In a digital flyer promoting the stand-up shows that would culminate in her new HBO comedy special, “Parmesan,” comedian, actress and one of America’s greatest working artists, Kate Berlant, posed an important question: “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CLOWN?” In one photo, Berlant, fresh from glam, seduces the camera; in the other, her face contorts into a rascally grin, eyes half-crossed for effect. No dichotomy better represents Berlant’s razor-sharp, thoroughly tasteful wit, which sits halfway between refined humorist and go-for-broke court jester.
If you haven’t seen this clown, there’s no better time than the present. Like most of Berlant’s work — from her extensive collaborations with best friend John Early to her unforgettable one-woman show, “KATE” — “Parmesan” is a masterful send-up of a time when we’re all doing character work. What begins as an honest account of modern life’s bleak state is distorted alongside Berlant’s malleable expressions, slowly blossoming into something life-affirming, like a diamond among the rubble. Some comedians like to say they give their audience a “night off” from the world. Berlant, on the other hand, relishes the chance to remind her audiences of just how blissfully hysterical the world can be.
Everyday life, in the Berlantian sense, is driven by affection for both the mundane and the surreal in equal measure. In the joke that inspires the special’s title, she measures an Instagram comment’s subzero value in a wide scope, lampooning the communal yet cartoonish nature of our endless scroll. Elsewhere, Berlant gets more personal than she ever has on stage, using the relatively recent discovery that she isn’t straight as the springboard for bits about how embracing queerness later in life can be as beautiful as it is uniquely mortifying.
But with Berlant, it’s not just about the jokes; it’s about the rhythm and physicality that accompany them. No one understands their audience better than she does, knowing comedy relies as much on observation as on good, old-fashioned slapstick. Berlant’s a tenured professor at the Make-‘Em-Laugh Institute, and “Parmesan” proves her research-driven thesis statement time and again: There’s no bad mood a good clown can’t improve.
From the moment Alex Gibney announced he was working on “Musk” in 2023, it became one of the most anticipated documentaries around – and a source of trepidation for its titular subject, tech mogul Elon Musk. But we may have underestimated how far the world’s wealthiest man and his ilk would go to prevent audiences from seeing it.
Weeks before “Musk” hit theaters, its distributor, Bleecker Street, couldn’t buy ads on TikTok, YouTube, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram or, here’s a shocker, Musk’s own X. A Hollywood Reporter story published on Sept. 25 made YouTube and Meta reverse course – a rare case of two media giants shamed into living up to their free-speech claims.
But this attempted media suppression shows “Musk” has struck a nerve, despite its namesake dismissing it as a “hit piece that misses.”
What happened to Bleecker Street, then, is both familiar to Gibney and extraordinarily alarming. “You can see how a few platforms coalescing around the endorsement of what these tech viziers are doing decide that a criticism of tech power is somehow political and can’t be allowed in terms of open discourse on their platforms,” Gibney told Salon. “So that was really disconcerting.”
It’s shaping up to be a dark autumn for Silicon Valley’s villains. In early December, Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial” turns our attention to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, played by Andrew Garfield.
Meanwhile, “Musk” was recently joined in theaters by Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning,” in which Jeremy Strong portrays Zuckerberg as a soulless ghoul prioritizing clicks over user safety. In “You Can See Everything,” notorious prankster Nathan Fielder shadows notorious (for different reasons) Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes in the days before she went to prison.
Gibney also profiled Holmes in his 2019 work “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” which adds another layer of coincidental symmetry: Fielder’s film hits theaters on Oct. 16, the same day “Musk” opens nationwide.
But “Musk” is unquestionably a tougher watch, and given its subject’s extensive integration into the second Trump administration, it can’t help but be political.
Of course, “Musk” isn’t campaigning for anything except our need to confront the existential threat posed by one man exercising significant control over our media and our military.
A chorus of testimony from people who were once closest to Musk builds a profile of a megalomaniacal con artist. Two of Musk’s most incisive critics, his ex-wife Justine Musk and former right-wing influencer Ashley St. Clair, describe him as a gaslighter and a nuke, respectively.
But perhaps the most damning testimonial comes from Musk himself – or rather, existing audio recordings of Musk delivered by a CGI version of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, since he refused to participate.
All of it boils down to simple questions Gibney poses at the film’s outset: How could Musk assume so much power, and why have we given it to him? I discussed those questions with Gibney, and what they taught him about Musk and our penchant for enabling men like him, in a wide-ranging conversation transcribed below.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Salon: You’ve done a documentary on Putin. You did one on Scientology, a famously litigious organization. You have a vast filmography featuring subjects who might have taken issue, or have taken issue, with what was said in your documentaries. Where does this rank in terms of threat level, legal or otherwise?
