In 1958, London's Daily Express newspaper started running a comic strip adapting Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. This was well before the first James Bond movie (Dr. No, 1962), so cartoonist John McLusky created the first non-literary published images of the fictional spy. — Read the rest
Disney made many announcements for the future of its theme parks at the D23 Disney fan event in Anaheim, California, Saturday night. One headline is that an upcoming refurbishment of the Imagination Pavilion in Disney World's EPCOT (Orlando, Florida) will feature beloved but neglected characters Figment and Dreamfinder. — Read the rest
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Hasan Piker stand with Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong during a campaign rally for Hong on August 2, 2026, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. | Joshua Lott/Getty Images
Hasan Piker has for years now been both an asset and a liability for Democrats. The Twitch streamer has elevated base-energizing progressives, such as Darializa Avila Chevalier and Zohran Mamdani, in interviews and with endorsements. But he’s also stoked controversy with past anti-Israel commentary and generally caused headaches for establishment Democrats who would rather not see Hasan’s favored candidates get any more oxygen.
Why? A familiar concept for these kinds of centrist Democrats: electability.
That concept has been on many left-leaning voters’ minds over the past few weeks, as primaries have put progressive candidates to the test — with very mixed results. Last week, Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate and democratic socialist Francesca Hong lost her primary to establishment favorite David Crowley. Not long before that, though, progressive Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed won his primary against the more mainstream Democratic candidate, Rep. Haley Stevens — albeit by a much smaller margin than many polls predicted.
America, Actually host Astead Herndon caught up with Piker to talk about whether the recent primary results have refined his understanding of how prepared Americans are to vote for democratic socialists, what support for unabashedly progressive candidates tells us about the changing working class in America, and the “pundit brain” problem in the Democratic Party.
Below is an excerpt of Astead’s conversation with Piker, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.
The last two weeks have produced mixed results for left-wing candidates: a big win in Michigan and a win this week in Minnesota for Peggy Flanagan, but a loss for Francesca Hong, which was a surprise in Wisconsin.
What have been your takeaways from the last set of results?
I think the ground game is phenomenal. There’s a lot of excitement on the platform. There’s a lot of excitement for the first time for “Change Candidates.” It’s still a good environment to be in if you are a socialist.
The establishment does have a lot of juice still, for sure. And when they can put together a similar strategy to what happened in 2020 against Bernie Sanders with Joe Biden, especially in a place like Wisconsin where Tony Evers is very clearly still a very popular governor, they were able to elevate David Crowley’s campaign, who actually had dropped out and consolidated support behind Sara Rodriguez initially. And he had to drop out because he was only performing at, like, 6 percent.
Yeah, the consolidation was swift, and it was complete. I mean, you’re comparing it to 2020, in which the establishment lined up behind Joe Biden and kind of nixed that Bernie Sanders campaign in the blink of an eye. I imagine you were surprised at the result.
I never underestimate my opponents, whether they be Republicans or whether they be establishment Democrats. You have to always operate as though you’re down 10 points. I don’t believe in the notion that we are going to win easy victories at the end of the day.
There are a lot of powerful interests at play here. There are a lot of people in positions of power that don’t wanna lose their seats. So they’re gonna fight like hell, so we have to also fight like hell. We have to fight extra hard, as a matter of fact, because we’re almost always outspent, right?
I got an alert right before we started talking from the New York Times that said, “A democratic socialist lost in Wisconsin, which shows the movement’s surging wave might crash before rippling out from big cities.” Is that wrong?
Oh, I love that. Look, people are gonna have their opinions. I’ll just say it like this.
Abdul El-Sayed’s one-point victory margin showed that the Democratic socialist-aligned movement or the progressive movement was in tatters. It was obviously a failure. And now, David Crowley’s less-than-one-point victory proves that the centrist bulwark is still here, and that the Democratic socialist movement is dying.
It kind of feels like it’s wish-casting for the most part, from a lot of people who maybe want to go back to the way things used to be. My assessment on this is definitely a little bit different. I think, at the end of the day, these are insurgencies, right? These are insurgent candidacies.
We’re talking about no name recognition for a state legislator that was entirely propped up by local Wisconsin DSA chapters. These people didn’t have a lot of money necessarily, and they were able to defy the odds, and they continued defying the odds all the way until the end.
The idea that the polls showed that Francesca was a clear frontrunner and was running away with this race is utterly irrelevant. Especially if you were to look at this with a broader perspective, like thinking about where Democratic Socialists of America have gotten to in the last two years.
I mean, I remember how I felt in 2024, in the aftermath of the DNC, about where the American socialist movement was as opposed to where it is now. We are clearly a force to be reckoned with, and that’s precisely the reason why a lot of people are paying close attention to what’s going on.
And I’ll say it like this. The fact that the Hong campaign did not have any major progressive national endorsements, and that I was like their top surrogate.
There was no Bernie Sanders endorsement, there was no AOC endorsement. That did make the Hong campaign unique on that front.
I think there were a couple other races that I was also involved in where my candidates lost, right?
I mean, Saikat Chakrabarti was another great example of this as well. It wasn’t a statewide race, and obviously, there’s always clear local differences that play a formative role in how these races turn out.
But we’ve looked back at this data. There are a couple different endorsement trackers out there, and they’ll put my endorsement up there, and they’ll put, like, AOC and Bernie Sanders. And it’s very clear that the best likelihood of success usually comes from a consolidation of national progressive forces, whether it be outside expenditures coming from Justice Democrats or things like that. And with the Francesca Hong campaign, I think it’s a testament to their success. It’s a testament to how popular the platform is in general.
