Earlier this month, three data centers in western Russia suddenly went dark due to a “rapid unplanned disassembly,” to use euphemistic engineering parlance. They exploded, in other words. Operated by Yandex, a Russian technology company often compared to Google that offers many similar services — a search engine, online shopping, cloud computing and the like — the centers were heavily damaged in a series of coordinated drone strikes over four days by Ukraine, which saw them as a valuable target in the country’s military campaign against Russian infrastructure.

As Russia’s war against Ukraine slogs on, both sides are increasingly adopting this strategy. While power plants and oil refineries have been hit, data centers and internet facilities are becoming the latest quarry for drone and missile strikes — and not just in Europe. Data centers operated by Amazon in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have also been targeted in the ongoing Iran war.

Few Americans have probably heard of Yandex, let alone use its services, and most likely didn’t notice when many of its hosted websites became inaccessible. But after Ukraine’s attacks, many people started to claim that social media was seemingly different. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was quick to suggest his country had dealt a massive blow to Russia’s online disinformation machine, saying, “It suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social platforms. There was less hate, less division and fewer provocations.” Several reports seemed to support his claims, citing data from internet monitoring service Cloudflare, that allegedly showed “Russia’s Yandex bot traffic nearly eliminated overnight.” 

But the truth is far more complicated, as some experts have noted. Yandex did experience a crash in bot activity, but at least some of that traffic seems to be legitimate. “When Cloudflare data shows a precipitous drop in ‘bot’ traffic, that does not mean ‘automated social media troll accounts’, it means ‘software that makes automated web requests on a large scale,’” Michał ‘Rysiek’ Woźniak, an internet infrastructure expert, told The Guardian. Others noted that they haven’t seen an actual drop in online disinformation. “Our platforms are still monitoring Russian social networks across the world and there is no discernible change in their posting patterns,” said Amil Khan, the chief executive of Valent, a tech startup that tracks disinformation.

None of that has stopped Reddit and other corners of the web from celebrating and memeing the issue. If those celebrations aren’t quite justified, there’s still something to be learned from the ordeal, which digs into the so-called dead internet theory. The basic premise is that almost nothing we see online is human-generated anymore. In his 2025 book “Market-Oriented Disinformation Research,” business academic Carlos Diaz Ruiz, who has studied how disinformation spreads in social media echo chambers, describes what many of us experience online on a daily basis: “an eerie feeling that the Internet is made up of bots talking to bots, following and liking bots, and posting AI-generated content designed for machine consumption, the algorithm, not humans.”

Indeed, bot traffic makes up an increasingly large share of the internet, surpassing human traffic for the first time in history over the summer, according to a June Cloudflare report. No doubt the surge in generative artificial intelligence use is what tipped the scales, but of course, not all bots are created equal. Many have legitimate, beneficial uses, like archiving web data.

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Some people have wedged dead internet theory into a conspiracy theory that Diaz Ruiz divides into “weak” and “strong.” The weak version of the theory is that the internet is now little more than a hall of mirrors used to manipulate the masses into fighting a culture war instead of a class war. “The Internet drama keeps the population occupied and distracted, preventing them from resisting the elites secretly controlling the world,” as Diaz Ruiz says. “The ‘strong’ version of the dead internet conspiracy theory claims that online activity is entirely disconnected from human activity because our society ceased to exist some time ago. In some versions, a catastrophic event occurred in the past, triggering society’s collapse.”

OK, so we’re basically talking the plot of “The Matrix” here. The argument that humanity peaked in 1999 may be compelling, and I won’t argue against it. If reality truly is nothing more than a hallucination, dream or computer screensaver in the brain, why should we waste time disputing it? Proving a negative with such a lack of evidence is fruitless. The point is, some people may be taking dead internet theory a little too far, but that doesn’t change the fact that within the last week people felt like they got a taste of some version of it.

If we lift the hood on some of these conspiracies, we can understand what people are really afraid of. Last December in the journal Computer, Hal Berghel, a computer science professor at the University of Nevada, argued the dead internet is more than a conspiracy and should not be dismissed, writing, “There’s certainly evidence of the distortion of the internet from the original concept as a liberating, self-healing, packetized purveyor of useful and important information: the original commitment to net neutrality is on life support, the goal of a shared public information repository is constantly compromised by paywalls, the content has moved from valuable scholarship to a sub-cerebral landfill, and the users are subjected to a mind-numbing cacophony of digital threats: spam, phish bait, spyware, malware, online bullying, online fraud, extortion, hacking, VoIP 911-swatting, doxing, slander, pretexting, etc.”

In other words, there’s a good reason so many people find dead internet theory attractive. Once a zone of promise and connection, the web has not only rotted and enshittified, it’s turned into a literal warzone. There really are algorithms out there, unleashed by governments actively dropping bombs on one another, that are designed to infect our minds and prejudice our ability to perceive the truth. It’s one of the many ways modern warfare has become invisible, pervasive and endless. No wonder social media is making so many people depressed — it can be a form of assault.

“In tandem with proxy warfare, cyber operations have become a central pillar of modern statecraft. Cyber warfare enables states to conduct aggressive acts; espionage, sabotage, infrastructure disruption without engaging in kinetic violence,” philosophers Oluyemi Opeoluwa Adisa and Kareem Shwan Adham wrote last year in a study published in the International Journal of Scientific Research and Management. “The strategic advantage of cyber warfare lies in its stealth and ambiguity. Because it blurs the line between war and crime, attribution becomes difficult, enabling perpetrators to operate with minimal consequences.”

How do we even tell how much of the dead internet theory is true? Perhaps through that old tech-support adage: Turn it off and back on again. And no, I don’t mean bombing more data centers, though we’re likely to see more of that, for better or worse. If everything feels fake, maybe we’re better off getting outside and experiencing something real for a minute. Yeah, yeah, we’ve all been told to touch grass so much that such advice is routinely mocked, and anyway, not everyone can easily do that.