Gibney: Well, high. I mean, when just before “Going Clear” was released, the Church of Scientology took out full-page ads in the New York Times and the L.A. Times with a big picture of me, sort of denouncing me. And there were people, you know, who would pop up in dark parking lots, you know, sort of accosting me, trying to kind of destabilize me psychologically. But I think in this case, he’s the richest man in the world. He has a lot of resources… And he has this platform, Twitter, which has become a kind of Thunderdome of hate and vitriol, and that activates, you know, unpredictable characters who sometimes act on their own…
That said, I don’t want to exaggerate what’s happened to me so far. Other people put themselves at greater risk than I, in the sense that they came forward and appeared on camera.
One of the things that you said in other interviews, and I think you actually said this in the documentary as well, is that you used to be a fan of Elon Musk’s products.
I mean, I looked at him from afar. I have some history on this whole electric car thing because I was brought in long ago to help with the editing of a doc called “Who Killed the Electric Car,” which is about GM’s first foray into the world of electric cars. A woman I met on that film, Jessie Deeter, later produced a film called “Revenge of the Electric Car,” and Elon Musk is in that. And Jessie, when she worked with him on that, was a big fan. [Deeter is also a producer on “Musk.”]
(Courtesy Bleecker Street Film / Gregg Segal)
So, you know, I had a certain connection to him. And I’m a big electric car guy. I own one — not a Tesla— but I own one, and I had a Tesla Powerwall in my house. I also sort of liked the kind of mumbling charisma that he had for a while, because he seemed like very much a regular guy. He was joking with people around on Twitter and stuff like that.
That said, he could also do unpredictable, chaotic and sometimes offensive things. But largely speaking, my view of him was positive. But I was interested in the fact that he accumulated so much power, and so that was the basis on which I dug in back in 2022.
Do you think that his ability to amass this much power is related to the fact that he is doing it in the American capitalist system, or do you think he could have done it in any other place in the world?
Well, I mean, there are a lot of intersections of opportunities for Elon Musk, and I also think he discovered, to use a phrase of his, the anomaly in the matrix for the American system. And that is money. He discovered that not only can you get a lot of money from the federal government, but if you have a lot of money, you can use it to influence sometimes how much money you get from the federal government or state governments. So I think there was that.
The other big thing is that in America we also have a kind of grudging admiration for the P.T. Barnum-like qualities of certain larger-than-life entrepreneurs, you know, and you see that a lot in Silicon Valley . . . That is a kind of cultural trope in this society for which I think we have a weakness. We sort of like to see them trick us all, though we also do like to see them go down after they’ve tricked us. So I think for all those reasons that maybe Elon was able to succeed here in a way that really exploited some of the flaws in our system and our psyche.
There’s also a propensity in our culture to believe in some superhuman aspect of genius, which I think your documentary gets at very well.
Yeah, it’s also that our weakness for money, or the power of money, in this culture also causes us somehow to think that if you’re wealthy, you’re also wise rather than just ruthless, right?
I often think of that famous line from “Citizen Kane,” where Orson Welles is joking with somebody, you know, having been very successful playing this William Randolph Hearst character, who said, “It’s no trick making a lot of money if all you want to do is make a lot of money.” Meaning, if you’re ruthless and determined, you can make a lot of money. Doesn’t mean you’re a genius, and it doesn’t mean that you’re a tech genius either.
I also think Elon Musk, having seen the ascent of Steve Jobs, was sort of defining himself in that way too – or going back to Thomas Edison, who had his own P.T. Barnum-like qualities in terms of inventing a character for himself to play. It’s not just the investor; it’s the inventor.
“Musk” runs for almost four hours. Did you always know it would be that long?
No. In fact, I had a cut of the film in the spring of 2024 that was under two hours. We were moving to release that and put it into the fall festivals. Then, in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump is nearly assassinated, and Musk hitches his wagon to the Trump train. And my friends at HBO said, “You’re not done. You have to follow this story because it could go to places that you don’t expect, and having spent as much time as you have, you have to follow it to at least a moment of greater conclusion.”
So I did, and that ended up being the reason that it’s at such a length. You see patterns from the first film that then repeat themselves, but on a much larger scale, in the second film. Suddenly economic power meets political power, economic and technological power meets political power, and that is the making of an epic story.
(Courtesy Bleecker Street Film / Ken Cedenoupi / UPI Alamy News) Elon Musk
In addition, it just so happened that as he embarked on his political project, a lot of people that I was talking to in the background, trying to persuade them to come forward, did come forward because they saw some of the more problematic aspects of Musk wielding power as part of MAGA world. That gave the story a kind of human dimension as well.
Weirdly, you know, I was having trouble kind of putting it all together, and I didn’t really get a sense of how to shape it until I watched Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” which in itself was a kind of take on the tech bros. That helped me kind of find a way forward in terms of what became a kind of epic narrative.
How so?
Well, you know, you start with a scientist who wants to do something big and important. And there’s even a sense of idealism about his ambition. But then he literally creates a monster, and the whole enterprise becomes utterly reckless and irresponsible and all about his own sort of grandiosity. Rather than a mission that might help people, it becomes about him.
What are you hoping this documentary will do in terms of making people a little bit more aware of who Elon Musk is and getting at the man behind the curtain, so to speak?
