; they wanted to get away for their health. In fact, James K. Polk is the only president to have stayed in the White House for each of the three summers he was president, and since he died shortly after leaving office, his fate was attributed at the time to those white gases.

Presidents, of course, have to keep working wherever they are. Some have wanted to escape Washington’s notorious humid summers, while others longed to flee the cold and create a “winter White House” in warmer climes. Harry Truman reportedly liked his Key West winter home so much that he called it the “Little White House” and spent 175 days of his presidency there. Richard Nixon was also fond of Florida, but he also frequently jetted back to his native California, as did Ronald Reagan. George W. Bush spent as much time as possible at the West Texas ranch he bought just before assuming the presidency. 

The first official presidential retreat was the Old Soldiers Home, which was commandeered by President James Buchanan as a summer getaway since its location in leafy Northwest Washington was cooler and quieter than the White House. It was subsequently used by Abraham Lincoln and his family, and he was said to have written the Emancipation Proclamation there. Some subsequent presidents enjoyed the retreat as well, but it was soon out of fashion as they began to travel further afield for their vacations. 

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From 1880 until 1977, when President Jimmy Carter sold off the last one, there was always a presidential yacht for the chief executive to unwind on and entertain guests, but there wasn’t another official presidential retreat until 1942, when President Franklin Roosevelt visited a Works Progress Administration project in Maryland called Camp Hi-Catoctin and selected it as the location for a future presidential retreat he dubbed Shangri-La. Roosevelt used the property to relax, but he also saw it as a perfect place for high-level diplomacy. His successor, Harry Truman, made it a permanent federal facility and then, after he took office in 1953, Dwight Eisenhower renamed it Camp David in honor of his young grandson. Since then, the property has been the site of many meetings with foreign leaders, including the diplomatic negotiations hosted in 1978 by Carter between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin that culminated in the Camp David Accords. 

Its location — just a 30-minute helicopter ride but many spiritual miles away from the White House — makes it a convenient spot for important domestic matters to be dealt with outside the bustle of the White House. Richard Nixon famously fired his trusted aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman at Camp David in 1973, while 12 years earlier John F. Kennedy received counsel there from Eisenhower after the Bay of Pigs disaster. 

While some presidents have clearly enjoyed Camp David more than others, Trump has made no secret of his deep dislike of it. He has used it only rarely, and the one time he has been known to propose having any high-level talks there was in 2019 when he inexplicably invited Taliban leadership to join him there just days before the anniversary of Sept. 11, a meeting which was mercifully cancelled after the group killed an American in a car bomb attack in Kabul. 

Trump only wants to visit his own properties. According to the independent watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), as of June the president has spent 37% of his second term at his own properties, with Mar-a-Lago receiving the most visits. Even on his official trips, if he’s unable to return home Trump will sleep at one of his own hotels, a move that is always profitable for him personally since the government pays for much of the huge entourage trailing the president. In fact, one of the perks Trump has given himself is that his various winter and summer retreats are also his commercial properties, and his visits not only promote the properties, they also provide opportunities for paying customers to have access to the president. His behavior has become so commonplace that few even remark anymore that the president lives a good part of the time at clubs with members who pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend time in his presence. 

The grift will apparently continue even after he leaves office. Trump recently announced that his proposed presidential library in Miami will double as a hotel, making it yet another profit center for the family. (He is also being sued by various interested parties who are upset that he was given the valuable land, worth a reported $330 million, for only $10 by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, with the understanding it would be used for a nonprofit organization.) Now he has big, unprecedented plans for the new Camp David.

According to the Washington Post, “a parcel” of his West Palm beach golf resort will “be designated a permanent, official sanctuary for foreign leaders and future U.S. presidents, designed to host international summits and house presidents when they take vacations in Florida.” Trump’s generosity is such that he also plans to throw in complimentary members for presidents. It’s obvious that there is a lot of money to be made, which will be accompanied by ongoing access to him and his family. If foreign dignitaries were there to meet with the president and take in some golf, you can imagine that Trump would be at the club next door waiting to hold court. As Rick Reilly, author of “Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump,” told the Post, “I suppose he wants to make a power play with these people and show them who is the king of America.”

Trump claims there would be no cost to the government, since he plans to pay for the housing himself. But as we’ve seen with the rapidly increasing costs to American taxpayers for his ballroom money pit at the White House, that’s unlikely to be the case. Taxpayers will almost certainly be on the hook for many millions, if only for the enhanced security that would be necessary. After all, this is the golf course where a would-be assassin was caught last year hiding in the bushes.

Trump leases the land for the golf course from Palm Beach County, which is seriously considering his proposal. If it is approved, the only course of action for the administration that follows Trump is to offload it — just as the federal government did with Mar-a-Lago after the socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post left it to the government when she died in 1973 to serve as a winter White House. Eight years later, citing exorbitant annual maintenance costs, the government returned the property to the Post Foundation, which put it for sale in 1985 before it was bought by Trump.

No name has been chosen for the property. But I don’t think there’s any mystery about what it’s going to be, do you?

The post Trump’s “Camp Donald” grift is designed to outlast his presidency appeared first on Salon.com.

Of all the tawdry delights in “Verity” — Michael Showalter’s adaptation of bestselling author Colleen Hoover’s massively popular psychological thriller — the best and most unexpected is how well the film hides its secrets. Now, don’t get me wrong: The movie isn’t exactly garnering Oscar buzz, or even eliciting the fervent “you’ve got to see this!” refrain that followed 2014’s “Gone Girl” around. “Verity” is trashy fun through and through, and doesn’t try to elevate itself past that pulpy baseline. But Showalter and the movie’s screenwriter, Nick Antosca, are skilled in the art of misdirection. They know how to surprise, and they use their trio of actors to do it cleverly.

Take Anne Hathaway, fresh off a string of box-office smashes in “The Odyssey,” “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” “The End of Oak Street” and “Mother Mary.” (Alright, the last one made a few pennies and a nickel, but we can dream.) This year alone, Hathaway has repeatedly proven her versatility, jumping between gun-toting moms, tortured pop stars and struggling journalists. In “Verity,” she plays the titular character, Verity Crawford, the author of a string of hit thriller novels who’s been mysteriously incapacitated after a car accident and can’t finish her final three books.

To complete the series, Verity’s publisher taps little-known writer Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), who agrees to step into Verity’s place using her copious notes. While Johnson’s elasticity as a performer is a bit more contentious, I’ve always found her choices fascinating — oscillating between rom-coms, superhero films and arthouse horror with the bat of a mascara’d eye. “Verity” is no different, allowing Johnson to move her character between suspicion and warmth with languid ease as she settles into Verity’s Vermont home to work.

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But the key piece to the “Verity” puzzle is Josh Hartnett, who plays Verity’s put-upon husband, Jeremy, with all the unnerving capriciousness a film like this demands. Here, Hartnett’s character exists in flux, somewhere between his old life and a new start. He’s both charming and chilling, expertly using a near-imperceptible shift in expression or tone to keep the audience on their toes. With Hartnett weaving through the entire story, it’s nearly impossible to get a handle on what’s really going on in “Verity.” And that volatility is what makes the film so exciting, even when it goes full-tilt cheesy.

This is nothing new for Hartnett, who’s spent the last few years enjoying a well-deserved career renaissance, following up his role in “Verity” with a starring role in Netflix‘s supernatural thriller miniseries, “Below.” Once the quintessential ’90s heartthrob, Hartnett has parlayed the goodwill from his hunky idol days into something far more compelling. Though he’s always been a great actor, popping up here and there to elevate material, Hartnett has found an artistic sweet spot, using his effervescent charm and boy-next-door-all-grown-up good looks to subvert expectations. Hartnett stands out among the roster of stubborn, uncompromisingly masculine leading men from his heyday, proving that there’s much more to winning over an audience than simply playing into the public’s perception.