But here’s your daily reminder that humans are primates whose still-evolving brains are exponentially outpaced by technological advancement. Being in nature is essential because we are nature. There’s a certain reset available in the presence of trees, birds and clouds. Even more important is connecting with real humans: family, friends, neighbors. Socialization is the essence of the primate brain too. You don’t have to uninstall any apps or delete Facebook, though you could try it too. Off, on again. 

And when you are online, which is unavoidable for many of us, try to remember that you are probably interacting with fewer humans than you might think. So don’t take it so seriously. Temper those outrageous emotions, the ones the algorithms have gotten so good at teasing out of us. Maybe instead we can fortify them into weapons to attack the real problems we face, like widening wealth gaps, destruction of the environment and the rise of authoritarianism. 

The post The internet isn’t dead. It’s even worse appeared first on Salon.com.

Not long ago, celebrities took to social media to express their contempt for a business and barely made a ripple in the public conversation, let alone national headlines. 

When Alec Baldwin furiously smashed his big thumbs into his tiny BlackBerry keyboard, tweeting, “Starbucks on 93 and B’way. Uptight Queen barista named JAY has an attitude problem,” no news outlets darted to the Starbucks location to interview Jay. 

When Kelly Osbourne tried in vain to pop into a Starbucks bathroom during New York Pride, inventing the hashtag “#PissedMyOwnPants,” no one ran to that Starbucks to see if they could recover evidence of Osbourne’s urine to prove her woes. 

We used to treat these complaints as absurd follies of celebrity excess — tone-deaf musings that proved how out of touch the rich and famous are with the everyday person working a customer-facing service job. Without fail, the celebrity always looked like the ridiculous party. But no part of celebrity culture in the past 10 years has proven that we are well past this comical stage more than Kelly Clarkson’s war with a small business that wouldn’t sell her a singing bird mounted on their wall. 

Over the weekend, Clarkson stopped into a curiosities shop called Art of Play in Brooklyn, New York, with a few items in mind. Within minutes, a national tragedy in the form of an egregious misunderstanding occurred between Clarkson and a shop attendant. According to the store, Clarkson inquired about purchasing Molly, a custom-made singing automaton bird mounted on their wall for magic shows and public display — a bird that is not for sale. Clarkson was told they could find a comparable item for her, but apparently felt slighted. “. . .Literally was looked at as if I couldn’t afford it,” Clarkson posted on X a few minutes after the initial interaction. “You’re an idiot and just lost a huge sale. But y’all should check out Art of Play in Brooklyn if you enjoy being treated like Julia Roberts’ character in ‘Pretty Woman.’”

The fallout was swift. Thousands of people flew to the store’s Google reviews to tank its ratings and leave upset comments, despite never having set foot inside. People crowded their Instagram page, commenting on a post from earlier in the week, “Here before they turn the comments off!” And while the situation has become multilayered and far too overblown in the days since, I found this initial reaction most disconcerting. 

This was one post, fired off in disgust from a major celebrity with a massive, very supportive audience. Sick in bed with nothing better to do this weekend, I watched the fallout play out in real time minutes after the post went up. It was as if Clarkson’s fans had their sleeper cells activated, ready to use the weapons at their disposal — their phones — at their commander’s word. The situation extended far past stan culture’s typical digital boundaries and immediately into the real world. Based on Clarkson’s behavior over the last month, I’m confident not only that the real world isn’t a place she ventures into often, but that many of us could stand to venture into it far more frequently, too. If a former karaoke-singing talk show host, a cocky shop owner and a sweet wooden bird caught in the middle can have so many people at each other’s throats, the world has officially tilted off its axis and begun spinning into perdition.

For those not already intimately versed in the situation’s details — consider yourself lucky — here’s the brass tacks. Art of Play clarified that Clarkson asked to buy Molly the singing bird automaton, which they told her was not for sale. The store continued, “It’s been a surreal experience to be the focus of such widespread outrage after just one mention by a celebrity. Clarkson responded with a post from the store’s Instagram story, featuring a blurry $15,000 price tag next to Molly. Art of Play clarified that their wall-mounted piece was not for sale, but that the artist would sell a twin creation for $15,000; meanwhile, a store employee offered her a comparable $2,000 option. 

One of the store’s co-owners, Adam Rubin, gave an interview to Curbed, saying, “Kelly Clarkson put us in danger,” which is one of the more patently hysterical results of this entire situation. Earlier this week, investigative reporter Pablo Torre obtained audio-free security footage showing the entire interaction between Clarkson and the store employee. In the footage, recorded on a crowded day with plenty of customers, the employee appears to tell Clarkson about Molly, then points out a similar bird elsewhere in the store and helps another customer. Clarkson goes to leave, stopping on the way out to exchange what seem like heated words with another employee behind the counter. The entire sequence of events lasts just five minutes, yet it has consumed the zeitgeist for days. 

As someone whose years of retail experience led to everything from customers crumpling their receipts and throwing them in his face to others threatening him after being unsatisfied with their discounts, my initial reaction was to side with Art of Play. Frankly, I don’t see how anyone’s reaction wasn’t. There isn’t one celebrity, living or dead, who I’d blindly support in using their five-minute shopping experience — which caused only ego bruises, not physical ones — to sic their millions of fans on a store. That’s just not something any human with an ounce of couth or self-awareness about the power of platform would do. Clarkson, who has been famous for her entire adult life and managed to grow her audience into a loyal following largely unscathed by scandal, is responsible for wielding her influence with tact. This was not a tactful decision. 

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Art of Play jokingly raising Molly’s price to $15 million in the wake of the controversy doesn’t exactly paint the store in the best light either — though it at least exhibits a sense of humor. (I can’t say the same for their gross decision to try to prove their innocence with security footage.) I don’t entirely believe Rubin’s assertions that his employees have been put in danger, but his store certainly has. In commerce’s current state, small businesses live and die on Google reviews. It’s well within the store’s right to stick up for themselves and express shock at the way Clarkson’s fans operate. Capitulating to a celebrity who reflexively decides to send a dogpile on a business would set an alarming social precedent. Even more frightening is that so many demanded that capitulation blindly, without ever knowing a single additional detail outside of Clarkson’s post. No matter whose side one might gravitate toward, the speed at which a celebrity’s will can mobilize the public should be deeply concerning.