Well, I mean, it is an agent provocateur. I don’t provide a solution, but I do provide, I think, a pretty compelling story, which asks the kind of fundamental question I posed at the beginning, which is, how did this guy get so much power, and why did we give it to him? Because it’s both about him and it’s about us, and it asks some discomforting questions about how literally existential power rests in the hands of one man who is increasingly chaotic, unhinged, and seemingly pursuing power without reason. There’s a chilling moment at the end of the film where somebody asks him, “Why have you accreted so much power?” And he literally can’t answer the question…
He’s a very peculiar character who’s a chaos agent. But we’ve allowed him to become normalized in a way.
I remember writing about him being on “Saturday Night Live” and people shrugging it off, like, “Oh, it’s not that big of a deal.” But it was a very big deal. Those kinds of things make him into a character when the reality is he has massive access to power.
And he’s saying things, even on “Saturday Night Live,” that were patently untrue… Even when he says, “Did you think I was going to be a chill, normal dude?” Well, there’s a funny hidden message there, which is kind of discomforting if you really think about it. Like, if you want to drive a Tesla, be prepared to endure a lot of performative cruelty from me, including cruelty that may end up killing people. . . That’s a pretty brutal message, honestly, for “Saturday Night Live.” But it was a joke, right? And that’s the genius, in a way, of Elon Musk: he’s constantly saying stuff that is deadly serious and a joke at the same time.
Speaking of that, the images and the joke, let’s talk about using the [CGI] avatar. I remember when the news first broke about that, someone said, “Well, I wonder if that’s Alex kind of trolling Musk back.”
I mean, it’s kind of a troll-back, yeah. In a way, it’s kind of investing in him, playing in his sandbox, because he didn’t agree to appear.
And I should make it clear, as I tried to do in the film, that what we hear from him are actual audio recordings of him. In other words, they’re not AI-confected answers. We didn’t ask AI what Elon would say. We’re taking real audio recordings, but how to couch that visually? And we took our cue, having done all this research into stuff that Elon said, from something he kept going over again: This idea that we’re likely living in a simulation. So I thought, OK, how about a simulated interview?
And yes, he’s famous for trolling people. He’s famous for creating memes. What was it he said in 2020 on Twitter? He said, you know, parodying “Dune,” he said, “He who controls the memes, controls the universe,” right? OK, well, here’s a meme for you, Elon, of you.
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What, if anything, about this documentary may help illuminate a few things for people, regardless of their political leanings, as we approach the midterms?
I mean, this should be our concern, whether you’re from the left or the right, is giving people unaccountable power. Also, this whole idea that our politics and, indeed, our Department of Justice and our Department of Defense can be utterly transactional.
We’re not getting the best that money can buy. We’re getting what money can buy. Period. In other words, the military stuff that you’re seeing is a third-rate frontier AI technology being fully integrated into our Department of Defense. And why is the worst technology being integrated? Because Elon Musk is literally paying for political advantage. So it’s a payback system, and we should all be outraged about that, left, right, or otherwise.
And now you’re seeing him trying to buy the midterms. He’s spending way more now than he did for the presidential campaign in 2024, and in part that’s to get more money for himself in the form of military contracts. But also, he knows that a reckoning is coming for him if the Democrats take over the House and the Senate, and there’s going to be a lot of investigations into him for corruption and abuse of power, taking our information, particularly possibly relating to DOGE, and doing God knows what with it.
Our whole system is built on a system of checks and balances, and the idea that the government is our instrument for making a better world, rather than, you know, making a few people rich…
But I think that what’s changed now with Trump is that the Department of Justice has become a protection racket for those who flatter and ally themselves with the president, and an instrument of revenge for those who oppose the president. You can’t depend on it as a kind of law-enforcing mechanism, and that may be the scariest thing of all. . . What we’re talking about is Putin’s Russia here, right? And if people want to avoid that, then I would strongly urge them to go out to the polls. Because this is a rogue administration that goes beyond any kind of sense of party affiliation. It’s a rogue administration that’s literally destroying our democracy.
A network of AI-generated models is using comics’ material to funnel views to their OnlyFans and Fanvue accounts—and there’s not much comedians can do about it.
It was the Peanut Butter heist that won me over. Everyone watching “Cape Fear” knows what I’m talking about – it’s the sixth-episode confrontation in which Max Cady, played by Javier Bardem, tangles yet again with his nightmare neighbors Anna (Amy Adams) and Tom Bowden (Patrick Wilson).
Some of you may be thinking I’ve mischaracterized the Bowdens since past versions of “Cape Fear” establish Max as the problem. But for all of Tom and Anna’s trepidation toward Max, they do little to thwart him from being all up in their business.
In one scene, Anna discovers Max in her kitchen making a sandwich for her son Zack (Joe Anders). In another, her daughter Natalie (Lily Collias) hitches a ride with him. Anna carpools with him too, and Tom joins Max for a few drinks at a local bar. The Bowdens spend more time with their local tormentor than I have ever spent with my neighbors, whom I like quite a bit.