For those who have watched Hartnett grow throughout his career, the actor’s keen yet unassuming abilities surely don’t come as a shock. His late ’90s breakthrough in the triple-hitter lineup of “Halloween: H20,” “The Faculty” and “The Virgin Suicides” catapulted him to international fame practically overnight, cementing his place alongside the era’s Tiger Beat celebrity infatuations. The primary difference between Hartnett and his contemporaries, though, was that Hartnett could hold his own on screen. He may not have had the bona fides of someone like Leonardo DiCaprio, but Hartnett’s work was consistent and appealing. He knew how to play the everyman (or everyteenager), caught up in frequently absurd or abrupt situations beyond his control.

That’s not to say they were all hits, of course. 2002’s “40 Days and 40 Nights,” an offbeat rom-com about a Bay Area web designer who chooses to abstain from sex and masturbation for the duration of Lent, is patently ridiculous and more than a little sexist. But that’s also where Hartnett’s appeal lies. He understands how to use his innate magnetism to charm his way through even the silliest scripts, occasionally creating a dissonance between the film and his performances that makes even the duds memorable. 

These days, I can’t say the same about some of Hartnett’s early peers, like Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, who, despite rising to fame earlier than Hartnett, never fully figured out how to separate themselves from their reputation. Both Cruise and Pitt have a death grip on their A-List prestige, hyper-aware of how much the world perceives and enjoys their work. That self-awareness has made their late-period work all too stodgy, selecting roles clearly informed by their notable reputations. Take Pitt’s “F1: The Movie” and this year’s “Heart of the Beast,” where Pitt plays hypermasculine characters whose lives, actions and goals are defined by a relentless desire to come out on top. For someone whose notoriety has twice become inseparable from who he’s married to, Pitt’s choice to play gruff loners feels noticeably calculated, keeping an arm’s distance between his work and the audience. 

In Cruise’s case, artistry seems to have taken a backseat almost entirely. Over the last decade, Cruise has resigned himself to action stardom, writing death-defying stunts into his contracts. Even with “Digger,” Cruise’s most ambitious project in years, he confines himself to a loud, obnoxious character destined to be written about as a “big swing.” The problem is that “Digger” only feels like a big swing because it’s marginally different from what Cruise has been doing lately. Cruise’s ambition is moot if he’s otherwise resigned himself to crowd-pleasers, making his occasional enterprising choices look even more daring.

Comparing Hartnett to actors like Pitt and Cruise might seem like a stretch. But consider that “Verity” topped last week’s box office by a wide margin, leaving “Digger” and “Heart of the Beast” eating its dust. No doubt this is partially due to Hoover’s extreme popularity, and Hathaway and Johnson’s bankability — those are fair elements to incorporate here. But when it comes to the difference in performance among all three leads, there’s really no competition.

 

Hartnett’s work is dynamic and unsettling, making what could be a forgettable tertiary character into an integral part of the story that viewers hold in the back of their minds, even when he’s offscreen. From the start, when Jeremy runs into Lowen on the street before they meet at Verity’s publisher’s office, Hartnett makes Jeremy’s presence feel dubious. His every motive feels ulterior, and his inevitable simmering romance with Lowen resembles a can of worms that could pop open at any moment.

But that’s Hartnett’s great skill. He understands how to keep viewers vigilant, how to shock them and startle them as soon as they think they know where he’s headed. He doesn’t just subvert expectations; he perverts them, creating characters who appear to have rich inner lives and plenty of secrets that the audience may never fully understand. M. Night Shyamalan’s 2024 thriller “Trap” used Hartnett’s expertise to its full potential, crafting a character who could be both a doting dad and a vicious serial killer at the same time. For Hartnett, shading in a complete picture, warts and all, is essential to making a character believable. It’s an old-school way of thinking for the modern era — a belief that the work should be taken seriously but without ever letting the viewer in on how intensely he’s considering it. With Hartnett, what you see is never what you get, at least not fully. And what a delight it is that this world still holds some surprises for us.

The post Josh Hartnett turned heartthrob fame into a career of risks appeared first on Salon.com.

The 1975 film “Jaws,” in which a local government hires a shark hunter to protect the town’s tourism industry, delighted me as a 10-year-old. But other than its infamous opening sequence, I don’t recall being scared. My younger sister, however, developed a years-long fear of deep water, even our 11-foot-deep pool. Maybe I’d just cultivated too much shark knowledge, well aware that these apex predators are docile and do not hunt humans like they do in Peter Benchley’s novel. The book and the film — I consumed both and can report that Steven Spielberg’s adaptation is better — only instilled in me a deeper love and respect for sharks. They are still my favorite fish to observe in aquariums or the ocean.

Outside of the movies, shark bounties are uncommon these days. That’s why news this week that Greenland was planning to cull 1,000 Greenland sharks was so alarming to many online. Officials in the Avannaata municipality on the island nation’s west coast approved the plan, offering fishers 300 Danish kroner, or about $45, per shark heart. The government complained that hungry sharks are eating too much Atlantic cod and Greenland halibut, cutting into what humans can bring home and damaging their gear. Lars Erik Gabrielsen, mayor of Avannaata, told The Guardian, “We need to safeguard the income of fishermen and the catch so that we can continue to eat the foods that we have relied on for generations.”

Conservationists and shark lovers were outraged at the proposal. Nick Dulvy, a professor and marine conservationist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, called it a “disaster” and said that biologically, the sharks are “the most sensitive species in the ocean to overfishing.” Marine ecologist Spencer Roberts, whose advocacy work includes calling out shark poaching, posted on X that “There is a psychotic sense of entitlement spreading around the world that imagines humans own the fish in the sea and demands retaliatory killing of predators who rely on these fish. Even centuries-old sages of the Arctic Ocean are not safe from this deranged human delusion.”

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Indeed, the Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus) is bizarre and misunderstood, basically being the couch potato of the depths of the North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean, where waters are just above freezing. Known as an abyssal species, it slothfully trawls the shadows like some mournful Lovecraftian being, possessing an especially sluggish metabolism, which isn’t surprising considering its size. Greenland sharks weigh in at one ton and reaching up to 23 feet in length. The maximum lifespan can average 400 years, the longest lifespan of any known vertebrate, meaning there are apparently Greenland sharks that are older than the United States. If that doesn’t blow you out of the water, I don’t know what will. Humans are famously bad at mentally fathoming deep time, so thinking about these ghostly rotund things hiding in the dark of the ocean, outliving empires like an ichthyological Ozymandias, fills me with even more awe than most sharks do.

In a rare spot of good news, the local government dropped the plan after national officials questioned its legality, but a future cull hasn’t been ruled out. Still, it’s worth upholding this turnaround as an example of why speaking out on animal rights can be successful. We don’t need to just sit back and watch the extinction of any species that doesn’t directly benefit us, while of course recognizing that fishers have to eat too. Some have proposed reimbursing fishers or using acoustic deterrents instead of mass slaughter.

But it’s more than just Greenland sharks at risk, with an estimated 79 million sharks dying in fisheries in 2019. At least 25 million of those species are threatened. As coral reefs struggle to survive, many sharks are losing their main food source, but humans are to blame for that one. These animals can be dangerous, same as a grizzly bear or elephant, but people tend to value sharks a lot less. This is in spite of their critical role in a healthy environment. Sharks aren’t monsters, they evolved to fill very specific roles in the ocean — a huge block in the Jenga of life — and if they go, our oceans would dramatically tumble in ways that would negatively impact humans too.

“Jaws” is a fantastic film if you can suspend your disbelief about a great white being the menace of the seas. That’s really us, but it doesn’t have to be.

The post Leave the Greenland sharks alone appeared first on Salon.com.

On Wednesday in the Oval Office, Donald Trump made clear that he’s not happy with how his political rivals have treated him and stoutly reserved his right for revenge. “They impeached me twice. I certainly — even to this moment I can do whatever I want, if I want.” Trump said, before claiming that only his respect for the office of the president keeps his behavior in check.  