And one thing I will have to stress here is the salience of the electability narrative. I think that’s still a real motivator for a lot of people.
Yeah, I hear that. Both El-Sayed’s campaign and Hong’s campaign did better among middle-class voters — I should say, than the data would tell us, among working-class voters. Considering how central working-class and bottom-up issues are to the DSA message, why has it not produced results that actually get it more working-class votes? Because that does seem to be something we’ve learned over the last three, four weeks.
I think that we have to dramatically reconstruct how we understand what it means to be working-class in this country. I think a lot of people will disagree with what I’m about to say here, but we have to do away with this fantastical notion that the working-class is one specific thing.
I think for the longest time, people have thought about this hardhat-wearing coal miner as the true working class, oftentimes White as well. And the working class is unbelievably diverse in this country, and it’s also a lot more college-educated than people actually give it credit for.
I think partially this is because if you look back to the ’90s as opposed to right now, yes, if you had a college education, you were upwardly mobile. You were probably a professional managerial class individual that was going to be able to retire at a reasonable age. You were doing fairly well. It was a guarantee for getting a good job, right?
That’s not the case in America any longer. There are a lot more people who have a college degree who are downwardly mobile, who are having a very tough time in the current job market, who do not own a home, and it’s seemingly less likely than before that they will ever be able to own a home.
And that is the actual working class. It’s much broader, right? So we’ve seen in Zohran’s race and in Abdul’s race, there’s this massive group of working-class folks that constantly get cast aside as not being a true representation of the American working class, when I think like, No, that is the true representation.
If you've ever been wowed by a cutaway illustration of a ship from your favorite sci-fi series or movie, there's a pretty good chance Matt Cushman had something to do with it. His visualizations of the guts of ships from Star Wars and Star Trek are astounding in their detail and the thoughtfulness given to functional, interior design. — Read the rest
Passend zum großen Evolution-Artikel in Retro Gamer 4/26 namens Die Chroniken von Zelda führt euch Hardy Heßdörfer in diesem rund 20-minütigen Video launig durch alle Serienteile der ruhmreichen Action-RPG-Serie.
Sollte oben bei euch eine Fehlermeldung stehen statt das Video (ein Problem des Safari-Browsers), klickt einfach auf “Video auf YouTube ansehen”. Viel Spaß!
Gas prices in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, on May 21, 2026. | Matthew Hatcher/Bloomberg via Getty Images
With the 2026 midterm elections quickly approaching, President Donald Trump’s war with Iran is ongoing and gas prices remain high.
Americans are taking note: On this week’s episode of America, Actually, host Astead Herndon visits Allentown, Pennsylvania in the state’s bellwether Seventh District, to hear how persistently high gas prices — almost $4.20 per gallon in Pennsylvania — are showing up in residents’ lives. Many said the economy and prices were at the top of their list of issues, and laid the blame at Trump’s feet.
Still, gas is just one expense of many, for voters who are likely also feeling the pinch with the cost of groceries, housing, electricity, and more. So how much power do gas prices really have to shape the outcome of an election — and, potentially, a presidency? And after decades of renewable energy growth, technological disruption, and new existential worries, why are gas prices still so core to the American political conversation?
To learn more, Herndon spoke with Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. They discussed the history of gas prices as a salient political issue, why Americans feel high prices so acutely, even compared to other commodities, and whether voters are ever willing to overlook gas prices when they go to the polls.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.
When did the price of gas become such a political weapon in America? Does this date all the way back to the Model T?
It really dates to the 1970s. That’s when the United States will have two energy crises, in 1973 and 1979, and the price of gas becomes a huge political issue for Americans. It affects presidents, it affects Congress, and it becomes a manifestation in that decade of the problems facing the country.
I think that’s when we start to realize we don’t have unlimited resources and it’s gonna be a political problem.
Can you go in more detail about that? What happened in the ’70s to make it so clear to Americans that this party might not last forever?
Production of oil here peaks in the late 1960s, early 1970s, and then in 1973, OPEC, which is the cartel of oil-producing countries in the Middle East, imposes an embargo on the US because the United States had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War. And as a result of the embargo, prices go up and supplies go down, and that’s when Americans start to face gas lines.
Then, in 1979, we have another round of this after the Iranian Revolution, and that leads to even bigger gas lines and more stringent rations and government mandates in ’79, and many people think it really helped bring down Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
Carter in 1979 is really reeling from what Americans experience. And it’s not simply gas prices, it’s waiting in line for gas. It’s hearing that you could only buy gas on certain days. It’s reading stories about people stealing gas and violent clashes occurring over getting this commodity.
There’s a lot of things that go into the mix with Carter — the hostages in Iran — but certainly his difficulty dealing with this fundamental is a big part of what happens in 1980 when Reagan wins the presidency.
Of course, presidents have little control over the global price of oil, yet they are blamed for it seemingly every time. How have politicians and particularly presidents dealt with that reality, considering the price at the pump is so important to their political futures while not always in their control?
In the ’70s they tried with legislation. Carter pushes legislation that deals with energy, but it’s limited in its success. Americans want a lot of oil and it was hard to get them to conserve.
He put solar panels on the White House. There’s really not much that presidents can do. We have the strategic reserves. And other than that, I think presidents just wait it out and hope the timing works in their favor and the gas prices go down again.