All this happens after Zack turns up with a missing toe, which Anna suspects Max orchestrated. Just like she and Tom strongly suspect Max spiked the family’s iced tea with Tom’s stash of LSD. Why does Tom have a stash of LSD? For microdosing, because Tom is a yuppie who hates his life.
(Apple TV) Patrick Wilson and Amy Adams in “Cape Fear.”
Anyway, when the couple angrily strides across the street to confront Max, we’re supposed to be in their corner. But Max’s door is open to them, and inside they find him preparing a luxurious meal. Before Tom gives the hardened ex-con an earful of what for, he and Anna are shocked silent when their cat strolls into Max’s kitchen.
“You took Peanut Butter?” Tom yelps in a way that halts Max in his tracks. He walks over to the cat and picks him up, and in previous adaptations of this story, this might signal that a disturbing act of animal cruelty is about to happen.
But Bardem’s Max is a different breed of psychopath from those previously embodied by Roberts DeNiro and Mitchum. “Peanut Butter? Really?” he says. “You’re calling this majestic creature . . . Peanut Butter?” Then he kisses kitty on the cheek and reintroduces him as Maní – the Spanish word for peanut.
“Maní will come home when he’s ready,” he says later. “You can’t force a cat.”
“Cape Fear” has now inspired three screen adaptations – two of them feature-length films that last about as long as the endurance limit most people have for its brand of sadism. In adapting the premise for TV, series creator Nick Antosca dilutes the movies’ naked menace by pouring reasonable doubt into both Max’s profile and that of the Bowdens, the married lawyers behind his downfall.
That doesn’t save “Cape Fear” from being a 10-hour slog set to an imitation of Bernard Herrmann’s anxiety-inducing score, but it does lend a little intrigue to Antosca and Bardem’s interpretation of Max.
Everyone in this series is some shade of awful.
The TV variation of Max Cady is where the classic prestige drama Difficult Man shakes hands with a manosphere cultist’s pent-up aggression. Bardem’s villain is built more like an aughts-edition antihero. He was once a respected celebrity chef who loved his wife even though he cheated on her, and exudes a kind of danger that brings out a touch of Bonnie and Clyde syndrome in horny strangers.
Meanwhile, Anna and Tom Bowden are a split version of the attorney previously played by Gregory Peck and Nick Nolte, Sam Bowden. Their relationship with Max is also much more personal: Anna was Max’s pregnant lawyer in the trial where Max stood accused of killing his expectant wife, while Tom was the prosecutor.
(Apple TV) Patrick Wilson and Javier Bardem in “Cape Fear.”
At some point, Anna persuaded Max to plead guilty even though he maintained his innocence. Shortly after Max’s trial ended, Anna and Tom got married, Anna got sober, and both buried a few secrets. While Max spent 17 years in prison, Anna built a reputation for freeing wrongfully convicted inmates, while Tom went to work for a fancy law firm.
It’s hard not to feel some kind of sympathy for Max, who sustained a severe brain injury while he was incarcerated that required surgeons to install a metal plate in his skull. As he tells a fellow prisoner in a flashback, he’d never murdered anyone before he killed the men who attacked him. Who knows if that’s true? Then again, Anna and Tom aren’t exactly paragons of honesty either.
Everyone in this series is some shade of awful. Anna’s boss, Noa (CCH Pounder), thinks Max is just the greatest, to the point of gaslighting her unnerved colleague. An unhinged girl who turns out to be his secret daughter, Nevaeh (Malia Pyles), has been living in the walls of the Bowdens’ house and messing with their kids. Max even has his own stalker played by Juliette Lewis, who also starred in the 1991 movie.
Still, there’s no getting around Max’s demonic impulses or the Bowdens’ clumsy game of FAFO mixed with “You Started It.” As Anna and Tom keep saying, Max was going to come after them no matter what. But good lord, they are bad at this.
I’ve always understood Max Cady to be a poisonous extension of the male ego, dating back to “The Executioners,” John D. MacDonald’s 1957 book that started it all. Max Cady either validates the paranoia of upstanding men obsessed with protecting or dominating women, or the disdain felt by those whom such men look down upon.
(Apple TV) Javier Bardem in “Cape Fear.”
Relatedly, his cinematic incarnations have evolved over the years: In the 1962 film, Mitchum’s Cady is a straight-up unrepentant criminal terrorizing Peck’s Sam Bowden by threatening to rape his wife and virginal teenage daughter. DeNiro’s take in Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake amplifies Max’s barbarism and Lewis’ Lolita vibe as Sam Bowden’s daughter, establishing her teenage curiosity about Max by sucking on his fingers. (Scorsese is also listed as an executive producer on the series, along with Steven Spielberg.)
Antosca’s choice to leave rape out of the equation in the TV show, then, is a smart one. Instead, he falls back on a tried-and-true fridging: Not only was Max’s wife brutalized to a degree that there were knife marks on her bones, but the killer also cut his unborn child out of her belly.