If this were a sitcom— and it feels like a bad one — we would now hear a laugh track followed by groans.

Clearly Trump has never understood the foundational concepts of American politics. Political ethics, the art of “half a loaf,” the truism that “all politics are local” and the principles of public service over private enrichment are lost on him. Those are just sayings on trophies Trump has minted for himself since he’ll never get the Nobel Peace Prize. 

He certainly doesn’t understand compromise or the importance of local issues. Consider his enthusiastic support for data centers, the only issue currently uniting Americans. He’s too busy feathering his own nest while laughing off any pretense of ethical behavior. While we can certainly criticize Trump for ignoring the foundations of our democracy, the same could also be said of Congress, most state houses and many city councils. And, hey, let’s not talk about the local pool board. That’s where stuff really gets weird. Sometime I’ll tell you about my former neighbor in Gaithersburg who thought “Robert’s Rules of Order” had something to do with sharing spouses. 

Recent polls of likely voters in the midterm elections make it clear that a significant majority are extremely tired of the nonsense promulgated by Trump and others. Yeah, those are just polls and they only offer you a vague snapshot in time. That being said, it isn’t just about the polls. Donald Trump is so scared of what’s coming that he’s limited his campaign activities to shoring up support in the deepest red districts of America while threatening Democrats with hellfire and damnation.

No one could be more delighted than the Democratic National Committee, whose pitch to the electorate consists of three words: “We’re not him!” It’s a simple message, if not exactly an inspiring one, made possible by Trump’s overwhelmingly inept corruption. At least for now, the Republicans have lowered the bar so far under a despotic president that even the dysfunctional Democrats might crawl over it. 

Where I see real hope for change is at the local level. Some of the most promising Democrats have led energetic and engaging campaigns, with more public appearances in front of potential constituents than most Republican incumbents have ever dared to hold. The pitch is reaching disgruntled voters of all stripes, including Latinos, Republican women and independents.  Some of them, like retired Army officer Richard Ojeda, the Democratic nominee in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, and Fred Wellman, another military vet running in Missouri’s 2nd District, have independently and successfully put themselves within striking distance in traditionally red districts. Trump won Wellman’s Missouri district by eight points in 2024, and won Ojeda’s Tar Heel State district by double digits. With more than three weeks to go, both races are statistical dead heats.Wow. It appears that talking to the electorate and not acting like a bully can have positive effects. Who knew?

Meanwhile Trump still preaches his gospel that the economy is in great shape and people are doing better than ever; “I think we’re going to do very well,” he said recently. “We’re letting people know what the Republicans have done, and it’s incredible. And prices are now coming way down. And oil, as soon as the war is over, which will be soon, will be coming way down.”

While his stump speech wears thin, Republican incumbents are also running against a Democratic Party that has already lost twice to Trump, forcing us to confront what might happen if the Republicans win again. In the first two years of the second Trump administration, he has effectively destroyed the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth and 10th amendments. With a continuing GOP majority in Congress, the other five are toast as well.

It’s more interesting to consider what happens if the Democrats, despite their best efforts, actually win control of Congress. Can they make substantive changes? Obviously, Trump will veto any bills the Democrats pass. During the 2011 debt ceiling crisis, House Speaker John Boehner famously remarked that the House had passed a plan, and it was up to Barack Obama to sign it. Will the current crop of Democrats be satisfied to offer that response in 2027? 

I doubt it. There’s already talk of impeaching both Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Trump himself — at least according to Trump. My bet is on Hegseth. At the very least, that would undermine Trump’s control of the military, which he would eagerly wield to suppress the will of the people. It was an outgoing Republican member of Congress, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who proposed impeaching the “secretary of fashion,” and it’s widely believed that more Republicans could be persuaded to vote Hegseth out following a big blue wave. Actually removing him from office would require 67 votes in the Senate, always a tall order. But Hegseth is as popular in Congress as a canker sore on a first date. On Thursday, he revived the medieval notion of holding public executions, always a sign of civility, and after a Democratic takeover of both houses, the remaining Republicans will have their own futures to think about. As Brad Pitt said in “Fight Club,”  it’s about “survival of the fittest, baby.” 

If Hegseth is actually removed, the smart money would have Congress then turning its attention on Trump. Only then, the argument goes, would Trump be weakened enough that it might be possible to impeach and convict him, finally removing him from office. I’d want to whip the votes to make sure you could get a conviction before even starting down that road. But many angry Democrats want to bypass Hegseth and immediately try to impeach the president. Knee-jerk reaction? Thy name is politician.

Of course, it’s also possible the Democrats might opt to do nothing about Trump once they get a majority, which is more or less their national campaign strategy. But with no ability to pass legislation, I suspect they’d focus their energy on investigations, some of which would go nowhere and all of which would further fuel our nation’s bitter divisions. But is there another, better option?

Six weeks before the 2020 election, when Trump’s chances of winning looked bleak, he let us know he’d be willing to sponsor or support an insurrection. He urged us to stop counting the votes. We got the insurrection when we didn’t. So what’s he telling us now? One persistent fear is that he may try to snatch ballot boxes in hotly contested districts and claim victory, while screaming about election fraud. Others are fearful that with the complicity of the Republicans in Congress, he’ll let government funding run out in mid-December and shut down the government again. 

As he says, he’ll take whatever action he wants. That has included moving B-1 bombers from a base in England because of a supposed terror threat from Iran, a nation he claims is on its knees, along with a suggestion that the Iranians might “take out” Los Angeles and San Diego. Not exactly Trump’s finest hour. 

His public pronouncement that he can do whatever he wants to Democratic leaders, combined with implied threats against American cities, proves one more time that this American president is an existential threat to humanity. Anything and everything is transactional to Trump, even the sacrifice of millions of innocent lives, both Democratic and Republican. More horrifying still, his statement was met by extended cheers from his exuberant audience of nearly 6,000 people who showed up in Nebraska on Oct. 5. 

The punchline here is this: That was the second time in a week that Trump played before a very small crowd. It looks better, I suppose, to have a thousand people kept from entering a venue than seating them in a spacious arena he can no longer fill. In Ohio, he played to about 5,000 people in a high school gym and later threatened to jail reporters who pointed out that he hadn’t filled that “arena.” 

Trump has clearly given up on retaining control of the House and pulled out of the U.S. Senate race in North Carolina. This week he has grown increasingly dark in emails to his MAGA contributors. Tuesday, he told his supporters, “One seat slips, then another, and the gavel changes hands like a throat being cut in silence. The other side does not need a landslide. They need the dark to do their work for them. A tired voter. An empty chair. A man who tells himself the night will pass if he stays indoors.”

No one believes Trump wrote that macabre bit of poetry, evocative of a “Halloween in the Heartland” tale of terror. It stinks of a collaboration between Susie Wiles and Stephen Miller.

At the end of this road, if the Democrats seize a majority in both the House and the Senate, Trump will become a Manhattan sewer rat cornered in a dank alley fighting over a rotting slice of pizza. 

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Government shutdowns, name-calling, blame-spreading, ballot seizures and even a failure to seat the winning Democrats in Congress are all conceivable between the morning of Nov. 4 and the moment the new Congress is sworn in. But I detect a couple of tells that indicate Trump’s threats are empty. First, his notoriously low popularity likely won’t lead to a more successful result than the Jan. 6 insurrection, although the effort could be more dangerous and desperate.

The second tell is that we’re already hearing talk among Republicans about moving beyond Trump. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio will supposedly run for House minority leader and outgoing Speaker Mike Johnson will be shown the door. Jordan has stayed in the shadows since Trump’s return, allowing Johnson to gaslight reporters and the public with his creepy smile. Will Jordan become the new face of the Republicans following Trump’s departure? Will JD Vance, who’s been campaigning in Alaska recently? (I make that suggestion with a straight face.) Then there’s Marco Rubio, the man in the Trump administration who wears all the hats and avoids most of the criticism. They are all jockeying for position in an uncertain future.

