December 26, 2025: Christmas Greetings From the President

Axios reported on December 23 that the White House has taken over the X account of the Justice Department, and on the same day, that account tried to undercut the new information by claiming that accusations in it are “unfounded and false.” But Trump’s behavior on December 25, Christmas, suggested otherwise.

Trump’s social media account posted: “Merry Christmas to all, including the many Sleazebags who loved Jeffrey Epstein, gave him bundles of money, went to his Island, attended his parties, and thought he was the greatest guy on earth, only to ‘drop him like a dog’ when things got too HOT, falsely claimed they had nothing to do with him, didn’t know him, said he was a disgusting person, and then blame, of course, President Donald J. Trump, who was actually the only one who did drop Epstein, and long before it became fashionable to do so. When their names get brought out in the ongoing Radical Left Witch Hunt (plus one lowlife ‘Republican,’ Massie!), and it is revealed that they are Democrats all, there will be a lot of explaining to do, much like there was when it was made public that the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax was a fictitious story—a total Scam—and had nothing to do with ‘TRUMP.’”

After misrepresenting the New York Times, he went on: “Now the same losers are at it again, only this time so many of their friends, mostly innocent, will be badly hurt and reputationally tarnished. But, sadly, that’s the way it is in the World of Corrupt Democrat Politics!!! Enjoy what may be your last Merry Christmas! President Donald J. Trump.” (...)

This evening, Trump posted: “Now 1,000,000 more pages on Epstein are found. DOJ is being forced to spend all of its time on this Democrat inspired Hoax. When do they say NO MORE, and work on Election Fraud etc. The Dem[ocrat]s are the ones who worked with Epstein, not the Republicans. Release all of their names, embarrass them, and get back to helping our Country! The Radical Left doesn’t want people talking about TRUMP & REPUBLICAN SUCCESS, only a long ago dead Jeffrey Epstein—Just another Witch Hunt!!!”

“I love the smell of panic in the evening,” former representative and Trump critic Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) posted over Trump’s screed. “Smells like… victory.”

Even before Trump’s evening post, in Meditations in an Emergency, Rebecca Solnit noted that it seems “clear that there is likely something in the files that further incriminates” Trump, an observation with which scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder agreed. He added: “Horrible as the facts at hand are, there must be something else, something verging on the unimaginable.”

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American |  Read more:
Image: none, too disgusted

[ed. It's called Illeism (to talk about yourself in the third person):]

In the realm of clinical psychology, illeism takes on a whole new dimension. It’s been observed in certain personality disorders and mental health conditions, sometimes as a coping mechanism or a symptom of dissociation.

***

[ed. Also this: Americans are waking up. A grand reckoning awaits us (Guardian):]

The US had to come to this point. We couldn’t go on as we were, even under Democratic presidents. For 40 years, a narrow economic elite has been siphoning off ever more wealth and power.

I’m old enough to remember when the US had the largest and fastest-growing middle class in the world. We adhered to the basic bargain that if someone worked hard and played by the rules, they’d do better than their parents, and their children would do even better.

I remember when CEOs took home 20 times the pay of their workers, not 300 times. When members of Congress acted in the interests of their constituents rather than being bribed by campaign donations to do the bidding of big corporations and the super-wealthy.

I remember when our biggest domestic challenges were civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights – not the very survival of democracy and the rule of law.

But over the last 40 years, starting with Ronald Reagan, the US went off the rails: deregulation, privatization, free trade, wild gambling by Wall Street, union-busting, monopolization, record levels of inequality, stagnant wages for most, staggering wealth for a few, big money taking over our politics.

Corporate profits became more important than good jobs and good wages for all, stock buy-backs and the wellbeing of investors more important than the common good.

Democratic presidents were better than Republicans, to be sure, but the underlying rot worsened. It was undermining the foundations of the US.

Trump has precipitated a long-overdue reckoning.

That reckoning has revealed the rot.

It has also revealed the suck-up cowardice of so many CEOs, billionaires, Wall Street bankers, media moguls, tech titans, Republican politicians and other so-called “leaders” who have stayed silent or actively sought to curry Trump’s favor.

America’s so-called “leadership class” is a sham. Most of them do not care a whit for the rest of the US. They are out for themselves.

The “fucking nightmare” is not over by any stretch. It’s likely to get worse in 2026 as Trump and his sycophants, and many of America’s “leaders”, realize 2026 may be their last unrestrained year to inflict damage and siphon off the spoils.