Is there an example of a president who beat the gas prices trap? Do we have any example of someone successfully convincing the country, “Hey, look away from the price of the pump”?
I think we have presidents who say, “Just look away for a little while,” and when reelection comes around again, they’re doing better. Even President George W. Bush struggled with some of this after 9/11 and after the war started. But in the end, he doesn’t make an announcement about it so much as focus on other issues such as national security.
And now we see how prices fluctuate, so you just wait for those moments.
Why is it always gasoline rather than other commodities when we think about the priorities for the electorate?
There’s a few things. One is that, historically, the automobile really symbolizes American freedom and American consumption. And so when something impinges on our ability to drive a lot…
Second, it’s a price you just see. It’s just very visible when it goes up or down, more than groceries even.
I think that kind of recurring image for people becomes very politically potent if that number gets too high. So it’s a real struggle, but it’s also symbolically right in front of us. And these days, I think even more so now than in the ’70s or ’80s, it’s become something that the reporters and the media track.
I want to talk specifically about this summer. We’ve crossed $4/gallon again this summer, the highest since 2022, and this time it’s pretty clearly tied with the ongoing war in Iran.
Donald Trump has tried to make the argument that some short-term pain at the pump is worth a long-term national security focus. But his energy secretary said pretty clearly that gas won’t be back to $3 until 2027. Obviously, that puts us after the midterm elections. It sounds like he’s running the exact playbook you just told me has never worked, which is to get people to just pretend this is not happening.
What have you thought about how the president has handled the spike in gas prices?
In part it strikes me as a president who doesn’t really care about the fate of his party. I think it’s a big issue. I think most Republicans understand that. And it’s tied to a war that really doesn’t have public support.
It’s a war without the kind of clarity that many people felt after 9/11 with Afghanistan, and Iraq for a while. It’s the worst of all worlds. And so I think he’s really fumbled on this issue, and there was part of him that hoped people either wouldn’t care even if they noticed, or somehow the prices would diminish. It’s certainly not looking that way.
In 2014, Narendra Modi pioneered the use of social media and digital campaigning in India to become prime minister. Known as one of the first global politicians to harness the power of the internet, he has the most social media followers of any world leader currently in office.
Today, over a decade since Modi’s digital-first political campaign, an internet-fueled youth movement called the Cockroach Janta Party (or the Cockroach People’s Party) is using the same social media platforms to organize protests, successfully forcing the resignation of one of Prime Minister Modi’s top advisers. The Indian government has responded with a crackdown, arresting protesters and increasingly censoring X, Meta, and other social meda sites. The legacy of the Cockroach Janta Party will be complex: On one hand, it brought to the forefront important conversations around Gen Z unemployment and meritocracy; on the other, it may have pushed the Indian government to create stricter new censorship laws to silence future dissent.
The internet that helped propel Modi to power is becoming a tool that a new generation uses against him. How much further will Modi’s government go to censor its people and restrict free speech?
Read more about censorship in India and the Cockroach Janta Party:
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“Blue zones” are places around the world where people have been reported to live longer, healthier lives. The idea began with researchers studying communities in places like Ikaria, Greece; Loma Linda, California; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Okinawa, Japan; and Sardinia, Italy, where daily life seems to support longevity through movement, connection, purpose, and healthier eating.
But over time, blue zones have become more than a way to study longevity. They became a certification program exported to communities across the United States.
In this video, we visit California’s Beach Cities to see what happens when a community tries to recreate the conditions of a blue zone, and ask whether the lessons of longevity can really be engineered, or whether basic public health ideas have been repackaged into something much bigger.
On June 11, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued an El Niño advisory after temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean remained higher than average for several months. Declaring an El Niño isn’t out of the ordinary, as they happen in cycles every two to seven years. But this one could be extraordinary.
Some are calling it a “super” or “Godzilla” El Niño, and the NOAA predicts an 81 percent chance that it could develop to a “very strong” level, rivaling the historic and devastating El Niños of 1982-1983 and 1997-1998. Experts are predicting it will likely reach its peak this winter and into 2027, bringing heat, rainfall, and other potential extreme weather events.
But even with that foresight and climate models that can confidently predict what might be in store, we still face a test of what could potentially be the strongest El Niño ever recorded and the wild weather that comes with it. We spoke with atmospheric scientists and meteorologists to find out how a super El Niño forms, why it changes global climate, and what we should expect in the coming months.
Punk in the Big Apple is a subject that has been exhaustively—and some might say exhaustingly—documented over the years, yet a new reissue by the venerable Chicago crate diggers Numero Group accomplishes the mighty task of finding a fresh angle on the late 1970s scene. The set gathers the entire catalog of the short-lived boutique label Ork Records, founded in 1975 by the Warhol cohort, film buff and would-be impresario Terry Ork. It was primarily a vehicle for a band he was managing called Television, but he soon released foundational punk and postpunk singles by Television, Richard Hell and Alex Chilton with compelling obscurities by the Erasers, the Revelons and Prix. Spread across two CDs or five LPs, this modest catalog totaling 49 songs reveals a scene as it was coalescing and figuring out a new set of rules for rock ‘n’ roll. It’s easily one of the best reissues of 2015.