The surest sign Trump is faltering is his shrinking crowds — and his desperate efforts to hide that fact.

Trump may stay in office until January of 2029, and he may not. Nature, politics and his unexplained health issues will have a say in that matter.

But as both Republicans and Democrats contemplate a future without him, perhaps even one based on democratic principles, Trump becomes increasingly insignificant while, at the same time, increasingly dangerous. We cannot afford to forget that.

 

The post What will Trump do after the midterms, with nothing left to lose? appeared first on Salon.com.

In the wake of a national story of an alleged gang rape at the Chi Phi fraternity house at Cornell University in October 2024, both students and faculty are turning their ire on the Ivy League school’s administration. On Monday, thousands of students and faculty members marched on the office of Michael Kotlikoff, who became the university’s president a few months before the alleged rape, with chants of “Resign!” The night before, graffiti appeared on his office building reading, “At Cornell, rapists are protected, protesters are expelled,” a reference to students who were suspended for protesting Israel’s war on Gaza. The university’s faculty senate is preparing a vote of no confidence on the administration’s leadership over claims that the school mishandled the rape allegations after the alleged victim, called Jane Doe, made a report to the campus police. 

The whole debacle has refreshed interest in the previous big controversy of Kotikoff’s brief but eventful presidential tenure: Cornell’s $60 million settlement with Donald Trump’s administration, which was announced in November 2025. The agreement was widely lambasted as a capitulation to the White House’s all-out war on diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Not only did the university implicitly concede that programs meant to help women and minorities are discriminatory against white men, they agreed to hand over data on race in admissions to the Trump administration and impose anti-DEI materials, provided by the White House, on faculty and staff. 

After the settlement was announced, the American Association of University Professors said in a statement that the agreement would “threaten some of the most vulnerable students on campus and invite ongoing federal government supervision to reduce the diversity of Cornell’s student body.” In July, the organization published an extensive report comparing the administration’s war on DEI to the Red Scare of the 1950s and called on university leadership to resist the Trump administration’s efforts to destroy racial diversity and gender equity efforts on campus. 

As the AAUP report shows, Cornell was far from the only university to cave to Trump; the norm for colleges and universities was rapid compliance. Diversity offices were shut down. Progressive student protesters were bullied and punished. Title IX protections, including rules protecting students from sexual harassment and abuse, were scaled back. Anecdotes have spread from faculty and students about a new chill descending over college campuses — a fear of retaliation for acknowledging the ongoing realities of racism, sexism and homophobia on campuses and in larger society. 

The fallout from the Cornell assault accusations, however, suggests that it may have been more than fear that was compelling this swift bending of the knee by many universities to Trump. There is also a degree of complicity. Progressive reforms to make campuses more welcoming to women and minority students are often a hassle for university administrators, even those ideologically who are aligned with the left. It means conflicts with board members, donors and alumni with more conservative leanings. It means having to handle student complaints of harassment, discrimination and even sexual abuse that would be easier to sweep under the rug. It means having to confront institutions — like fraternities — that reinscribe racism and sexism but are often simultaneously protected by the most elite and wealthy people connected to the universities. Giving into the Trump administration on DEI means being able to revert to older, easier ways of doing things — even if it comes at the expense of student freedom and safety. 

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It’s worth remembering that Jane Doe filed her complaint before Trump was president. Her case has all the hallmarks of an institution that tried to make her go away. Cornell police excluded relevant language — including the unambiguous phrase “I was raped” — from their report to the district attorney on Doe’s statement. Her lawyer claims that the university made her believe that the authorities were pursuing a criminal investigation, even though her case had already been closed. As Cornell philosophy professor Kate Manne noted in an essay for New York magazine, the university’s student code of conduct has a stricter definition of rape-by-intoxication than New York State’s, which would seem to cover the situation alleged here, where a woman is as high and drunk as Doe admits she was. And yet only five of the seven men accused were expelled from school, even as she was forced to drop out due to the subsequent stress and anxiety. 

Kotlikoff has a public record of flirting with “anti-woke” backlash. Last year, he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that framed “free speech” as a conservative concern and censorship as a leftist phenomenon, bragging about how his school had invited Ann Coulter and other right-wing speakers to campus, despite student protests. But as reader Michael Handelman wisely pointed out in a letter to the editor, “I was troubled by what he didn’t say. Right now, the greatest threat to academic freedom is the Trump administration.” Kotlikoff’s omission was telling, and left the reader with the impression that a few student protesters are a bigger threat to free speech than the heavy boot of the federal government stomping on academic freedom, which the administration was doing by suing Cornell in the first place. 

 

Earlier this year, Kotlikoff made news by bumping student protesters with his car, claiming he was the victim of “harassment and intimidation, with the direct motive of silencing speech” — an odd statement, as student protest is a form of protected speech. In this case, the students were asking Kotlikoff about the suspensions of pro-Palestinian protesters, which also put them on the “pro” side of the free speech issue the Cornell president claims to hold so dear. The board of trustees cleared Kotlikoff in its investigation and blamed the students, but the student protesters accused the board of bias. 

If Cornell is guilty of abandoning Jane Doe, it has no reason to fear consequences from the federal government for failure to enforce Title IX protections against sexual abuse on campus. As the New York Times reported this week, the Trump administration barely enforced the law during his first term. In his second term, enforcement is basically nonexistent. According to analysis by the Washington Post, Cornell’s track record is already alarming. From 2018 to 2024, there were 1,216 reports of sexual assault, domestic and dating violence, and stalking on campus. Only 51 people were ever found responsible, and of those, fewer than half faced serious consequences.

Jane Doe reported her alleged rape a few days after Trump got elected. With that history in mind, Cornell police and administrators could have had every reason to believe there would be no federal repercussions if they failed to reach a just outcome in her case.

Jane Doe’s lawyer, Thomas Giuffra, told CNN that his client “was not somebody who was a legacy [student], from a wealthy family” and “came from a small town.” Fraternities, in stark contrast, enjoy immense protections from exactly those wealthy people from legacy families. As historian Nick Syrett, author of “The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities,” told Time, former fraternity members are “a base of alumni that universities don’t want to upset because they’re generous and they’re powerful.” Whatever an administrator’s personal feelings, in a situation like this, it is objectively easier to cut loose an alleged victim rather than take on alleged assailants who are well-connected to powerful elites.

From a purely self-interested point of view, the Trump administration’s demands that schools give up policies and programs to help women and minority students is a win-win for administrators. It allows school leaders to give up a miserable, uphill battle against elite forces, while handing them a way to deflect blame onto the White House for forcing them into it.

We can’t peer into the hearts of administrators and know the exact mix of complicity and fear that drove these capitulations. But the Cornell case is a stark illustration of why the prospect of letting Trump have what he wants has a dark allure. 

The post What Cornell says about universities’ MAGA complicity appeared first on Salon.com.

A vulgar spectacle uses gilt and grandeur to cover for a weak mind. There’s a bit of treacle for a devoted audience, all flash, no substance. Yet despite it all, it’s an undeniable force with a string of victories proving that Americans have horrible taste.

You could be forgiven for thinking, given the context of the last decade, that I’m talking about President Donald Trump. But those are the sentiments that greeted Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera” when the musical crossed the pond from London’s West End in the late 1980s. Time reviewer William A. Henry III called it “muddled” and “slushily derivative.” Still, he couldn’t doubt that it bowled over a certain type of theatergoer.

“For those who seek an equivalent to a ride through the Haunted Mansion at Walt Disney World — seemingly a vast proportion of today’s Broadway audience — ‘Phantom’ is a brilliantly manipulated journey, scary yet ultimately unthreatening,” he wrote.

Trump was in that number, clapping along with the theme park-ride of a musical. The real estate scion had himself made a jump — across the East River — in the ‘80s. As the crow flies, his commute from Queens was shorter than Phantom’s, but it was about as far metaphorically. Trump’s Manhattan offensive took the family business of his slumlord father into the old-money center of the universe. His penchant for ostentatious displays of wealth and slapping his name up in massive gilded letters did little to win him friends among New York’s elite. 