But this is what happens when civilians stop treating celebrities like famous people and start trusting them like friends. Call it the talk show effect, or the America’s sweetheart effect; whatever you call it, it’s poisoning how we think and react. Internet stan culture has evolved so much that online culture wars have become real-life battles. When did a singer versus a singing bird become a saga that would capture the world’s attention? There is no world in which any of us should care about Clarkson’s innocuous interaction with a puzzle shop employee, and certainly no world where Clarkson should make it any of our business. 

That’s what’s saddest about this situation: There are better ways to spend everyone’s time, and far more important ways for Clarkson to use her platform. Clarkson doesn’t appear to have posted anything on her X account that hasn’t gone through a manager in well over two years. And yet, she’ll go to bat for a perceived slight at a glorified magic shop? It’s been less than a month since her music industry peers, Macklemore and Ed Sheeran, got into a very public, contentious disagreement over Macklemore’s support of Palestine. And though several musicians spoke up and shared their opinions, Clarkson was not one of them. That issue — or the midterm elections, ICE protests, response to Flock cameras in Clarkson’s home state of Texas, anything! — was not important enough for Clarkson to log on to say something. Receiving less-than-perfect assistance in a small, crowded store? Alert the troops.

 

All this shows that, no matter how much Clarkson brands herself as everybody’s best friend, her actions don’t always reflect everybody’s best interests. This was clear as day two weeks ago when Clarkson was asked her thoughts on AI during an appearance on the “Las Culturistas” podcast. “Controversial, I don’t care: I love AI,” Clarkson said. “There are very amazing things with AI that I am obsessed with. I am very into it artistically, too.” Clarkson went on to say that her “issue” was with AI musicians potentially competing with human artists. In other words: Clarkson’s concerns aren’t with AI stealing other people’s art, gobbling up natural resources, replacing people’s jobs, or generally making the world worse. She cares when it affects her. What a perfectly succinct way to frame the feud with Art of Play too — and a perfect bit of cosmic irony that Clarkson wasn’t allowed to take a handcrafted bird home to an AI-obsessed household.

I’d like to think that Clarkson’s views on customer interactions, AI and the weight of political and social events don’t reflect the public’s. But judging by the response to Clarkson’s tweet, I don’t think that’s true anymore. In fact, Clarkson’s opinions are all-too indicative of the confluence between idol worship and social outrage. You might say it’s not that serious, and it wasn’t — until Clarkson made it that serious. 

We’re a jacked-in species, seamlessly ported to our devices and the ephemeral digital worlds inside them, allowing them to dictate our emotional responses and how we use our precious time. We live in a country where viral videos of unpleasant exchanges are valuable social capital, where those seeking power are looking to those who have it to learn what can be weaponized to seize control. It was always going to end this way when Clarkson named the store and pressed send. How very ironic that the first American Idol has become a picture of the blind devotion synonymous with Western exceptionalism. Perhaps we should’ve listened a bit closer to the refrain in “Since U Been Gone,” where Clarkson tells us, straight up, “I get what I want.”

The post Kelly Clarkson is nobody’s idol appeared first on Salon.com.

Watching Shane Gillis tickle himself to the point of being red in the face during his third “Saturday Night Live” hosting gig this past weekend, I’d wager that no one thinks Shane Gillis is funnier than Shane Gillis. But while that’s a pretty safe bet, his confidence in his own comedic stylings can’t get full credit for landing him where he’s at: appearances on a show he was fired from, Bud Light commercials where, as he points out, he “looked like a lesbian,” and a TV show about tires that 59% of critics hate and 91% of people who probably also think it’s funny to hear women called whores love.

No, we can thank everyone who, during the course of his 38 years on this earth, politely laughed at one of Gillis’ “Cornell 7‘s Big Book of Punchlines” zingers. And additional thanks to Lorne Michaels, who knows a ratings/headlines cow when he sees one, even if he doesn’t want to house him in his own barn at the end of the night.

Just as journalists worth their paychecks are taught to shy away from punching up headlines with puns or expletives because it’s lazy work, plenty of successful comedians refrain from desperately grasping for an easy laugh by calling women whores or punching down at their “big fat bit*h sisters,” as Gillis did in his monologue on Saturday night. Leanne Morgan has, to my knowledge, never joked about going to the gym and the men there being sluts for wearing sweatpants that show off their D and B’s, and she probably actually goes to the gym. Oh wait, Gillis did say in his monologue that he feels most comfortable working out in “his friend Joe Rogan‘s private gym.” Right. Riiiiiiiight.

Point being, happy, successful, confident, well-loved comedians are creative and secure enough to reach out and up for their material, not straight into their own asses. There’s a difference between being a “controversial” comic and appealing to the lowest common denominator. Dave Chappelle is equally awful, content-wise, but at least he’s good at being the absolute worst, if that can be a thing for the sake of this argument. Worth noting here that, even though he’s been in the game far longer than Gillis, Chappelle’s hosting number is only one larger than his . . . wonder why that is?

Gillis has made a career out of appealing to people chomping at the bit for their chance to storm the Capitol, and apparently there’s a home for that now on “SNL,” a show that’s lasted 51 years and counting by offering up a little something for everyone and carving out space for anyone — except for women, and people of color, and, more and more, viewers who haven’t been able to wear a red ball cap since 2017. Who’s laughing now? Not anyone I’d want to be next to on the treadmill.

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It’s not the controversy alone that’s of value to a show like “SNL”; it’s giving a platform to someone who’s more than willing to stand there, in front of a live audience, and verbalize the ugly things that people are afraid to say out loud . . . for now. But if they see enough people doing it, they may just be bold enough to do the same. And so it goes, and here we are. Audiences just want to look in a mirror, even if they themselves internally despise what they see in that mirror. 

Gillis got enough polite, awkward laughs on his misogynistic sad clown shtick thus far from friends, relatives and dates just waiting for him to shut up so they can order appetizers that now he not only has a whole career to showcase that shtick, but a built-in audience of like-minded fans who also were told by one too many people that they have “a great sense of humor.”  We’re all paying the nauseating price now, and anyone who paved the way is complicit.