So what is this guy Link Cromwell doing on here? His pair of tunes stands out among the gritty, grotty punk anthems: “Crazy Like a Fox” is a folksy protest song about rejecting workaday conformity, more “Eve of Destruction” than “Blitzkrieg Bop.” And “Shock Me” is a jittery volt of garage rock energy, much rawer than the A-side but still not exactly the sound you associate with CBGB. Their inclusion on this set, however, is crucial. Both songs were recorded in the mid 1960s by a musician who would later have a profound impact on punk rock and in fact on all subsequent rock. Link Cromwell was actually the stage name of Lenny Kaye, who is one of the most influential men in rock history, even though most people have never heard the name.
Kaye recorded those two songs for his uncle Larry Kusik, who had written “Crazy Like a Fox” with Ritchie Adams. Both were professional songwriters and musicians, the former penning “Speak Softly Love” from “The Godfather” and the latter a member of the Fireflies and later the Archies. Link Cromwell was their attempt to cash in on the popularity of Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction,” although “Crazy” barely sold a handful of copies. Kaye continued making music, forming a band called the Zoo and writing for “Rolling Stone,” “Crawdaddy” and “Fusion,” among other publications.
In the early 1970s he started playing electric guitar while his friend Patti Smith recited poetry. Eventually, the project cohered into the Patti Smith Group, which self-released its first single, “Piss Factory,” on their own Mer Records. It not only inspired the music of New York but also the business by which that music would be disseminated. Power to the people, indeed.
Perhaps even more crucially, in 1972 Kaye assembled a collection of garage-rock tunes from the 1960s, tightly wound rock anthems full of bristly defiance and angst and attitude by bands like the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, the Count Five, the Standells and the Electric Prunes. The psych explorations and hippie noodling of the late 1960s rendered that sound obsolete, but Kaye still heard something explosive and timeless in those Fuzztone guitar riffs and Farfisa organ rave-ups. He called his compilation “Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968,” and while its initial pressing wasn’t what you would call a blockbuster, the right bands heard it.
“Nuggets” was the foundation for punk rock in New York City and college rock in Athens. It was expanded in the late 1990s and fomented the garage rock revival that gave us the White Stripes, the Hives and Reigning Sound. Even today acts like Ty Segall, Royal Headache, Thee Oh Sees and Total Control owe a debt to “Nuggets.” It’s impossible to overstate the influence of that compilation, which arguably invented the concept of the reissue and possibly even the mixtape. Punk wouldn’t have existed without garage rock, and “New York, New York” wouldn’t exist without “Nuggets.”
Link Cromwell ended up on Ork because Terry Ork asked if he could reissue it—a request that reveals the influence of ‘60s garage rock on ‘70s punk.
Recently Kaye related the story to Salon: “One day Charles [Ball, who ran the business side of Ork Records] said to me, Can we put out your old ‘Crazy Like a Fox’ single? And I thought, why not? That’s how I got included in their great discography. My song is an anomaly because it’s not really from the time covered by the new Ork set.”
That certainly makes the song stand out. It connects this new punk scene with an older sound and style.
Absolutely. They all listened to “Nuggets.” In a weird way, “Nuggets” was a philosophical throwback to a time when rock ‘n’ roll was pretty open-ended and was still figuring itself out. I think that’s a good comparison to what was happening at CBGB at the time. Both were these interim periods when there are a lot of different stylistic things coming into the music and everybody’s having a good time putting them together in odd ways. So the bands that clustered around CBGB looked at the “Nuggets” album as a role model, I think. I grew up in that garage rock era, so I partook of that sense of experimentalism and excitement.
Were you surprised that “Nuggets” had so much resonance?
Well, the thing sold so few copies on its initial release! But it’s found a home among people who appreciated the spirit of the music. I suppose it was one of the templates of a kind of feeling within rock ‘n’ roll at the time that bands needed to rediscover their original motivations—why you make music in the first place. It’s not really to be professional musicians or to have a career, but to find a voice. Surely the bands on “Nuggets” and the bands at GBGB had that same spirit and were trying to return to what I call the original sin of rock ‘n’ roll. They were trying to find their own way.
Every generation seems to find “Nuggets” at a certain point, even now with the current wave of garage rock bands.
Two things about “Nuggets.” One, there is a sense of innovation and rediscovery within it. Second, it’s just great records. It’s not so much about the Fuzztone guitars and Farfisa organ as it is about these incredibly well-crafted and well-performed records. Even though they have a veneer of primitivism, they’re not as simple as they look. They’re unique. They come out of your speakers and they transcend genre. One of the things that I love about the Ork set is that it’s not as genre specific as people these days think of punk rock as being. When you say punk rock, the Ramones template comes to mind. But to me the bands on “Nuggets” were all over the place stylistically, and I think that’s true of the earlier bands at CBGB and the ones that Terry collected for his label. There are a lot of different kinds of music at work—a lot of people discovering themselves. And that’s what makes it worthy of its lavish presentation.
The Ork set definitely conveys a sense of community centered around Terry Ork, all of these bands orbiting around this very charismatic character.
It was a community. It was an underground collection of individuals who got to know each other and encouraged each other. That’s one of the things Terry was so good at—helping people become themselves. He certainly had that role in Television. He wasn’t much of a musician. He wasn’t even much of a businessman. For him to run a label was a stretch of his talent. But he took care of some of the practicalities, from finding his bands places to play to encouraging them once they got there. He was a good soul, a merry cherubic human. I never think of him as serious. When I think of him, I think of him as being somewhat mischievous.