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By the rule of Difficult Men, if Max does bad things, he has his reasons. And if he does those things to terrible people, they probably have it coming. Unfortunately, one of the people who paid the ultimate price in this feud is Anna’s coworker, whom she couldn’t leave out of her personal problems. He’s currently resting in pieces, poor guy.
The plot of “Cape Fear” dictates that this sporting tale of homicidal pettiness can only end one way. Until that inevitable conclusion, I’ll be rooting for Max Cady’s campaign against the Bowdens’ vortex of selfishness, which is entirely OK to do. None of these people is real, but the irritations they represent – NIMBYism, narcissism and the compulsion to destroy others to build ourselves up – are quite familiar. If the Bowdens were better written, I wouldn’t wish them ill. But I always trust the instincts of a good cat.
BRUSSELS ― The EU should consider approving a three or four-year budget instead of trying to plan the bloc’s financial needs for seven years, the president of Cyprus told POLITICO.
“We’re discussing the budget in 2034 and now we’re in 2026,” Nikos Christodoulides said in an interview on the sidelines of Thursday’s summit of EU leaders in Brussels.
A three or four-year budget might be “easier” for some member countries to swallow, he suggested. “Why not open the political discussion?”
“You don’t know what’s going to be the situation in 2030, 2031,” he added. “I mean, look what happened with Covid, with the Ukrainian war … It’s not possible to declare all your priorities today.”
The EU’s seven-year, roughly €2 trillion budget has to be agreed by all 27 member countries but has two deeply entrenched camps on either side: The so-called frugals, comprised of Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and others who want a smaller budget, and the friends of cohesion, a loose grouping of 17 countries that do not want major cuts to agriculture and regional funds.
An EU official close to the budget negotiations said the idea of a shorter timeframe was weird.
EU law allows a budget of “at least five years,” though every budget has been seven years since 1993.
The odds of the budget being approved by the end of the year are increasingly slim, with an election in Spain in November, which polls indicate Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez will lose to the center-right and far-right, potentially blowing out the timeline for consensus to 2027.
“Everybody used to understand that we need to finish … a political agreement by the end of the year,” Christodoulides said. “Now, with the situation in Spain, elections there,” that is less likely to happen.
Christodoulides also said he expected the budget to be cut by around a 10th compared to the budget proposed by the European Commission. Last week, the Irish government proposed an 8% cut compared to the Commission’s proposal.
“I think we may end up on 10% or 11%,” he said. “Double digits.”
Welcome to RATED AND SLATED, the column that’s terminally online so you don’t have to be.
This week, I’ve been distracting myself from the horrors of a livestreamed war by playing a relaxing new video game which lets you pilot a military drone.
I’ve been enjoying Remote Reaper: FPV Drone so much that I’m packing in the day job to focus on my YouTube channel, where I’ll be streaming myself carrying out combat missions. Subscribe now!
Ukrainian-developed FPV drone simulator “Remote Reaper: FPV Drone” has officially left Early Access, with version 1.0 now available on Steam.
Developed in collaboration with military pilots, the simulator focuses on combat FPV drone operations and introduces several features in… pic.twitter.com/63id2RVJoL
I’ll be modding the simulator so that I can drone bomb my favorite cities around the world. I’ve got no time for anyone who says this game could be used to generate military training data or perform real combat operations.
In fact, I’m so confident that this is all just a load of harmless fun that tonight I’ll be sending the reaper to pay a visit to my own home. Tune in live below!
RATED AND SLATED
AI FLIGHT BUDDIES
boy next to me asked chat gpt can he bring his cava on the flight and now he’s having a full on kii with the bot pic.twitter.com/R3m6iJuiG9
If this is the baseline level of AI psychosis for the general population, it won’t be long before you find yourself sitting on a commercial flight next to an LLM fanatic who’s “having a full-on kii with the bot” about how he’s about to hijack the plane—AND YOU MADE IT ON WITH THE BOX CUTTERS TOO MISSION ACCOMPLISHED TWIN NAHHH BUT BE FR… YOU REGRET NOT BRINGING THE BIG SUICIDE JACKET NOW? —oh well, at least you won’t have to worry about popping your ears for much longer.
ROBOT SECURITY DOGS WITH INDIAN ACCENTS
#BREAKING: Absolutely WILD footage has emerged from Atlanta where an apartment complex now uses "robot security dogs" to patrol the area at night.
The robot dogs also seem to speak in Indian accents to the residents.
Does the robot security dog have this accent because it’s manned by a human operator or because it was abandoned as a pup, stuck in India, living on the streets, surviving, being a tourist guide, smoking on the fucking roads?
I’m sick of going on X and seeing you complaining about 3D-printed salmon. I don’t want to hear that it’s not real meat, that “it contains zero fish at all”—grow up! This looks every bit as appetizing as all those AI-generated food menus. Well, it’s your loss; more for me. In fact, strap me into an eating chair, stick me under the specialized food-grade nozzles, and print those fake layers of muscle and fiber straight into my mouth, layer by layer, until I contain more slop than my own timeline.