As he explained in his bestseller “The Art of the Deal,” Trump had always wanted to be in Manhattan. “I believed, perhaps to an irrational degree, that Manhattan was always going to be the best place to live — the center of the world,” he wrote. If he rubbed elbows with members of high society in Broadway box seats and swanky steakhouses, they inevitably came away feeling they were touched the wrong way. As the 1990s dawned, Trump would tell any reporter within earshot that New York society was “horses**t.”

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“I’ll never have the goodwill of the establishment, the tastemakers of New York,” he told Vanity Fair in 1990. “The real public has always liked Donald Trump. The real public feels that Donald Trump is going through Trump-bashing.”

Trump has been open about his love of “Phantom” — though he admitted in his 2004 book “Think Like A Billionaire” to liking “Evita” best out of all Webber’s productions — and he’d shouted out the musical multiple times in interviews. In a 2023 chat with far-right podcaster Steve Bannon, Trump explained his reaction upon seeing the play for the first time: “This thing is unbelievable. It didn’t take long, because the music was incredible . . . The whole thing with the gondolas and the candles . . . it’s great, everybody loves it.” 

Even if Trump hadn’t blasted “Music of the Night” from his newly installed speakers in the White House Rose Garden as pressure to release the Epstein files mounted, and even if he hadn’t used his Kennedy Center sway to honor Michael Crawford, who originated the musical’s title role, it’s hard not to imagine that the president sees a bit of himself in the titular Phantom.

Watching this outsider derail the lives of a stuffy opera society that would never accept him, you have to wonder what Trump was cheering for. Was it Webber’s melodramatic love story, which the show brings to life with all the subtlety of a chandelier crashing to the stage? Was it the cheesy stab of synthesizers and Meat Loaf-style vocals, a stick-in-the-eye for Broadway purists? Or was it the Phantom himself, a man so consumed with the need for recognition that he’d drag all of high society into hell if he couldn’t get it?

The Phantom is a disfigured man who lives beneath a Parisian opera house, furiously writing a discordant opera about the legendary lover Don Juan. He haunts the opera house, eventually fixating on a chorus girl named Christine. He convinces her that he is an “angel of music,” taking advantage of a childhood story told to her by her late father, and he blackmails the opera’s ownership into making Christine a star, while also pining for her. When he realizes Christine is engaged to an aristocrat, the enraged Phantom kills several of the opera company’s members. After forcing the opera house to stage his composition, he kidnaps Christine and tries to force her to marry him. Only after she convinces him that he’s worthy of love does he let Christine and her fiancé go.   

The musical closed in April 2023 after an historic 35-year run, which means that the chandelier no longer falls inside a Broadway theater. But the Phantom of the Opera is still here — in Trump’s mind. Despite winning two presidential elections, he has never received the adoration he feels is due. In public speeches, Trump moans about a press and a public that refuse to give him credit for all the good he’s done. He claims the media never gave him his flowers over his response to the Covid-19 pandemic, that no one celebrates his donation of his presidential salary to federal agencies, that journalists focus too much on the wars he’s started and not the conflicts he’s avoided. 

When the public had the chance to show him love in the 2020 presidential election, they soundly rejected him. It’s a slight he still hasn’t recovered from, and he’s used every opportunity in his second term to settle petty scores and destroy anything that scans like the tastes of elites. You can see Trump’s scorn for the snobs best in his assault on the Kennedy Center, a living memorial to the 35th president that hosted philharmonics and operas — until Trump got his lasso around its neck. Unable to extort the institution into something suitable for his tastes, he’s now shuttered the building and is reportedly weighing its demolition. In his destructive tirades and ongoing dismantlings, all payback for long-held petty grudges, you can almost see a younger Trump watching the heartbroken Phantom. 

The masked outsider lurks on the rooftop, having discovered Christine is engaged. The lines of her duet with her fiancé still ring in his ears: “Love me. That’s all I ask of you.”  

The post Trump’s 40-year love affair with “The Phantom of the Opera” appeared first on Salon.com.

We’ve spent our entire political careers in different camps. One of us was a Democratic governor and chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The other served as a conservative Republican in Congress for over a decade, representing a deep-red district in the Indiana heartland that President Donald Trump won in each of his three presidential elections by over 30 points.

But before we got into politics, we were both physicians in internal medicine and cardiothoracic surgery, respectively. We’ve seen firsthand how crucial it is for the patient-provider relationship to guide and determine the right care. And that’s why we’re so alarmed that nearly half of Americans, according to a recent survey by KFF, the independent health organization, now report that their health insurers have delayed or denied coverage for a doctor-recommended treatment within the past two years.

Corporate insurers should not be at the forefront of patient care. Delays and denials put patients’ health at risk. And they often lead to preventable complications and higher long-term spending.

We both believe reforming the health insurance system is a moral and an economic imperative, as do many of our colleagues on both sides of the aisle. Even in a bitterly divided Congress, we have seen encouraging signs that reform is possible.

In recent months, Democrats and Republicans have worked together to hold insurers accountable — especially when it comes to “prior authorization,” the notorious and widely despised insurer practice of denying certain procedures and treatments unless doctors and patients first obtain permission. In a recent American Medical Association survey, 95% of physicians said they’ve seen prior authorization requirements delay necessary care. Nearly four in five have witnessed patients abandon treatment because of problems with the process.

Leaders in both parties already agree that improvements to the American insurance model are necessary. The bipartisan Improving Seniors’ Timely Access to Care Act would move Medicare Advantage prior authorizations to an electronic system and require quicker response times and greater transparency from insurers. Significantly, over 300 House members and 70 senators have cosponsored the legislation. This summer, it cleared two House committees unanimously.

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Lawmakers are also finding common ground on transparency. In July the House Energy and Commerce Committee advanced a bipartisan bill that would require health insurers to publicly report how often they deny claims.

That scrutiny is overdue. Medicare Advantage insurers denied more than four million prior authorization requests in 2024.

When patients and their doctors appealed those denials, insurance companies reversed roughly 80% of their initial decisions. That high reversal rate suggests insurers are denying lots of medically appropriate procedures, tests and treatments — and hoping that doctors and patients will be too busy, sick and frustrated to follow through with an appeal.

That’s often a safe, albeit callous, bet. For too many Americans, fighting insurance companies can feel like a battle they cannot win. It often requires tremendous mental and emotional fortitude at a time when they are simply trying to get well. That is why Congress must take on that fight for them. Families already pay extraordinary sums for health coverage — by some measures, the monthly cost of employer-sponsored family health coverage now rivals the typical monthly mortgage payment. And still, these families face denials, delays and difficulty accessing the care and medicines they need.

As physicians, we know that time matters when someone is sick. As a Democrat and a Republican, we also recognize how rare genuine consensus is in Washington. That’s why we’re cautiously hopeful that after the midterms, Congress will seize the opportunity to make prior authorization and broader insurance marketplace reforms a priority.

The post A health reform both parties can get behind appeared first on Salon.com.

I was wrong about Fox News. Or rather, I was wrong about what the network can be useful for.

The conservative media behemoth is celebrating 30 years on the air this week. I have been a loyal, daily viewer for about half that run. I remember the inaugural episodes of “The Five” and “Outnumbered.” Before Marc Lamont Hill was helping elevate the conversation on one of the country’s biggest podcasts, I watched him school Bill O’Reilly as a Fox contributor and Temple University professor. And who can forget Alan Colmes, forever assigned the role of hapless Democrat?

For years, I believed there was no particularly good reason for a serious progressive to go on Fox News. The network touts its “fair and balanced” tagline, but it is not a neutral venue and it does not deserve to be treated like one. Its business model is grievance. A Democrat on Fox is a prop. The network invites them into the studio so its audience can watch them lose. Why submit to the bad faith interruptions and the inevitable social media clip engineered to make the left look elitist or insane? 