But “SNL” is a liberal show, you may be thinking. I mean . . . sure? But it’s also a show with a sound bite archive spanning decades which includes such hits as “Jane, you ignorant slut,” from a late-’70s “Weekend Update” sketch starring Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin. I’ll save you the Google. There’s more. 

In the wake of Gillis’ most recent hosting gig, it’s been refreshing to see men in the entertainment industry call him out. Michael Che, who started at “SNL” as a writer in 2013 and transitioned to an on-screen role as a “Weekend Update” co-anchor the following year, weighed in on Gillis’ monologue via a series of Instagram stories, writing, “Gotta do more press this week to promote the special . . . wonder what every f—ing questions gonna be about . . . thanks a lot, Shane.” “Schitt’s Creek” star Dan Levy, son of “SCTV” alum Eugene Levy, also took to Instagram with a more direct and thoughtful approach, saying, “Women wearing short shorts at the gym does not make them whores. It makes the men calling them whores misogynists.”

 

But the most effective statement would be from Lorne Michaels, which he could make by honoring his first instinct to place Gillis in the persona non grata pile after clips from his podcast, “Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast,” showed him using racist and homophobic slurs, causing Gillis to be canned from the cast of “SNL” just days after his hiring was announced.  

I personally regret every time I put wind in the sails of a deeply unfunny and offensive man by politely laughing, feeling too awkward to course-correct the moment. Most women have these moments. I had one during my first job, when I was 15, and I laughed at the security guard twice my age who joked about his pants feeling tight after I mentioned that I had a girlfriend. I had one when I was driving with an old friend and didn’t give more than a “you gotta be careful with stuff like that” warning when he launched into a rant about how the women assaulted by Harvey Weinstein “shouldn’t have been surprised” he acted the way he did. It’s hard to stand up in moments like these, but look what happens when we don’t. Shane Gillis is a cystic pimple. All the rest of it is the pus.

Lorne Michaels will likely invite Gillis back. The fact that I and countless other writers are typing out similar commentaries all but ensures it. But what he should be asking himself is whether the audience he’s going after with jokes like the ones Gillis made this past weekend is an audience he’d feel comfortable sitting in. That should matter. And more people should say something if it seems like it doesn’t.

The post Shane Gillis and the danger of laughing at unfunny men on “SNL” appeared first on Salon.com.

Just like comedy fans replay their favorite routines every so often, I often find myself returning to a few journalistic pieces written about comedy to help me order my thoughts. One is Lindy West’s 2013 Jezebel piece she wrote in the wake of debating Jim Norton concerning comedy’s role in perpetuating rape culture on the canceled FX series “Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell.”

The aftershock is probably more memorable than the piece. The barrage of hatred that bombarded West moved her to record a YouTube video wherein she reads the litany of threats prompted by her daring to suggest that comedians be more thoughtful in their stand-up routines.

The essay she wrote about that experience plainly summarizes her reasonable stance. “I believe that the way we speak about things and the type of media we consume profoundly influences how we think about the world,” she wrote.

Emily Nussbaum’s 2017 New Yorker essay “How Jokes Won the Election,” a second repeat reader, is a kind of response to that call, taking a hard look at the far-right’s weaponizing of humor and cloaking threats in punchlines. This tactic helped Donald Trump, a most ridiculous candidate, sail to the White House.

“How do you fight an enemy who’s just kidding?” Nussbaum asked, a question we should be mulling each time Netflix triumphantly announces a new stand-up special from celebrities who can’t get enough of reducing queerness into a punchline.

One year before West debated Norton on TV, Joe Rogan’s NBC gig “Fear Factor” aired its last episode. He talks about his departure in his Netflix stand-up “Burn the Boats,” in which he revealed that the line he refused to cross was to challenge contestants to drink donkey semen.

“When I’m the voice of reason,” Rogan said, “you’ve got a really f***ed-up program.” You could reasonably apply that same note to Netflix, which recently debuted Rogan’s hour-plus special as a live comedy event.

Netflix is determined to maintain its claim as the top destination for stand-up specials, which it does by flooding the stream with choices. The Hollywood Reporter cites a source that counted the total number of comedy specials released in 2023 at more than 150, with most of those appearing on Netflix.

Amazon’s Prime Video is also a player, countering Netflix’s “anything goes” approach with a select stream of comics known for working clean like Nate Bargatze and Jim Gaffigan. Hulu is also beefing up its stand-up presence with 12 specials per year while one-time king HBO is going niche, matching Amazon’s eight-special ballpark.

This feels like light years from the era when a Comedy Central special was every ambitious comic’s goal – that, or getting a sitcom deal. Then HBO became the comic’s dream gig and, to a lesser extent, Showtime.

Now Netflix is the comedian’s golden ticket. Get a stand-up special there or a deal for multiple gigs, and the possibilities are endless. On the lower end, lesser-known comics can fill clubs or maybe larger theaters.

Mid-to-top range comics can fill arenas once they’re in with the service’s top executive Ted Sarandos. Taylor Tomlinson was a relative unknown when she signed on to do a few specials. Now she has a weeknight broadcast network gig, “After Midnight,” following “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

Live events, however, are reserved for the top-level killers. Chris Rock’s followed nearly a year of silence about getting slapped at the Oscars, which also happened live. Katt Williams’ live special “Woke Foke” came after his post-New Year’s tea-spilling on Club Shay Shay.

Other live specials, including “The Roast of Tom Brady” and John Mulaney’s six-episode variety talk show “John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in L.A.” were exercises in brand establishment as much as entertainment events, although Mulaney’s was undeniably more of a creative high-wire act.

Rogan’s stand-up special, his first in six years, is a mutual exhibit of power and influence. He’s one of a very few entertainers whose presidential endorsement makes headlines. (He’s backing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as you may have guessed.)

He doesn’t need Netflix, but surely Netflix is happy to have him.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the new multiyear contract Spotify signed with Rogan in February to continue hosting his podcast could be worth as much as $250 million and is no longer exclusive to the streamer.