And that seems to come through on the Ork set, even though he doesn’t play a note on it.
There was a certain playfulness, a sense of being far enough from the mainstream that you had no choice but to find your own path. All of these bands were essentially misfits, and that’s why the scene at CBGB could grow and develop unnoticed. No one was paying much attention, so people could take their time figuring out whatever new direction they wanted to follow or whatever new idiosyncrasies they wanted to adopt.
The focus is on these really intriguing bands, some of whom were caught in motion going on to the majors and some of whom would not be documented at all, like the Erasers. I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the Erasers had it not been for Ork. It’s great to hear “Little Johnny Jewel” and “Blank Generation” and to hear Richard Hell moving away from Television to his solo vision. It’s great to hear Alex Chilton between incarnations. But really, for me, hearing some of these other bands is a great thing, because otherwise they might be forgotten by rock history.
One thing about “Nuggets” is that it’s not your top-shelf groups. Maybe some of them became big, like the Standells. But a lot of them were the also-rans. That’s where I like my rock ‘n’ roll arrow of interest points—toward those bands that are off to the side. In a way they tell the tale of the scene much more than the successful bands.
I think that’s what “Nuggets” instilled in me: this idea that you didn’t have to be the Beatles to make good or important music. You could be nobodies and still have an amazing song.
Exactly. The Beatles are at such a level, they’re just the Beatles. In a weird way they’re disconnected from their times. But you listen to some of those Merseybeat bands and you get a real sense of what it was like in Liverpool at a certain moment in time. As a rock historian, I like to see the oddballs. I’m doing a little investigating into New Orleans in the late ‘50s, and I know Little Richard and Fats Domino and all those guys. But when I find a piano player like Archibald or this guy I’m really into now, Roy Montell, who has a song called “That Mellow Saxophone,” that’s really the fun stuff. In some ways they’re more revelatory and insightful that the major players in the scene.
You were in Patti Smith’s band at the time, and her first single, “Hey Joe”/”Piss Factory,” was massively influential, even from a business standpoint. Releasing it on your own Mer Records label showed that you could do this on your own and on a smaller scale.
I understood how to do it. I loved the a cappella doo wop labels that record stores in the tri-state area were doing at the time. That was where independent labels began. You don’t have a route to the major labels, so you might as well put it out yourself. It’s not so different from today when people are making their own CDs and selling them at gigs. You can see what you sound like and figure yourself out. Out little Mer Records didn’t have any other releases, because we weren’t businesspeople. It was an experiment to try to create, if nothing else, a rare record of the future.
You’ve talked about artists coming into their own at CBGB, but it sounds like you had come into your own a bit earlier than most of the people on Ork Records. Did that give you a different perspective on punk?
I was probably four or five years older than most of those people, which is enough for a generation. I did serve my rock ‘n’ roll apprenticeship in the ‘60s. I was in what would be known as a garage band, and it was called the Zoo. I played mostly on the fraternity circuit, which stretched across Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York. If you saw “Animal House,” then you saw the type of band I was in. We were playing “Shout” for 20 minutes while the fraternity brothers swam in beer. You played four sets a night. I remember when I played the Delta Kappa Epsilon house—the D Kaps, which was the football players’ house at Rutgers, where I went to school—they would give us an extra $25 if we didn’t take a break. So we were up to $125! It’s a great way to learn your craft and a good way to go through college. I always think of rock ‘n’ roll as my true major.
To play in the ‘60s, when the whole playing field was changing so radically, was amazing. My first band started at the end of ’64, and when the Zoo broke up in around ’67, there had already been quite an evolution in how the music was regarded. I think the same can be said for the early ‘70s into the late ‘70s. The whole sensibility of what rock ‘n’ roll could be and who could play it changed radically. I have to laugh when I remember when the Zoo started. There were a couple of British Invasion songs in our repertoire, but mostly it was songs like “What’d I Say” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’.” By the time we broke up, we were sitting on the floor cross-legged playing raga rock. That’s a pretty large leap. I never thought I would be continuing it after college, which is why my subsequent career is so amazing to me.
Was there a moment when you realized that you could make a career out of music?
Yeah, about a year ago. You just keep doing it until you realize you’ve made a life of it. It’s really something to have this Ork box come out. You realize what a long life it’s been. It’s quite a commemoration. I certainly didn’t see Ork Records as such a thing. It’s like somebody putting out records with your friends, people helping themselves. But now you look back and it’s really quite a body of work.
When Ork put the “Crazy Like a Fox” single out, how did it do? Did it sell particularly well?
The single has been released on so many compilation albums and has been rereleased many times, so it’s just amazing how little impact it ever makes. It’s a cool single, though. I just performed at the Ponderosa Stomp under the name Link Cromwell, and it was his first appearance in 49-and-a-half years. I’m pretty amazed by his longevity. The single has never been a hit, but it continues on. In a weird way, it’s my own tale. It’s the theme song that tells the story of my life. “While they’re working on the inside, I’m having fun on the outside.” The song gave me a sense of myself as a musician, as a performer, as someone who could be that “Crazy Like a Fox” person. And I’m grateful that Terry and Charles helped move it along its lifeline. And in retrospect, I think it’s just a good song—a tribute to my Uncle Larry, who was a great songwriter. “Speak Softly Love,” the theme from “The Godfather.” “A Time for Us” from “Romeo & Juliet.” He was a great encourager of me at a time when I needed a little bit of encouragement.