THE FUTURE OF JOB INTERVIEWS
Good news. In the future our agents can just talk to each other while we sit alone in our basements and doomscroll. https://t.co/iWZWac8JGo
To be fair, if my AI agent does the video job interview with the AI recruiter while I’m not in the room, then I’d say that’s actually getting my new employer ready for what I’m going to be like at work: dissociating at my desk before vanishing off for 40-minute shits on company time. My agent had better work on his innocent face for when he’s asked who blocked the toilet in the gender-neutral restroom with partially digested 3D-printed salmon.
GOD’S OWN INFLUENCER
Belarus has blessed its first AI-generated religious icon
The icon depicts Carlo Acutis, an Italian teenager who was canonized in 2025 and became known as the “Cyber Apostle.”
The icon was installed in a Catholic church in Novolukoml, where Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz… pic.twitter.com/vawCVEK8aX
I know Cyber-Apostle of the Eucharist Saint Carlo Acutis isn’t technically “alive” anymore, but what’s to stop him from being the Pope? Maybe the real reason Leo XIV hates AI so much is that, like the rest of us, he’s worried it’s going to steal his job.
This melancholy duet sounds as if it could’ve been written to be Fontaines D.C. frontman Grian Chatten’s dream collaboration with Lana Del Rey, if only she wasn’t too busy recording a GTA VI radio station with her airboat captain husband to jump on the track. Fortunately, ROSALÍA was free to cut a yearning vocal take—presumably because there was no one around to take her on the alligator tour she’d originally planned for the day.
CAMERONWINTER.FILM
Bourgeois darling Paul Thomas Anderson strikes again, this time w a toothless, derivative, anti-revolutionary concert film devoted to saccharine young nepo-psyop Cameron Winter. In these trying times, Anderson chooses to mock liberatory aesthetics w grainy anesthetic 35mm slop. https://t.co/UMgBTaXfwa
Want a sad night out with the boys? Well, great news: The Cameron Winter concert film is coming to a cinema near you. Why not cheer up your pals by buying the official Live at Carnegie Hall grand piano popcorn bucket? Stick it on your lap, tell ’em to reach to the bottom, and then you, too, can bust out the falsetto.
If you promise to reboot Girls every ten years, then I will commit to the internet’s most stringent longevity protocol. I need to be around to see what happens to the bloodlines of Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna. You will find me in the hyperbaric chamber 100 years from now, watching their febrile descendants resort to increasingly extreme measures to keep their little dreams alive amidst the spectacular, decayed opulence of a futuristic New York City. By that point, I’ll be the last millennial alive, the only person in the world who still believes that Lena Dunham is the voice of our generation.
The artist’s macabre short works have been adapted into eerily freaky 30-minute bites for television. We got a sneak preview of the next episode airing on HBO Max.
Low-quality AI-generated content currently dominates children’s media. Maka, a streaming platform run by child development experts, is offering an alternative.
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.
A business capitulating to a celebrity who reflexively sends a dogpile on them would set an alarming social precedent. Even more frightening is that so many demanded that capitulation blindly, without knowing a single additional detail. No matter whose side one might gravitate toward, the speed at which a celebrity’s will can mobilize the public should be deeply concerning.
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.
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.
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.”
BRUSSELS — Slovakia is reviving a dormant cooperation forum with Moscow, putting Russia’s gas and oil supplies, nuclear fuel and the treatment of Russian athletes high on the agenda of their first such meeting in five years, according to a Russian government note obtained by POLITICO.
The note, written by Russian Science and Higher Education Minister Valery Falkov, says Slovak Foreign Minister Juraj Blanár agreed during an Aug. 20 video call to hold a meeting of the Russian-Slovak Intergovernmental Commission in Moscow.
Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico said Wednesday the meeting is scheduled for Nov. 25. The Russian note — which is dated Sept. 10 — initially set the date of the meeting as Oct. 26-27.
The IGC, which covers economic, scientific and technical cooperation, has been dormant since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The last meeting was the commission’s 21st session, held in Bratislava on Nov. 12, 2021.
The meeting comes as Moscow finds openings in other international arenas. The U.S. has invited Vladimir Putin to December’s G20 summit in Miami, while the International Olympic Committee has provisionally lifted its suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee and urged sports bodies to ease restrictions on Russian athletes.
Asked about the purported agenda for the IGC, the Slovak foreign ministry directed POLITICO to Blanár’s public statements after the Aug. 20 call. “We pursue a policy in all directions and maintain dialogue with all countries that are interested in pragmatic cooperation with us for the benefit of the Slovak Republic’s national interests,” Blanár said at the time.
The Russian foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
The renewed push for warmer Slovak-Russian relations follows Fico’s May 9 visit to Moscow, where he met Russia’s President Vladimir Putin during Victory Day commemorations. It comes after Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary’s April election, which cost Putin one of his closest partners in Europe and forced him to look elsewhere for EU allies.