He’s also opened Comedy Mothership in Austin, drawing performers from around the country to the Texas city in a quest to create another stand-up epicenter driven by successful podcasters as opposed to New York’s and Los Angeles’ comedy club pipeline.

And Rogan, who caused a furor in 2022 for spreading misinformation during the pandemic, is accepted as an inevitability of modern popular culture. A recent Bloomberg profile softened his reputation to just short of baby skin texture by describing his podcast as “[mixing] marathon interviews of prominent guests with a hefty dose of often conventional and sometimes iffy lifestyle advice — including diet tips, exercise routines and vitamin supplements.”

Some have moved their lives to Austin to be close to Rogan’s Mothership, including the likes of Tom Segura and Shane Gillis. Exerting his pull in the comedy world, which boasts a booming live performance market, only makes him more powerful. Pollstar says the Top 30 comedy tours grossed nearly $514 million in 2023.

But what he and the other comics he boosts have in common, besides Netflix deals, is their penchant for anti-trans material and platforming far-right bigots in the name of “asking questions” and pursuing the “truth.” They also sell out arenas, cultivating their audiences online and forwarding some truly odious ideas in the name of yuks and supposed pondering.

Segura welcomed accused sex trafficker and vocal misogynist Andrew Tate as a guest on “Your Mom’s House,” which he co-hosts with his wife Christina Pazsitzky. Gillis and Matt McCusker’s “Secret Podcast” is where listeners can hear more of the racist material that got Gillis fired from his “Saturday Night Live” gig before it began.

Rogan has hosted all these comics along with all types of conspiracy theorists, “free-thinkers” like Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson, and worst of all, repeat Rogan guest Alex Jones.

Rogan goes on at length about Jones in “Burn the Boats,” calling him “right about a lot of things . . . he was wrong about that one thing, though. But he’s right — the wrong thing was a big one! But he’s right — that one thing was huge. But he’s often correct!”

That is quite a stance to take about a man who not only concocted a massive lie about the Sandy Hook massacre, that one thing he was wrong about, but recently opined that Trump should embrace Project 2025 instead of distancing himself from it. And not for the jokes.

Let’s not forget another significant event Jones made possible: he spearheaded the organization efforts that became the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021. You know, the direct attack on democracy sane people refer to as an insurrection.

This is part of Rogan’s Netflix special, in which he also jokes, “We lost a lot of good people during the pandemic. Many of them are still alive.”

Ha! Kidding! Not about his admiration for Alex Jones, though.

The prevailing model in any business, showbiz included, is that success breeds success. A week after Rogan’s special premiered it’s still in the service’s Top 10 most popular titles, sitting at No. 4 as of Friday.

Netflix’s average output of one special per week along with its other debuts means Rogan will eventually be washed down the stream along with the other comics. But his Netflix berth places him in front of many more people, including those who don’t follow his podcast.

Contemplating what all of this means returned me to West’s thoughts from 11 years ago because they apply here. “I do believe that comedy’s current permissiveness around cavalier, cruel, victim-targeting rape jokes contributes to (that’s contributes — not causes) a culture of young men who don’t understand what it means to take this stuff seriously,” she wrote.

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Indeed. Comedians who may have made light of sexual assault a decade ago have since moved on to joke about others more easily vilified than half the human population. Mainly transgender people.

Rogan is right there with them. And Netflix’s willingness to further elevate a performer whose entire schtick is slapping a smile on disinformation and normalizing trans panic should worry more of us, even if they’ve done it several times before.

A predictable rebuttal is that people don’t have to watch if they don’t want to, which is true. A lot of people watch Netflix, though; the service accounted for 8.4% of TV usage for June, according to Nielsen, a month during which 40.3% of time spent watching TV in June was attributable to streaming.

You can turn on Netflix and watch Hannah Gadsby or other progressive comedians who took a stand against the service’s promotion of Dave Chappelle’s anti-trans material. Besides, there’s a market for this stuff, as Spotify proved by standing by Rogan in 2022. The service lost subscribers and artists over Rogan’s conspiracy-mongering related to COVID and vaccines, but even Neil Young’s back now. If you can’t beat ‘em, et cetera, et cetera.

 “[A] joke can be another kind of Big Lie, shrunk to look like a toy,” Nussbaum wrote. “It’s the thrill of hyperbole, of treating the extreme as normal, the shock (and the joy) of seeing the normal get violated, fast.” Flood the stream with so many jokes like that and from a whole lot of mainstreamed mouthpieces to the point of making fringe nonsense into just another normal bit, and like Rogan said, you’ve got yourself a really f***ed-up program. 

The post In Joe Rogan, Netflix continues mainstreaming misinformation and panic for laughs appeared first on Salon.com.

President Donald Trump has lately been telling a story about James Talarico that comes with its own setting, action and reliable third-act catastrophe. The Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, Trump says, goes to barbecues, forces down meat and then slips behind a tent to vomit. The tent is a surprisingly durable detail. The menu changes.

At an Oct. 2 rally in Mobile, Alabama, Trump described Talarico as a vegan who was now “eating meat like a pig.” After every barbecue, he claimed, the candidate retreats behind a tent and “throws up all over the place.” In Nebraska, the offending meat had become steak. By San Antonio, Trump had incorporated Talarico’s recent absence from the campaign trail into the plot: The candidate, who said he had the flu, was supposedly sick from eating meat “for political reasons.” The president seems particularly taken with this little drama. He has returned to it repeatedly, refining the details like a comedian workshopping a bit.

The premise is that Talarico is a secret vegan. 

Just for the record: He isn’t. The story ties back to 2022, when Talarico advocated reducing meat consumption and announced that his state House campaign would purchase vegan products from local businesses. He did not announce that he had become vegan himself. Since then, he has been photographed eating chicken, steak and a turkey leg. His campaign has repeatedly denied the accusation. 

Ordinarily, one might expect the turkey leg to settle things.

Instead, Trump has supplied an imaginary sequel to every public meal.