Did you ever consider “Crazy Like a Fox” for “Nuggets”?
No. I never would have been so self-serving as to put it on. In a way it’s not really a Nuggets-y song. It’s not a band coming out of nowhere. It hasn’t got a great Fuzztone guitar solo, which is probably de rigueur for “Nuggets.” But it’s still a very hooky song. I especially have an affection for the flip side, “Shock Me,” since the bass playing on it is my first instrumental appearance on record. I didn’t play on the A side, but I played bass on the B side while my uncle tootled along on harp. It ‘s just a great little slice of folk protest.
Now that you’ve dusted off Link Cromwell for Ponderosa Stomp, do you have any further plans for him?
I have no idea. Sometimes in my imagination I invent a little lifeline that Link Cromwell might have had, had that song been a hit. There would have been the lost years in the desert, and then he would have tried to stage a comeback and re-create that hit. But to be perfectly honest, I’m happy with the way things have turned out. If the song had been a chart success, my whole life would have been written differently. Everything happens for a reason.
A new chapter in the story of America’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, has been quite literally discovered.
Archaeologists at Jefferson’s estate Monticello have discovered the living quarters of his slave Sally Hemmings, according to a report by NBC News.
Architectural historian Gardiner Hallock, who works for Monticello, told NBC News that “this discovery gives us a sense of how enslaved people were living. Some of Sally’s children may have been born in this room. It’s important because it shows Sally as a human being — a mother, daughter, and sister — and brings out the relationships in her life.”
It is widely believed that Jefferson engaged in a sexual relationship with Hemmings and historians fiercely debate whether Jefferson fathered six of her known children. Although the jury is still out as to whether Jefferson fathered any children with Hemmings, a DNA test in 1998 revealed that a man who was previously believed to be the white father of Hemmings’ children did not have a genetic connection to at least one of their ancestors, while a male from the Jefferson line did. While this does not prove Jefferson’s paternity, it does make that more likely.
Indeed, the National Genealogical Society concluded near the beginning of the 2000s that “the chain of evidence securely fastens Sally Hemings’ children to their father Thomas Jefferson.”
Monticello spokeswoman Mia Magruder Dammann told NBCBLK that “for the first time at Monticello we have a physical space dedicated to Sally Hemings and her life. It’s significant because it connects the entire African American arch at Monticello.”
The starkest contrast between two summertime TV hits about women navigating midlife’s challenges shows up in the way its leading ladies handle themselves in the kitchen. For Jennifer Garner’s Hollis Shaw, the influencer around whom “The Five-Star Weekend” revolves, the kitchen is her happy place and moneymaker. Within moments of the series’ opening, she’s sliding a pie in the oven and futzing over tiny tarts and meringue kisses to photograph for her Hungry with Hollis followers.
Hannah Waddingham’s “Ride or Die” assassin, Judith Burton, earns her pay quite differently: She kills the world’s worst people. To her, the kitchen is an arsenal; in the premiere, she beats two men silly with a stock pot, a skillet and several dinner plates. Later, her best friend, Debbie Claybourne (Octavia Spencer), is shocked to discover that Judith stores a submachine gun in her oven.
Both series meet a cultural moment many middle-aged women would call miraculous, and pharmaceutical and cosmetic corporations would describe as profitable. No generation of 40- and 50-somethings has been as extensively catered to as Gen Xers and geriatric Millennial ladies, for whom hormone replacement therapy, along with the secret ways of retinol, hyaluronic acid serum and collagen therapies, have been normalized.
Every TV show is selling us something: “Five-Star Weekend” markets the expectation of how women should age well and politely.
There comes a point at which a woman realizes she’s a lot closer in age to Diane Keaton in “Something’s Gotta Give” than Amanda Peet, and she’s OK with that. Remember which one got to smash Keanu Reeves’ doctor?
In this economy, though, not many people can afford a house in the Hamptons or Nantucket. But we can vacation vicariously with Hollis and her friends Dru-Ann (Regina Hall), Brooke (D’Arcy Carden), Tatum (Chloë Sevigny) and Gigi (Gemma Chan) to the place Dru-Ann virally nicknames “white person clam island.”
(Greg Gayne/Peacock) Regina Hall as Dru-Ann, Jennifer Garner as Hollis, D’Arcy Carden as Brooke, Chloë Sevigny as Tatum in “The Five-Star Weekend”
“The Five-Star Weekend,” based on Elin Hilderbrand’s novel, is currently topping Peacock’s list of most popular series because of its breezy familiarity; we’ve spent time with these women in past summers, dating all the way back to “Big Little Lies.” You should know the formula by now. They have enviable wealth and careers, except for one who’s relatively less well-off than the rest. A tragedy or a mystery that brings everyone to a seaside locale; here, the sudden death of Hollis’ husband sends her sailing off to her family home on Nantucket, where all the interiors are as creamy and dreamy as a Nancy Meyers film. And there must be romance, represented in Hollis’ conveniently single high school sweetheart, played by the perennially foxy Timothy Olyphant.
Everybody’s hiding something from themselves and their host, who has planned all their fun with a pathological degree of anal retentiveness. There is a spa trip and fancy dinner at a restaurant and behind it all, lurking silently, a cancer scare.
If the “Five-Star” crew were to meet “Ride or Die” duo Debbie and Judith at a pub, they’d have war stories to swap. Debbie is a politician’s wife who sidelined her career aspirations to support his ambition to be Prime Minister. She gets him within spitting distance of Downing Street just in time for her husband to dump her.