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed has made me reconsider that.

The Michigan Democratic Senate candidate has emerged as an anomalous fixture on the conservative network, dominating segments with a cool composure that leaves hosts alternating between hostility and reluctant infatuation. El-Sayed is not merely surviving Fox News hits. He is dominating them, and the hosts know it — and Donald Trump definitely knows it.

The president raged on social media about El-Sayed’s Monday appearance on “The Story with Martha MacCallum” that Fox News spends more time covering “Democrat jihadists” than they do GOP candidates. Trump’s temper tantrums highlight a fundamental structural weakness in contemporary conservatism: Right-wing ideology is inherently hierarchical, predicated on the worship of strength and dominance. When El-Sayed goes onto Fox and refuses to shrink, when he looks a host in the eye and dismantles talking points with data and empathy, it scrambles the entire authoritarian matrix. 

The psychological fallout among the network’s talking heads has been equally telling. Jesse Watters, a stalwart of the network’s macho posturing, has spent weeks gushing over El-Sayed with an almost comical bewilderment. After the Democratic candidate casually skewered his Republican opponent Mike Rogers as a “beta” on air — eliciting an involuntary chuckle from Watters — the Fox host found himself helplessly admitting that he liked the progressive Democrat despite himself.

This is a model for the left — and there is a lineage here. 

Democrats on Fox News used to be cast in a narrow role: the tame liberal who could be invited on to lose politely. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was one of the first politicians on the left who seriously engaged with the network’s audience. He appeared on Fox during his 2016 presidential run and talked directly about wages, healthcare and corporate power. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign proved a Democrat can leave the network Roger Ailes built with their own viral moments. He routinely met a hostile premise with calm facts, a sharp answer and a smile that made the host’s irritation look frivolous. 

El-Sayed is the next stage of that evolution. He adds something that many national Democrats still lack: an understanding that a media hit is not a policy seminar. It is about making the audience see who is in command. El-Sayed has figured out how to talk to the people who love Fox without pretending that the network is something it isn’t.

He refused to let Fox’s presenters dictate the terms of the conversation. In August, El-Sayed sat for a 25-minute one-on-one with Watters, who confronted him with the inventory of right-wing obsessions: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Trump’s war with Iran, transgender athletes and his Muslim faith. Watters wanted to compress El-Sayed into a caricature, a radical leftist Muslim candidate who could be made alien and threatening to the people watching at home.

El-Sayed did not take the bait. When Watters pressed him about abolishing ICE, he did not surrender the moral argument or get stuck in a defensive loop. He pointed out that the U.S. enforced immigration law before ICE’s creation and that the agency’s existence has not solved the problem Watters claimed to care about. 

“We were able to enforce our immigration policies without shooting people in the face and the back of the head,” El-Sayed said, while dodging several of the culture war questions and steering the interview back to healthcare and affordability. When Watters raised surgery for minors in the crudest possible terms, El-Sayed answered by asking whether the host was circumcised. Right-wing influencers howled that it was a nightmare. The clip went viral anyway.

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El-Sayed’s appearance on Monday with MacCallum was masterful policy communication. The host pressed the candidate on terrorism, the Iran war, Medicare for All and campaign financing, and the two talked over each other at points because El-Sayed kept answering the question behind the question. 

On terrorism, he was unequivocal that the victim is never at fault. Then, he pivoted: “Why are we fighting this war, to what end? Who benefits from it? Why did we do this? What are we paying for it?” 

When MacCollum played a clip of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani defining socialism as everyone having what they need to live a dignified life, and then asked if that disturbed El-Sayed as a capitalist, he dismantled the frame in seconds. “Well, Martha, I assume you went to good public schools.” 

Yes. 

“And you got to drive on good roads today.” 

Pretty much. 

“And when you put your garbage out, somebody comes and picks it up.” 

Yes. 

El-Sayed embodied the most devastating move in American politics: When someone tries to explain socialism to you, explain the socialist parts of the life they already love. MacCallum pressed him on campaign finance and high-profile donors, and El-Sayed did not stutter or retreat. He pivoted to the fundamental reality that ordinary people across the political spectrum despise: the corrupting influence of corporate money in politics.

This connects directly to a deeper truth about the American electorate that corporate-backed consultants consistently fail to grasp. And there is evidence it is landing. In a recent New York Times/Siena poll, El-Sayed outperformed other swing-state Democratic Senate candidates in capturing a vital sliver of 2024 Trump voters, securing 8% compared to paltry single digits elsewhere.

This is not because those voters have suddenly embraced intersectional environmentalism or Medicare for All in its entirety; it is because working-class Americans are profoundly alienated by corporate malfeasance, stagnant wages and the hollow promises of career politicians. When a candidate like El-Sayed — just like Sanders and Buttigieg before him — speaks directly to economic class struggles without patronizing rhetoric, a significant percentage of non-ideological working-class viewers listen. And they recognize the fundamental truth in the critique.

The left does not need to pretend that Fox News has suddenly become fair. It has not. One candidate’s successful appearance does not redeem a network that has fueled racism, conspiracy theories, anti-immigrant panic and the authoritarian politics that brought Trump to power. 

But refusing to appear on Fox News is no longer a tenable position if it merely concedes millions of viewers to an information ecosystem with no meaningful counterargument that can reach them. 

The post Abdul El-Sayed is the Democrat who keeps dominating Fox News appeared first on Salon.com.

There are certain sensations you don’t realize belong to an era until they’re gone: the modem’s electronic shriek as it connected to the internet, the satisfying clack of a landline receiver, the little metallic weight of an arcade token in your palm. Lately, I’ve been wondering if the basket of free chips and salsa — dropped almost ceremonially onto the table before anyone has ordered a thing — might eventually join them.

At El Nopal, a regional Mexican chain my family has frequented for years, the opening minutes of dinner follow a familiar choreography. We slide into a pleather booth beneath burnt-orange walls and televisions playing Spanish-language fútbol. Half the table orders Diet Coke, the other water with lemon; someone requests a skillet of molten white queso. Then come the chips: hot, sturdy, generously salted, piled into black woven baskets alongside ramekins of fire-engine-red mild salsa and a darker, spicier version flecked with onion and jalapeño.

For our family of six, there are always two baskets, dividing the table into loose territories. Those seated in the middle are expected to choose a side; reaching from both feels vaguely lawless. Everyone has a salsa ritual. Mine is two-thirds spicy, one-third mild. My sister mixes the mild with queso until it turns a muted pink. One of my brothers splashes vinegary house hot sauce into the spicy. Soon the menus are stacked, the pebbled Coke cups are sweating rings onto the table and somebody is pointing with a chip while saying, “No, no, tell her the part about —”

The Trump administration has made that little ritual more expensive to maintain.

In July 2025, the administration withdrew from a long-standing agreement governing fresh tomatoes imported from Mexico and imposed a 17.09% antidumping duty on most of them. The Commerce Department said the move was intended to counter Mexican tomatoes being sold in the United States at unfair prices and protect domestic growers.

Then the weather got bad.

Poor conditions in Mexico and Florida further reduced supplies, and tomato prices climbed to their highest level in roughly two decades. Dante Galeazzi, president of the Texas International Produce Association, told Houston Public Media that at one point the fresh tomato market had jumped to about $80 a box. Grocery stores began backing away from tomatoes earlier in the year; restaurants, he said, held on longer.

There is only so much a restaurant can absorb.

“The challenge is for our Texas restaurants, they operate on very narrow profit margins in what I would call good economic times,” Kelsey Erickson Streufert, chief public affairs officer for the Texas Restaurant Association, told the publication.

These are not, she continued, particularly good economic times for running a restaurant. Food is more expensive, but so are labor, utilities, insurance and credit card swipe fees — virtually everything required to keep the doors open. Eventually, the arithmetic gets down to the ramekin.