At his San Antonio rally, the president turned to Talarico’s Republican opponent, Attorney General Ken Paxton, and offered an assessment: “I have a feeling Ken likes meat.” He then launched into praise of Texas’ exceptionally tough men and strong women, invoking Davy Crockett and the other heroes of the Alamo. It was a remarkably efficient progression from barbecue to regurgitation to virility to American legend. However, Americans have long used a man’s dinner to make assumptions about his character.

A few years ago, I wrote about the meat-and-potatoes man, that sturdy fixture of sitcoms, country music and nostalgic Americana. In an episode of “The Andy Griffith Show,” Andy confronts a French menu and simply asks for steak and a baked potato. Barney, determined to appear worldly, accidentally orders snails and brains. Andy’s plainspoken certainty is the point. He knows what he wants, and he doesn’t particularly care whether anybody else approves.

Where meat-and-potatoes masculinity once suggested a certain rugged, if slightly hayseed, self-assuredness, its latest incarnation is curiously obedient.

Consider Trump’s fondness for distributing Florsheim leather oxfords to the men in his orbit. The president has reportedly taken to guessing their shoe sizes and ordering pairs accordingly. Some recipients apparently feel obliged to wear them, lest they offend the boss. The old meat-and-potatoes man knew what he liked and ordered it without apology. His successors are walking around in matching shoes because someone else likes them.

And that’s before anyone sits down to dinner.

Several senior administration figures have embraced the “meat and ferments” diet promoted by physician Sean O’Mara: grass-fed beef, sauerkraut, kimchi and relatively little room for improvisation. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has praised its supposed effects on his visceral fat. His wife, Cheryl Hines, has described the embarrassment of bringing his pungent sauerkraut into restaurants. Picture the leather shoes pinching beneath the table, the fermented cabbage making itself known above it. These men are all, supposedly, very, very manly.

The meat-and-potatoes man has become the man with a meat protocol. What once signaled a cheerful lack of fuss now demands a highly specific menu, bodily surveillance and an almost devotional attention to what enters the digestive tract. It is not so much dinner as a program.

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There is something genuinely romantic about the self-sufficient cowboy who can build a fire and cook a well-seasoned steak beneath a blanket of stars. But the romance depends on his independence. If Trump decided tomorrow that everyone should trade their Florsheims for Stetsons, one suspects Washington would experience a sudden proliferation of cowboy hats. What ought to resemble John Wayne riding into the sunset would begin to look more like the Kens in “Barbie,” each earnestly serenading his respective date with the same Matchbox Twenty song. One man strumming a guitar by firelight can be charming. An entire beach of men performing the exact same romantic gesture becomes cringeworthy. What was supposed to be a spontaneous expression of rugged individuality has become something closer to choreography.

Which brings us back to Talarico. It is not enough for him to eat meat. He must eat Texas barbecue. More than that, he must actually enjoy it. And even that is insufficient. In Trump’s version, the evidence of fraud is waiting just beyond the camera’s view, behind the tent. 

There, in a scene of the president’s own invention, Talarico can always be caught dropping the act.

Food has embarrassed politicians before. In 1976, Gerald Ford famously bit into a tamale without removing its corn husk during a visit to San Antonio. Ford committed an observable mistake. Talarico’s supposed misstep takes place somewhere nobody can see it. Once, a candidate could be judged for eating the local specialty incorrectly. Now he can be accused of eating it correctly and not meaning it.

The trouble with masculinity as a group project is that it rarely remains confined to the group. When belonging depends on following an increasingly elaborate set of rules, there is a temptation to start enforcing them. And those expectations have a way of extending beyond men themselves, toward how women should dress, behave and exercise autonomy. The performance acquires an audience, and then the audience is expected to participate.

The idealized American man is, after all, supposed to be a self-assured loner: the pioneer charting his own course, the cowboy slipping into the night to find a lost horse, the man who simply does what needs doing. 

Instead, this version of manhood seems to require an extraordinary amount of coaching. I keep thinking of “The Birdcage,” in which Robin Williams’ Armand attempts to teach Nathan Lane’s Albert how to walk like John Wayne. The more deliberately Albert performs masculinity, the more conspicuous the performance becomes.

Of course Trump imagines Talarico disappearing behind the barbecue tent to drop the act. For a political culture increasingly invested in prescribing how a man should dress, eat and behave, the idea of someone secretly abandoning the performance must be familiar. Maintaining it looks exhausting.

The post James Talarico isn’t vegan. So why is the GOP so fixated? appeared first on Salon.com.

Even by first-day-on-the-job standards, Donald Trump‘s new press secretary is shockingly incompetent. Katie Zacharia has some media experience as a cable news pundit, albeit mostly on far-right channels like Newsmax and One America News. She’s even had a communications job before, when she replaced the infamous Tricia McLaughlin as the spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security. But her stint there last only six weeks, which in retrospect should have been the first sign of trouble. 

At her first White House briefing on Tuesday, Zacharia kicked things off by haltingly reading a lengthy statement about how she hopes to “only build on, only amplify, and only multiply, to the extent possible, all of the wins” of Trump’s second term.

The situation only grew worse. Zacharia took questions from just three reporters. Even though they were from friendly media outlets — Fox News, Breitbart and the Daily Mail — she still seemed overwhelmed. Her response to a softball question about her family was painful to watch; she said “my president” before correcting herself and saying “my husband.” After about seven minutes of questions, Zacharia threw in the towel, directing reporters to the tarmac where Trump would be boarding Marine One. “You can ask him all of the questions there!” she announced.

Reviews of her performance were brutal.

“Trump managed to find a press secretary who can barely read,” independent journalist Aaron Rupar posted. 

Former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki called it “basically an SNL skit.”

Nikki McCann Ramirez, a political reporter for Rolling Stone, dubbed it a “Chat-GPT-ass first speech from the new press secretary.”

But Zacharia found a defender in the only audience that ultimately matters. “I thought she was very good,” Trump shouted minutes later over the roar of Marine One’s engines while Zacharia, taking a spot usually held by presidential aide Natalie Harp, stood smiling over his shoulder. 

Of course the president thinks she’s great. Zacharia has the only traits that matter to Trump: She’s blonde, skinny and she appears to worship him passionately. Harp had better watch out; she’s got real competition for the role of most fervent Trump devotee. The president confirmed this by praising Zacharia not for any special skills but for being a “devoted fan” with “an unblemished record of support” for himself. 