You think that’s bad? How about this: Hours before that happens, Judith’s younger handler Sam (Calam Lynch) invites her to retire over lunch, suggesting that her recent 50th birthday might have made her a little psychologically unstable. “My mum turned 50 last year,” he shares, “and she went absolutely insane!”
The funniest part of that conversation is when Sam labels Judith a WOACA, a Woman of a Certain Age, pronouncing it as if he were Fozzie Bear punctuating a joke in an old-timey stand-up set. Only the real joke, it seems, is that Judith assumed her mission-completion rate and dedication were enough to maintain the respect of Sam and their boss, played by Bill Nighy. Not so.
(Courtesy of Prime Video)
There’s an additional slathering of irony in Garner, the woman behind “Alias” superspy Sydney Bristow, playing the happy homemaker. Meanwhile “Ride or Die,” created by Tessa Coates, introduces Waddingham, the elegant and proper boss lady from “Ted Lasso,” by showing Judith trading an easy assassination by distant sniping for an up-close-and-personal stabbing. Just for the fun of it.
I’d say that’s a pretty good representation of the gap between the long-shot fantasy of midlife and an intimate understanding of how it actually turns out.
As every perimenopausal woman knows, it’s really hard to relax when so many people in the world deserve to be punched.
Every TV show is selling us something: “Five-Star Weekend” markets the expectation of how women should age well and politely, which is to propose we seek respite from all the heartbreak, ageism and our creeping fear of obsolescence and decrepitude by leaning on our nearest friends. That, and sitting in salt rooms and mud baths or gazing at the bottom of our stand mixer’s bowl. Expressing our rage at all that, however, is still frowned upon.
That makes Debbie and Judith relatable and extraordinary figures, in that they are 50-something women, played by 50-something women headlining a high-velocity espionage thriller, linked to developments each is entitled to be angry about. Instead of proposing Waddingham as a Bond co-star, she’s the expertly skilled agent flanked by a best friend with an equally formidable intellect – the Moneypenny to her 007.
With the scrape Debbie and Judith find themselves in, a beach holiday is out of the question. Besides, as every perimenopausal woman knows, it’s really hard to relax when so many people in the world deserve to be punched.
“Ride or Die” reminds us that our local multiplexes used to be dominated by buddy action blockbusters in past summers, most of which starred men.
An exception was “Thelma & Louise,” which became the talk of the season and then year when it landed in theaters 35 years ago in May. Susan Sarandon’s Louise and Geena Davis’ Thelma spurred debates about what it meant that this film, written by a woman, created two female folk heroes out of the cold-blooded killing of a would-be rapist. Feminists loved it, but plenty of other women viewed it as improper.
It only occurred to me recently that Sarandon was 44 years old when she played Louise, the pal who pulled the trigger. I wasn’t thinking about that when I first saw “Thelma & Louise” because my 40s were far away enough to not even consider that detail. Now I know how much it matters.
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Ultimately, what sisterhood there is between “Five-Star Weekend” and “Ride or Die” can be seen in the way they consider the resources a woman has as she enters middle age. If we are “Five-Star”-fortunate, we can hire assistance to handle the inevitable difficulties associated with this time of life, whether that means groundskeepers or divorce lawyers. Would that were possible for all of us.
“Ride or Die,” for all its fanciful twists, ultimately has more realistic counsel for all the WOACAs watching: Bank on yourself and your extensively earned skills. You don’t need to be rich to burn the road behind you to the point of no return, just confident enough to keep barreling forward. And if you’re really lucky, you’ll have a trustworthy person riding shotgun in your getaway car.
Gut health is everywhere right now. The hashtag #GutTok has over 6 billion views on TikTok, the global digestive health product market is worth over $60 billion, and viral trends that promise to “hack your gut” through miracle products, cleanses, and restrictive diets are all the rage. But what does gut health really mean, and what can science tell us about how to make sure our gut is in good shape?
The gut microbiome, a complex network of trillions of microorganisms living inside our digestive system, may hold the key to the mysteries of gut health. We have a symbiotic relationship with all of those little guys; we keep them well-fed and they produce substances that can benefit our body and brain. These microbes help regulate bodily functions, protect against disease, and recover from illnesses like cyclosporiasis, which is spreading right now across the US.
But with so many voices chiming in on gut health, pushing everything from probiotic foods and supplements to wellness shots and coffee enemas, it can be hard to tell what information is based on real research and what might just be a marketing gimmick or social media clickbait. Vox spoke to doctors and visited Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles to bust some gut health myths for science-backed advice.
Read more about gut health and gut microbiome research:
F1 races are exhilarating. While racing alongside 21 other cars, an F1 driver can reach speeds of up to 231 mph, making it one of the world’s most dangerous sports.
And F1 drivers need to be physically prepared to prevent disaster. Over the course of a single race, they experience hundreds of pounds of force, temperatures up to 130°F, and risk extreme dehydration that can lead to lowered brain function. In order to stay on the road and not pass out, F1 drivers have to be in peak physical condition.
In order to find out how F1 drivers can survive a sport that is so physically demanding, I hit the gym. Since F1 is such an international sport, there aren’t many specialized trainers in the US. So with the help of an F1 performance expert currently based in the United Arab Emirates, I worked out with David Dunlop, a strength and conditioning coach who works with NFL players. And it turns out that training for F1 is surprisingly similar to training to be a linebacker.