“You have restaurants that are simply saying, ‘Look, I can’t afford to put salsa on the tables anymore,’” Galeazzi said. “What are consumers going to do? Where are consumers going to find this relief?”

The tragedy of a $4 basket of chips is obviously not the $4. It is the moment someone at the table inevitably says, “Eh, do we need these today?” Sometimes the answer will be yes. Some days undoubtedly call for acid, salt and crunch. On other days, maybe you skip them. You wait patiently for the entrées. The stories still get told. Someone finds a plastic straw to point with instead.

It’s fine.

But the texture of the wait is different.

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That small decision — chips or no chips — moves the diner almost imperceptibly from guest to customer. The thing that once arrived as part of the welcome now joins the same mental ledger as everything else: Drinks? An appetizer? Queso? Dessert? Do we need it? Is it worth it? Should we just save the money?

People sometimes joke online about whether you grew up in an “appetizers and drinks” family or an “entrées and water” family. It is a joke, mostly, about the invisible financial rules children learn at restaurants: what counts as normal, what counts as a treat and what you know better than to ask for.

Part of the appeal of the neighborhood Americanized Mexican restaurant has long been that it offers a particularly accessible kind of abundance. You can order an inexpensive combination plate and a soda, or water with a squeeze of lime, eat something hot and filling and deeply flavorful, and be out the door in 45 minutes without anybody making you feel strange about any of it.

And while you wait, you get the same chips as the table ordering margaritas.

Free chips briefly flatten the distinction between the appetizers-and-drinks family and the entrées-and-water family. Everybody gets to start with something.

Of course, restaurants cannot run on symbolism.

The “free” things on the table have never actually been free to them. Somebody bought the tomatoes. Somebody fried the chips. Somebody washed the ramekins and refilled the baskets. Hospitality has always had scaffolding beneath it; ideally, the guest simply doesn’t spend much time looking at it.

Lately, that scaffolding has become harder for restaurants to hide.

One of my favorite Chicago breakfast spots recently changed the way it serves Texas toast. Two slices had been the default for years. Now the waiter asks: Do you actually want two, or would one be enough? They were happy to bring two, he explained. But a lot of second slices were coming back uneaten, and they simply couldn’t afford to keep throwing them away. It is difficult to begrudge a restaurant that calculation. In fact, the question struck me as a rather thoughtful solution: Have as much toast as you want. Just tell us you want it first.

But it also made visible, for a moment, the financial scaffolding behind the plate.

That is what interests me about the chips and salsa, too. Not that restaurant owners are becoming less generous, but that the economic forces pressing on them increasingly require them to show their work.

Trade policy tends to arrive in public dressed in abstraction: percentages, agreements, investigations, duties, markets. Then someone opens an invoice. A tomato costs more. A batch of salsa costs more. The complimentary appetizer that was once cheap enough to disappear into the cost of doing business becomes expensive enough to notice. Eventually, somebody has to decide whether hospitality can continue to absorb it.

And then, one night, a server has to ask if you would like to add chips.

This is a mundane outcome of economic policy — almost comically so. No one’s dinner is destroyed. No one sits staring mournfully at the bare lacquered table. There is simply a small patch of negative space where something automatic used to happen.

But small gestures are often where hospitality lives.

The loss of free chips and salsa isn’t really about chips and salsa. It is about what happens when policy decisions force restaurants to make the scaffolding of their hospitality more visible — when a gesture designed to make guests forget about the transaction becomes part of the transaction itself. At El Nopal, when the baskets arrive, nobody asks who is paying for this round. Nobody pauses to determine whether everyone wants enough chips to justify them. Nobody calculates how hungry they are with their entrée still twenty minutes away.

Someone tells a story. Someone interrupts to improve the punchline. Someone else points across the table with a tortilla chip. And everyone reaches into the basket without asking.

The post Trump’s tariffs may kill free chips and salsa appeared first on Salon.com.

Do me a favor: Picture Charles Bronson. Black moptop over a face lined like a well-traveled map, and a jacket with the collar turned up against the perennial winter of cinematic 1970s New York City. His hand’s in the coat pocket, resting on the only argument anyone he encounters will listen to. He turns to the camera and gives a rapid-fire lecture on the declining birth rates of white Americans and the need to read classical philosophers and reject post-modern thought. 

Ridiculous, right? Bronson’s aggrieved architect in the classic “Death Wish” films didn’t have a guiding philosophy. All he had was a gun and the bad luck to run into nearly every petty criminal on the island of Manhattan, and he sure wasn’t trying to convince the audience of the correctness of his conservative worldview. He wasn’t a debate club member. He was a hammer meeting a nail, traveling to the run down parts of towns all over America to shore things up — to entertain rather than win over audiences. If moviegoers came away thinking that cities were hellholes full of criminals who need to be tried by 12 or carried by six, so much the better.

It’s a lesson that the team of writers, directors and producers at The Daily Wire failed to learn. The film studio arm of the conservative commentary empire created in 2015 by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing, who left the company in 2025, is pushing out films that double as lectures on how America went wrong by going woke. The latest offering, a campus action film titled “Run Hide Fight: Infidels,” delivers on the hectoring and little else.

From its first original film in 2016, the studio made clear its political orientation — and intentions. “Shut In” features a protagonist, who was a recovering addict and single mother, fighting off a home invasion from a crazed pedophile, and it heavily implies that her former drug use is to blame for the current trouble. She escapes her fate by forcing her ex-boyfriend to overdose and lives happily ever after as an apple-butter-making tradwife. The Daily Wire kept the hits coming in 2020 by making director-writer Kyle Rankin’s “Run Hide Fight,” a paper-thin good-guy-with-a-gun parable that follows a 17-year-old girl whose school is under attack from a squadron of active shooters. (The title comes from a common safety protocol for everyday citizens who find themselves being shot at.) Two years later, Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh fronted “What Is a Woman?”, a street harassment documentary centered on attacking non-traditional gender identities and transgender issues.

“Infidels,” though, sees the studio outdoing itself in centering  reactionary politics. Starring disgraced Marvel star Jonathan Majors, the film takes the school-shooting premise and injects it into the campus culture wars. Under the guise of pro-Palestinian protests, terrorists take over a small liberal arts college, and a group of college students, with the help of  Majors’ “protect Western civilization”-spouting veteran, fight to take back their campus. 

“Infidels” spouts arguments familiar to any Daily Wire watcher at a blistering pace. College students are either misinformed about the reality of Israel’s war on Gaza, or they are completely oblivious to it. The campus protest organizer, a literal blue-haired college student in a keffiyeh, is unwittingly working for a splinter cell of murderous terrorists. In contrast to the actual police crackdown on campus protests across the country, the college’s trustees and president sit on their hands for fear of causing offense. The town’s mayor refuses to call in the SWAT team because of bad optics. Graffiti primes right-wing watchers to fume with a laundry list of leftist slogans. Land acknowledgements statements, agnosticism, the utility of college education and mixed-race families in commercials all get a moment in the over-stuffed script by Kyle Rankin.

If hearing the arguments of Shapiro, who acts as a producer, in the mouths of supposed twentysomethings doesn’t give the game away, the baffling characterizations in the film do. The students’ tastes veer almost embarrassingly close to those of suburban middle-aged men. They drink (unaged) whiskey that one student distills in his dorm room while listening to ‘90s butt-rockers Seven Mary Three. One character is introduced swinging a sword in his pajamas while chomping a cigar and quoting Rudyard Kipling. If you have been unfortunate to see a Daily Wire hang session, then you will know  that Shapiro and Company aren’t setting up a spate of undergraduate methanol blindness. They genuinely think these kids are cool. 