But taking a step back, Zacharia’s hiring is revealing — and encouraging. It’s yet another sign that the president is putting his own cravings for adulation over political considerations like winning the upcoming midterms for his party. 

“When stressed, Donald Trump retreats to his comfort zone,” investigative journalist Lindsay Beyerstein told me. Beyerstein, who is working on a book about conspiracy theorists called “Angry Minds,” noted that “Zacharia has a long history of pushing QAnon.”

The term “QAnon” may seem like a blast from the past, and for good reason. According to a February 2022 report from PRRI, tens of millions of Americans — including 25% of Republican voters — affirmed the QAnon conspiracy theory that Democrats sexually abuse and kill children to drink their blood. In the haze of the Covid-19 pandemic and the disaster of Jan. 6, millions of Trump supporters turned to the myth that Trump was God’s emissary sent to earth to destroy this Satanic cabal of child-killers. After Trump blocked the release of Justice Department files on his long-time friend, convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the fantasy that the former reality TV host is a holy warrior against pedophilia lost a lot of public appeal. 

But as far as Trump is concerned, QAnon is forever. Even as many of his voters quietly pretend the whole QAnon thing never happened, the White House was trying to revive the conspiracy cult over the summer. As The Bulwark’s Will Sommer reported in June, “The Trump administration launched a bizarre QAnon-themed social media campaign,” with various departments tweeting QAnon slogans. Sommer followed up his report by telling CNN that even “as the president faces persistently low approval rating,” the White House is trying to tell his voters something else: “[R]emember when you thought Trump was going to save the world?”

As a political move, it’s a bad idea. Trump’s apparent narcissism and corruption were easier for voters to laugh off when the economy was doing well. But now that he’s goosed inflation with tariffs and the war on Iran, his methods are not so funny anymore. For his part, Trump seems increasingly less concerned with political realities and more worried about saving face and fluffing his own ego, even if that means pulling deeper into a bubble where he’s only surrounded by people who flatter him all day with pleasing lies about his greatness. 

“He’s reliving QAnon because it represents the bygone days when his supporters worshipped him like a god,” Beyerstein said. “Trump may not realized how played out QAnon has become because he doesn’t live in the real world.”

Zacharia’s QAnon history is deep and troubling. As Popular Information’s Judd Legum reported, “Zacharia repeatedly used Truth Social to promote Pizzagate and other fringe conspiracy theories.” (Pizzagate is the original QAnon conspiracy theory — that Democrats sexually abuse and cannibalize children.) She repeatedly accused John Podesta, who headed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, of being a “pedophile,” posting in 2022, “The radical left Hollywood elitists are sick pedo cannibals.” Zacharia also reposted the false claims of another Trump sycophant, Ali Alexander, who wrote, “Democrats want to mask and rape your children. That’s their satanic platform.”

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Popular Information also looked into Zacharia’s claims that she was a lawyer and found “there is no evidence that [she] ever passed a bar exam.” The press secretary is not a member of the bar association in any state where she’s worked. In fact, according to Legum and his team, there is no whiff of documentation that she’s licensed to practice law anywhere.

When she was standing next to Trump after her disastrous briefing, a reporter asked, “Where did she pass the bar exam?”

The president looked quizzically at Zacharia, who replied, “When I moved to China.” Sharp readers will notice that China has no authority to grant law licenses anywhere in the United States. 

Such a clumsy diversion would never have happened under Karoline Leavitt, Zacharia’s predecessor who was, if nothing else, good at her job. A smooth character and fast talker, Leavitt deployed cartoonish Christian piety and a non-stop act of aggrieved victimhood to keep reporters too discombobulated to hold her feet to the fire about the administration’s various failures. There was little sense that she legitimately worshipped Trump; instead, she appeared to see him as a stepping stone for her own ambitions. This theory got another shot in the arm when Leavitt left the White House, implying she was going to be a housewife, only to walk right into a cushy job as a Fox News commentator. 

Trump reportedly floated Harp as Leavitt’s replacement, a move that was spun as a “joke” — even though “jokes” are not about humor for the president but instead a way to test boundaries. While press secretaries have long been spin doctors, under Trump the job morphed into one where blatant lies and gaslighting are readily employed to create over-the-top praise for the president. But clearly, this outward-facing propaganda was not enough for the president. 

Being Trump’s press secretary isn’t as much about distorting press coverage or bamboozling the public anymore. The position has been refocused on the task of giving the president more of the hardcore Natalie Harp treatment. Even as the midterms grow closer, Trump is abandoning the task of winning the public over, choosing instead to retreat deeper into a fantasy world.

There, everyone loves him most of all.

The post Trump’s new QAnon press secretary exposes his desperation appeared first on Salon.com.

Donald Trump lies. Telling untruths is not merely second nature to him; it is of the first order, automatic. He lies as naturally as he breathes.

From his claim to being a great businessman and dealmaker to calling himself not the worst president in U.S. history — which he is, by far — but the best, Trump has spewed a firehose of falsehoods to the public. But he has never reserved his lying only for his political opponents.

He has lied to his MAGA followers about, well, everything — bringing grocery prices down, ending this or that war “on day one,” the value of his cryptocurrency offerings, creating any number of “unbelievable” plans to fix our infrastructure, our healthcare, our economy. All those “beautiful” plans that were never plans but so-called concepts of plans. You know, back-of-the-envelope musings on critical national issues while heading off for another taxpayer-funded golf outing.

Suffice it to say: If you can name it, Trump has lied about it.

Journalists often write of Trump’s Big Lie about how the 2020 election was stolen from him, but that is only one of the big lies Republicans tell, and it is not the one that most adversely affects working Americans.

The biggest lie is the one Republicans have told for more than half a century — about how they are better than Democrats at managing the economy. A majority of Americans have believed this for my whole lifetime. But with Trump’s wild mismanagement of the economy, public sentiment is finally changing. More people now trust Democrats on the economy, and for good reason.