Read more about the fitness required to drive in an F1 race:
Former Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, former second gentleman Doug Emhoff, left, along with Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) stand for the national anthem during the Obama Presidential Center dedication ceremony on June 18, 2026, in Chicago. | Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Two years after her whirlwind ascension to Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Kamala Harris is thinking about…running for president again. Not doing it — yet — but laying the groundwork in case she does.
She’s done the book tour through the early states. She’s taken the meeting with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and dialed up pro-Palestinian organizers to feel out the room. And she’s leading many 2028 polls — ahead of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, ahead of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, ahead of the field. But she remains noncommittal to the prospect about running in 2028 and is yet to weigh in on the Democratic party’s most pressing ideological fights.
It’s an odd situation: The candidate is unclear if she wants to run — and the party seems unclear if they want her to.
So last week, I talked with Democratic Party officials, donors, and South Carolina voters for our last episode of America, Actually to figure out whether Harris has a lane for another presidential bid — and whether it’s one she actually wants.
Here’s what I learned:
The Harris camp treats 2024 as an anomaly
The case from her inner circle is that the 2024 presidential election against President Donald Trump simply doesn’t count. To start, President Joe Biden dropped out in July — under pressure from virtually the entire Democratic Party — and left her just 107 days to mount a campaign.
And, then, there were the multiple assassination attempts against Trump, including one that resulted in an indelible image of the bloodied candidate pumping his fist in a knot of Secret Service agents. As one Harris surrogate put it to me: “I think Jesus Christ would’ve lost in 2024 after the assassination attempt.”
It’s a real argument, but it’s also exactly the argument a team makes once it has decided the loss wasn’t about the candidate. I’m not sure the rest of the party agree. (Also, she did run for the nomination in 2020 and dropped out in late 2019, before the first primary contest.)
The donor class may be ready to turn the page
I called John Morgan, a Florida mega-donor who’s raised tens of millions for Democrats going back to the Clinton years. He doesn’t want Harris to run, but, even more, he said that he thinks the money won’t materialize and that she and Newsom would be cannibalizing the same California checkbooks. He also raised her ties to the Biden administration. According to Morgan, the entire Biden era needs what he called — and I’m quoting the man — a “Bye Bye Biden” sendoff.
Morgan also added plenty of donors feel this way, and almost none will say it out loud, because “people think to say no to her, they could be labeled racist, and they don’t want that, ’cause they’re Democrats,” he said.
Oof.
Nobody has actually replaced her — and that’s the real story
Here’s one where the Harris team has a point. No one has yet supplanted her with the two groups that anchor the Democratic base: Black voters and women. To this moment, that bond holds. I felt it at a Juneteenth picnic in North Charleston, where “Yes, she should run” won our little yes-bucket, no-bucket poll. A few other responses we got: “Third time’s a charm.” “We need women.” “It was stolen from her the first time.”
But the fuller conversations were more nuanced than any topline number. There’s a generational split — younger voters are raising her prosecutor record and her posture on Gaza, with one telling me she “was locking us up until she needed our vote.” There’s a gender split — men at the picnic were ready to run back “a competent white man” before another woman, and women insisted that the door just needs one more good push.
Beneath nearly all of it, one word kept surfacing, from the yeses and the nos alike: fresh. People want a fresh face. Some want a fresher Harris. Some just want somebody new.
The Black vote — particularly in the South — has been the great consolidating force in modern Democratic primaries: the firewall that lined up behind Hillary Clinton in 2016, that rescued Joe Biden in South Carolina in 2020, that ultimately made Obama.
Democrats run orderly primaries when that group decides early and moves together. A Black electorate that’s split by age, split by gender, and openly shopping for a new face isn’t just a headache for Harris; it’s a break from decades of how this party has chosen a nominee. That’s not really a story about Kamala Harris. It’s a story about a party that doesn’t know what it wants — and a 2028 presidential cycle that’s going to be a good deal messier than the polling makes it look.
Last week, I discussed the miniDSP UMIK-2 USB measurement microphone and as I mentioned then, it's not often that we see much discussion about these devices among audiophiles even though they are important in helping us chase down sonic problems and of course to calibrate the sound system. To me, that calibration process is an essential part of achieving a truly "accurate" sound system once we
Liebe Retrofreunde, entweder zum Anfixen geeignet, wenn ihr das Heft noch nicht habt, oder aber zum gemütlichen Mitlesen: Egal wie ihr unser regelmäßiges Heftblättern nutzt, wünschen euch Anatol und Jörg ebenso viel Spaß beim Zusehen, wie wir bei der Aufnahme hatten! Wer das Heft als ePaper oder Einzelheft bestellen möchte, wird im Shop fündig.
Das Video ist nur leicht geschnitten und damit 53 Minuten lang, aber wir wollen ja nicht durchhetzen. Also zieht euch ein frisches Bier oder einen Tee oder einen Kaffee oder ein Glas Rotwein oder was auch immer ihr gerne trinkt (wir akzeptieren auch kristallaktiviertes Wasser) und macht es euch gemütlich
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Im aktuellen Heft Retro Gamer 2/26 haben wir einen vierseitigen Praxistest zum Commodore 64 Ultimate – hier ist das zugehörige Video, in dem euch Jörg Langer knapp 20 Minuten lang den Wunder-Brotkasten vorführt. Viel Spaß!
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