Months before losing the election to Péter Magyar, Orbán rebooted the Russian-Hungarian Intergovernmental Commission on Economic Cooperation, which had been suspended for several years after the 2022 invasion. Magyar’s government did not confirm to POLITICO whether the commission would go ahead next year.
EU leaders, including Fico, will gather in Brussels on Thursday for a two-day summit focused on issues including energy prices and support for Ukraine, with the country’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy expected to join them for a conversation on Friday.
Oil imports and cultural integration
In the August video call, Blanár raised Slovakia’s opposition to the EU’s phaseout of Russian gas imports and asked to discuss supplies at the Moscow meeting, according to the document, which POLITICO could not independently verify but bears the hallmarks of a legitimate Russian ministerial note. Slovak representatives also stressed the importance of continued Russian oil deliveries through the Druzhba pipeline and welcomed regular shipments of nuclear fuel for Slovak power plants, according to the note.
Slovakia remains heavily reliant on Russian oil and gas, and Fico has argued that ending imports would raise costs. When the two leaders met in Moscow on May 9, Putin said Russia would do everything to meet Slovakia’s energy needs.
The agenda for the meeting next month reaches beyond energy, according to the document. The sides plan to explore working groups on culture, tourism, agriculture and environmental protection, and to discuss the status of the Russian Center for Science and Culture in Bratislava.
Falkov also records Blanár’s opposition to what the note calls the “discrimination against Russian athletes” at international competitions, noting the issue is to be discussed at the IGC meeting.
The International Olympic Committee lifted the suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee in July and said its previous recommendations restricting Russian athletes’ participation no longer applied. World Archery lifted restrictions on Russian athletes and officials in August. FIFA President Gianni Infantino has also called for Russia to be allowed back into international football.
The approach echoes Moscow’s recent effort to lock in closer ties with Orbán’s Hungary. Budapest and Moscow in December agreed on a 12-point plan to expand cooperation in areas including energy, trade and culture. The plan was signed by then Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó and Russian Health Minister Mikhail Murashko after talks in Moscow in December. The Slovak note points to a similar breadth of ambition.
The Kremlin’s outreach to Fico shows how Moscow can use energy ties to pull individual EU countries away from a united stance on Ukraine. Putin made a similar pitch in Washington last weekend: After a call with the Russian leader, President Donald Trump said Russia would supply diesel to U.S. and global markets to bring down fuel prices. The deal would provide revenue to Moscow while weakening efforts to maintain a united front against the Kremlin.
But there are questions over whether Putin can follow through on his pledge to Trump. Ukraine has been stepping up drone strikes on Russian refineries, aiming to disrupt fuel supplies and cut revenue for Moscow’s war effort. Kyiv said this month that strikes had disabled 51 percent of Russia’s oil-refining capacity.
When it comes to box sets, Elvis Costello’s 49th-anniversary edition of his debut album “My Aim Is True” is a dream compilation for completists. The original 12-song LP clocked in at a swift 33 minutes, while the special edition features a whopping 104 tracks, along with Costello’s 72-page essay about the album’s origins. It’s a veritable feast for the ears, and “My Aim Is True” is a worthy subject for all of the attendant attention.
Released by Stiff Records in 1977, Costello’s debut took full advantage of the burgeoning punk movement. To commemorate the anniversary, such as it is, “My Aim Is True” features a fully remastered edition of the album. Stateside listeners will be delighted to learn that the edition concludes with “Watching the Detectives,” the searing track that was appended to the American release. The balance of the LP was recorded at North London’s Pathway studio with Clover, a California-based country rock band, and produced by Nick Lowe, Costello’s fellow Stiff Records colleague.
As presented here, “My Aim Is True” is every bit as explosive and exciting as the original release, an album that featured a clever blend of punk, rockabilly, pop and new wave sounds. With standout tracks like “Welcome to the Working Week,” “Less Than Zero,” and “Waiting for the End of the World,” it could hardly fail. Meanwhile, “Alison,” “(The Angels Wanna Wear) My Red Shoes,” and “Watching the Detectives” were early classics among the Costello canon.
What makes the 49th-anniversary box set particularly special is the inclusion of the extra discs. When “My Aim Is True” originally saw its release, Costello was at a crossroads. Working by day as a data entry clerk, he was contemplating different futures for his artistic self, as evinced by disc two, for example, which is entitled “The Blue Print” and is comprised of 17 acoustic demos for future tracks on such LPs as “Armed Forces,” “Get Happy!!” and “Trust.”
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A third disc, “The Stranger in the House,” finds Costello imagining another potential career for himself as a professional songwriter. Like “The Blue Print,” “The Stranger in the House” is made up of demos and outtakes he created for his fantasy life as a working songwriter — possibly even in faraway Nashville. Meanwhile, a fourth disc, the best of the lot for fans of his longtime backing band, is entitled “Becoming the Attractions” and finds Costello, keyboard player Steve Nieve, drummer Pete Thomas and bass player Bruce Thomas transforming “My Aim Is True” for mass consumption.