The idea of telling a lie so massive that not many people would think that it could be made out of whole cloth comes from Adolf Hitler’s 1925 book “Mein Kampf.” The failed artist and future German führer thought that most people would not believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” This theory was later put to use by Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich’s propaganda minister, to scapegoat and dehumanize Jewish people, and it led directly to the Holocaust — a horrible truth many Nazi-curious conservatives love to deny.

Trump, a fanboy of ruthless dictators, was determined to stay in office after losing the 2020 election decisively in both the Electoral College and the popular vote to Joe Biden, and he naturally turned to Hitler’s technique. (I say “naturally” because, according to his first wife Ivana, he kept a volume of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside. Also, after Trump’s first term, his former White House chief of staff Gen. John Kelly warned Americans that Trump very much admired Hitler.)

The Republican’s lie on the economy is such a whopper — so “colossal,” as Hitler put it — that it has defined American politics for decades. That’s the ruse of the colossal lie, which is not merely the propagandist’s use of repetition (Trump’s main go-to move) but a sort of verbal legerdemain. People are cunningly led to disbelieve what they see with their own eyes and feel in their own pocketbooks.

As we head into the November midterms, and as candidates begin to emerge in the 2028 presidential race, it’s a good time to refresh our memories of how costly the GOP’s colossal lie about trickle-down economics, which began with President Ronald Reagan, has been for Americans.

Running for the presidency, the former Republican California governor and B-list actor said that giving tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations would “trickle down” benefits to the working people of America. This sounded good in theory, but it was “voodoo economics” in practice, as George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s opponent in the 1980 Republican primaries, noted — until he was chosen as the Californian’s running mate).

In his two terms, Reagan’s tax cuts increased the national debt from $1.1 trillion to $2.7 trillion. But that’s nothing compared to Trump. While occupying the White House, the president has increased the national debt by a staggering $11.6 trillion so far, an increase of more than 25%.

As I’ve written before, Democratic presidents have almost always done better — I should say much better — than Republican presidents in managing the U.S. economy. According to a 2016 academic study by Alan S. Blinder and Mark W. Watson, this was true from the Truman administration through the first Obama term across all major macroeconomic measures: job creation, unemployment, national debt, GDP growth, growth in real wages and controlling inflation.

As Blinder and Watson concluded:

[T]here is a systematic and large gap between the U.S. economy’s performance when a Democrat is president of the United States versus when a Republican is. Democrats do better on almost every criterion.

We can tack on Biden’s term as well, which, amid the global inflation spikes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic shutting down supply chains, recovered far better than any other advanced country. As The Economist put it at the time, the quickly recovering economy under Biden was “the envy of the world.” People may not have felt “the vibe,” but things were on the right track by all standard economic measures.

In addition, in 2021, the Biden administration’s $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was passed with bipartisan support to rebuild or upgrade the nation’s aging transportation, water and broadband systems. The following year, the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act was enacted and called for microchip manufacturing to be started up in rural areas, mostly Republican-voting districts. Unlike Trump, Biden understood that the president is charged with working on behalf of all Americans, not just those who voted for him.

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Since the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, about 70% of all jobs have been created during Democratic administrations, and in recent decades, the percentage is more than 90%. Of the 11 recessions the country suffered between 1953 and 2020 — when the pandemic began — 10 began while a Republican was in the White House.

What Blinder and Watson studied was independently updated in 2024 with similar findings of a “striking” positive difference on the U.S. economy when a Democrat is in the White House. One doesn’t need academics or economics experts to tell that Republicans never look out for the interests of the working class, or even the middle class. But for those who still like evidence, a series of charts by Steven Rattner and graphic artist Taylor Maggiacomo tell the story of Trump’s promises on the economy and his results so far.

What these charts cannot show is the long-term economic disaster of lost markets for farmers and U.S. manufacturers caused by Trump’s tariffs and his disparagement of our trading partners, or what it will mean to our economy as countries move to de-Americanize their tech — which they must do to protect themselves from Trump.

Although he had once headed the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan kicked off the GOP’s modern union-busting zeal, treating union members as badly as he did university kids, our infrastructure of the future, as governor of California. This points to another factor that macroeconomic statistics do not tell us: Democrats are not only better stewards of the economy, but they also want the wealth created by American workers to be shared more equitably and for the social safety net to be made more robust, so Americans can better weather any financial vicissitudes.

Democrats also understand that the economy depends on healthy, educated, informed workers, and that the performance of parents in the workforce increases when they have access to affordable quality childcare.

Do I need to point out that Republicans have little to no desire to help workers and those in need, outside of, say, charitable contributions or church work? Indeed, rather than looking out for the poor or loving the stranger — and growing increasingly annoyed by those darned Biblical verses about a camel passing through the eye of a needle — the wealthy and powerful long ago undertook to remake American Christianity.

As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte recently noted, the right’s perversion of the message of Jesus knows no bounds; to justify their greed and avarice, they are taught that it is inconceivable to be Christian and vote other than Republican, which is yet another colossal lie by the GOP.

Public sentiment about which party does best in managing the economy has finally shifted to Democrats in the face of Trump’s gross mismanagement of the recovering Biden economy. Trump’s tax cuts, tariffs, attacks on education and journalists, his disparagement of historical allies and his war of choice with Iran have undermined nearly every aspect of what has made the United States prosperous.

But it is up to journalists to regularly tell this truth to the public in the face of the colossal Republican lie about the economy that began with Reagan, a man who had the sheer audacity to claim that the budget deficit was affected by restaurant servers not declaring their tips.

Today’s Republicans are even more Dickensian, focused as they are on deporting hard-working immigrants who long to be American citizens and taking healthcare and even food stamps away from struggling American families.

Why are Republicans terrible with the economy? Because they do not believe in government — unless it helps them.

The post The biggest GOP lie isn’t about elections — it’s the economy appeared first on Salon.com.

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.

The post Billionaires love Trump’s AI rebrand appeared first on Salon.com.

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.

The post The centerpiece scene of “Babygirl” cleverly redefines how we see sex and pleasure onscreen appeared first on Salon.com.

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.