Focusing on the cast of college kids uncovers the core problem of the film. You’re meant to root against villains who, outside of their devotion to a radical strain of Islam, believe everything The Daily Wire’s average opinionator believes. For the logic of this siege thriller to make any sense, you have to want those college kids, who spend the first hour taking over quads and discussing polyamory, to get away unscathed. Rankin clearly doesn’t; he luxuriates in the deaths of the blue-haired activist and her gay right-hand man. The former has her throat slit in a startlingly graphic manner, and the latter is thrown from a roof in a literal interpretation of a common counterargument against LGBTQ+ supporters of Palestine. The shot of the student falling from a roof to his death is drawn out and examined from several gleeful angles. 

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On the opposite side, the audience is meant to root for Majors’ character, who warns that Islam is coming for “the wombs of our women” and that the U.S. will be undermined by a strict devotion to the rights of citizens. That sword-swinging cigar chomper calls a dying Egyptian dorm neighbor a common ethnic epithet before rushing off to save the day, which in turn serves to highlight a larger issue that The Daily Wire runs into each time they sit down to hammer out a script. When they try to sneak their liberal bogeymen into a film, their debate team muscles kick in. Soon, the film is more “well, actually” than action.

In a vacuum, Bronson’s “Death Wish” vigilante was just as unlikeable. For four films, the actor played a grief-crazed man looking for trouble and shooting anyone who looked at him crossways. But Bronson wasn’t one for speechifying; he never turned to the camera and explained how the big-city carnage was all Jimmy Carter’s fault. He certainly never decided that his late wife, who had been killed by gang members, deserved her fate because of his household’s liberal views at the series’ outset. In the hands of The Daily Wire’s would-be auteurs, the criminals would have spent the opening hour of “Death Wish” hopping subway turnstiles and taking free classes at City University of New York.

The problem of unlikeable heroes is also evident in the leaked script of the studio’s upcoming pro-ICE thriller. With a working title of “Pawn Shop,” the film is set to follow a pair of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents facing down a mob of supposed antifa counterprotestors and members of the gang MS-13 as they attempt to take a suspect into custody. There is even a showdown with a Renee Good stand-in, who is shot by one of the film’s hero agents. From a draft script shared by The Bulwark: 

The first shot takes the [sic] Melanie in the neck, below her covid mask. The second in the head, above her covid mask.

The inclusion of the mask might make The Daily Wire’s supposedly small-government audience feel less sympathy for an unarmed woman who was killed. But asking audiences who haven’t already bought into Shapiro’s schtick to root for her killer across the next few hours of action and culture war arguments is a heavy load no Daily Wire film has shown they can lift. 

 

UPDATE: This column has been updated to clarify the departure of Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing from the company in 2025.

The post The Daily Wire is too mad to make a movie appeared first on Salon.com.

Pete Hegseth is odd. This isn’t just a personal opinion, though there’s no doubt that he gets widely mocked for his carefully cultivated public persona, which is a mix of megachurch preacher, gym rat and Robert Duvall’s napalm-huffing character in “Apocalypse Now.” The fact that the defense secretary is different is simply a statistical reality.

It’s not just that he’s a white evangelical Christian, a group that, according to PRRI, makes up only 13% of the population. Hegseth’s church, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, is extreme even for the right, with a leader who argues against women’s suffrage and teaches that slavery was the height of “mutual intimacy and harmony” between the races. Even within MAGA, those remain fringe positions, despite great efforts by some Christian nationalists to reignite “debate” on such long-resolved issues. 

All this means it’s hard not to laugh when Hegseth pontificates about his hatred of “weirdos.” Although he has a war to fight in Iran, somehow he finds time to focus his attention on what he clearly sees as the greater battle: remaking the military according to the demands of his very white, very male, very right-wing vision.

“No fatties, no t******s, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals,” Hegseth said during a Sept. 30 speech at the U.S. Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. He didn’t explicitly say “no women,” but his kicker — “with testosterone testing on top” — made the implication plain. The “no beardos” demand may seem strange, but as Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times explained, it’s coded racism. Hegseth ended medical exemptions that allowed beards for people, mostly Black men, with certain skin conditions. This may explain why he has no problem when white men have beards, as seen on his church leader, Doug Wilson, or the many celebrities the defense secretary likes to take photos with. (Hegseth himself sported a beard in 2018.) 

“Wimps,” “radicals” and “weirdos” are more ambiguous pejoratives, but Hegseth’s recent actions suggest his definitions are expansive enough to cover the vast majority of Americans. He’s been on a firing spree, demanding a 20% cut of the Pentagon’s top brass in an apparent effort to expunge those he deems “woke.” The move comes after nearly two years of blocking promotions for and pushing out Black and female military leaders. Hegseth also rewrote the list of religions recognized by the Pentagon, narrowing from over 200 faith categorizations to a mere 31 — 22 of which are Christian. He claims this is to simplify the bureaucracy, but his motives are likely more disturbing: to stigmatize non-Christians and restrict the definition of “Christian.” The Air Force is already forcing service members to register their religious beliefs under the truncated list, drawing criticism from atheists and others whose belief systems are not included as options. 

Last week, Hegseth upped the ante by announcing the formation of the Office of Religious Affairs “to strengthen the moral, ethical and spiritual readiness of our warfighters.” Despite boilerplate claims that this action will not “compel religious participation” or “diminish the free exercise rights” of service members, both the policies and pomp surrounding the announcement made it clear that the goal is to promote Hegseth’s version of Christianity — and shame anyone who does not adhere to it. The office will be run by the defense secretary himself and, in ominous language, promises to fund “research, technology, and analytical tools to support and assess spiritual fitness,” which sounds like a data-gathering operation to ensure troops meet Hegseth’s esoteric views on proper religious practice. 

“Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God,” Hegseth said in his announcement, using language from the Book of Ephesians that will be sure to resonate with Christian evangelicals. 

Taken together, this purge helps clarify what Hegseth means when he’s talking about “weirdos” and “wimps,” as well as other slurs like “t******s.” He’s hostile to women, the LGBTQ+ community, people of color and anyone who doesn’t adhere to his vision of conservative Christianity — although it’s worth noting that with his message of peace and love, Jesus Christ himself would not be accepted by Hegseth as a Christian.

The secretary may have gone to Princeton University, but he hasn’t yet grasped the concept of irony. The people he deems “weirdos” far outnumber those in his narrow category, presumably of non-weirdos, many times over. 

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Hegseth has tried to justify his position and rhetoric by arguing that a proper military should only contain “the real 1%” of supposedly superior people. But as Eliot Cohen of The Atlantic notes, this claim is ignorant of history. You need large numbers to win wars, which inherently means that armies can’t be elitist institutions.

Hegseth has a real math problem on his hands. His “real 1%” of alleged non-weirdos is just not enough people to staff a modern military, especially in times of war. His solution appears to be to hit the road, trying to recruit more mini-Hegseths to enlist. On Sept. 19 he embarked on the Send Me Tour in an effort to reach out to people in white evangelical-heavy parts of the country with a Bible-heavy pitch about how Jesus wants them to fight for their country. Both the tour’s name and the secretary’s stump speech rely heavily on Isaiah 6:8; Hegseth equates God’s call to the prophet to be faithful with his own plea for evangelicals to join the military.

In a response video, Sen. Raphael Warnock, the Democrat from Georgia who is also an ordained minister with multiple theology degrees, didn’t mince his words. “Pete Hegseth is busy twisting the scriptures yet again . . . When Isaiah answers that call, it is not a call to go into battle.” Instead, Warnock said, “Isaiah challenges corruption” and “those who would crush the poor.”

Those objectives, of course, are not remotely Hegseth’s. His creation of a hierarchy that places white, straight men at the top and relegates everyone else into an underclass of “weirdos” and “wimps” ignores the Bible’s historical context — and actual meaning. Anyone who doubts that can simply examine his behavior in office and his monomaniacal focus on sorting America’s service members into a worthy-unworthy dichotomy, based solely on how much they adhere to his own self-serving ideals of what a soldier should look like.

The post Pete Hegseth’s holy war on “weirdos” targets most Americans appeared first on Salon.com.