A fifth disc, “Covered in Clover,” takes the story of “My Aim Is True” full circle with Costello’s 2007 live performance of the LP with Clover. A benefit performance for victims of Prader-Willi Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder, Costello’s reunion with Clover demonstrates one of the singer-songwriter’s greatest strengths: the elasticity of his music and his uncanny ability to remake himself across the decades. Indeed, it is the variety and profundity of his music since 1977 that continues to make him one of his genre’s most intriguing artists.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Joe Rogan doesn’t need Netflix, but surely Netflix is happy to have him.
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.
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 Ukraine war’s spillover into the Black Sea is creating a growing European security and commercial risk: Drones are hitting ships and killing sailors, grain routes are under strain, and insurers and investors are weighing the cost of operating through Ukraine’s ports.
Five commercial vessels have been hit in Bulgarian and Romanian waters over the past week alone, leaving at least four people dead, several sailors missing and others injured. In response, Black Sea countries Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey have raised the issue at NATO, asking for more focus toward the region and joint support, according to two alliance diplomats.
“The attack within Bulgaria’s exclusive economic zone is absolutely unacceptable. It constitutes a serious breach of maritime and international law and will further jeopardise safe navigation in the Black Sea,” Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev said on X after the attacks last week.
Russia has been attacking Ukrainian ports and cities in the area since the start of its full-scale invasion. But the recent strikes have brought the spillover into NATO territory. If they continue, EU leaders will face pressure to protect Black Sea shipping and keep Ukrainian trade moving.
Those questions will be top of mind at Thursday’s European Council summit. According to draft conclusions obtained by POLITICO, leaders are expected to discuss the “immediate restoration of safe passage for grain cargo ships.”
A wider problem
Russia is not the only country using naval drones in the Black Sea. Ukraine has also used them against Russian-linked shipping. In June, a Ukrainian sea drone exploded in Romania’s Constanța port after Kyiv said it had veered off course because of Russian electronic interference.
“The Black Sea situation is quite dangerous because attacks are coming from both [sides],” said an EU shipping representative, who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “You have to worry about both.”
Attribution can also be difficult. Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev said Wednesday that investigators still have not proven that Russia is behind the strikes — although some have attributed his reticence to his broadly softer approach toward the Kremlin.
Drone operations by both Russia and Ukraine are likely to continue as long as each has the money and production capacity to sustain them, said Cristian Vlas, assistant research manager for Eastern Europe at the think tank ACLED.
Oleksii Goncharenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker and founder of the Black Sea Security Forum, told POLITICO that a “serious diplomatic initiative” was needed, bringing together Ukraine, Russia and a third-party guarantor, such as Turkey, “to restore freedom of navigation in the Black Sea.”
Grain routes under pressure
The security risk is disrupting routes that carry Ukraine’s harvest to market, with consequences for EU transport links. Black Sea ports are Ukraine’s main export gateway, handling around 95 percent of the country’s grain exports, as well as significant volumes of iron ore. Shipping traffic has fallen as the security risk has grown.
Some cargo is being rerouted to the River Danube, but capacity there has been stretched in recent months as drought pushes water levels to record lows. Operators are trying to add rail capacity, but that risks moving the bottleneck westward to Romania.
Moving more Ukrainian grain overland also risks reviving tensions with farmers in neighboring EU countries, Vlas said. Romanian farmers have worried that Ukrainian produce meant only to transit could stay on the domestic market, he added, while transport operators are already juggling competing demands for capacity.
Ukraine’s Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotskyi has warned that millions of tons of unsold grain is piling up, and that farmers who can’t sell won’t be able to afford to resow all their land.
Bulgaria is working with Romania and Turkey on a joint initiative to protect freedom of navigation in the Black Sea, which Radev plans to bring to EU leaders on Thursday.
Following the Black Sea countries’ request at NATO, military officials are likely to look into possible options such as shifting counter-drone systems to the region, the two alliance diplomats said. Radev said Sofia will convene his counterparts in Ankara and Bucharest to examine further proposals, while a senior Bulgarian official called for new joint anti-drone systems with Romania, partly financed by the EU.
Investment at risk
The attacks also threaten what had started to look like a renewed bet on Ukraine’s ports. MSC, the world’s largest container line, was among the biggest and newest investors, reportedly acquiring a majority stake in a container terminal at a port near Odesa in May.
Ukraine has also been offering investors a long-term concession at the Chornomorsk terminal near Odesa. This terminal is one of Ukraine’s largest planned port public-private partnerships and part of what is expected to be a multibillion-euro reconstruction effort involving European companies.
But people who work in Ukraine’s ports say the case for rebuilding is collapsing.
“No one is ready to invest and rebuild, since you know that tomorrow there will be another missile, another pack of drones,” Oleg Grygoriuk, chairman of Ukraine’s Marine Transport Workers’ Trade Union, said.
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