Hollywood Has Left L.A.

The past decade has been tough on Hollywood — both the industry and the place. L.A. has endured a parade of black-swan catastrophes that have repeatedly upended its signature business, including fires, strikes, COVID, the decline of movie theaters and linear TV, and streaming’s boom and bust. Taken together, these disasters have triggered something like an identity crisis. If you call up a couple dozen executives, agents, directors, producers, writers, actors, and below-the-line artists and ask about the scene on the ground right now, they’ll describe a city detached from its old rhythms and sense of purpose. Today’s L.A., a few say, feels more like a Rust Belt crater than the glamorous capital of the world’s entertainment. “It’s so grim, like a sad company town where the mill is closing,” says one executive. “It’s morose, and everybody’s scared,” says the actor and director Mark Duplass. “It’s a bummer to live here now,” says a writer.

Pieces of the business still hum along in the city, albeit more quietly than they used to. Executives and agents are back in the office, at least the ones who weren’t laid off. Pitching and deal-making continue, though much of that now happens over Zoom. But production — the physical process of turning script pages into movies and TV shows — has largely left town. What began years ago as a trickle has suddenly become an exodus. Today, only about a fifth of American movies and shows are filmed in L.A. (...)

As the labor of making movies and shows splinters across far-flung cities and countries, Hollywood has become dislodged from its physical home. Some of these new hubs may suit the needs of individual projects, but none of them offers what L.A. did for most of the past century: a stable gravitational center where crews can make a living and the craft can be passed down. This isn’t just a logistical reorganization; it’s an existential shift, and there may be no going back. “The nucleus that Hollywood grew out of is dying,” says Jonathan Nolan, the writer-director whose work includes Person of Interest, Westworld, and Fallout. “I don’t think Hollywood the industry has much to do with Hollywood the place anymore,” says Lowe.

One reason L.A. even became a city at all is because it was a great place to make movies. (It helped that it was far enough from New Jersey to escape the enforcement of Thomas Edison’s patents on motion-picture cameras and projectors.) The weather allowed for year-round outdoor shooting, attracting the industry’s best filmmakers, actors, and crews. This created a self-reinforcing bubble in which the top talent was all concentrated in the same place; this, in turn, supported an informal apprenticeship system under which younger crew members learned on the job, providing a steady influx of skilled labor. For a long time, there was usually no good reason to shoot anywhere else.

Then, in the 1990s, British Columbia hatched a plan to bring some of that action north. The Canadian provincial government introduced one of the world’s first film tax credits — a financial incentive meant to lure foreign productions — offering a modest rebate on money spent employing local crews. It worked, and many U.S. states took notice. In the early aughts, Louisiana and New Mexico rolled out flashy credits of their own, transforming New Orleans and Albuquerque into viable production hubs.

A short while later, streaming boomed, and the demand for scripted entertainment exploded. With more production in play, regions around the world began ramping up their incentives, and many built soundstages and crew bases that could compete with those in L.A. What followed was a global bakeoff for Hollywood’s business. Canada, the U.K., and Australia enhanced their already aggressive tax credits, often made even more appealing by favorable exchange rates. Many U.S. states, including Georgia and New York, followed. Before long, most of the country, and dozens of countries beyond, were offering some version of a production subsidy.

These incentives can be shockingly generous. Today, producers can shoot in certain locations and receive back 30 to 40 percent of a project’s budget with local taxpayers footing the bill. Unlike traditional tax breaks, which merely reduce what a company owes, these credits often amount to direct cash payments, issued regardless of whether the production generates significant tax revenue in return. New York State, for example, offers a 30 percent base tax credit with a 10 percent bonus for projects made upstate. Last year, New York tax dollars helped subsidize TV shows including HBO’s The Gilded Age (which received $52 million from state coffers), Prime Video’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel ($46 million), and Apple TV+’s Severance ($39 million). An Albany-funded audit of New York’s film tax credit, published last year, determined that the incentive is probably a net loss for the state, returning as little as 15 cents in direct tax revenue for every dollar spent. Regardless, in May, New York added an additional $100 million for independent films, bringing the state’s total film subsidies to $800 million.

Meanwhile, California mostly sat on its hands, assuming its long-standing monopoly on talent and infrastructure would be enough to keep Hollywood anchored. Subsidizing an industry already based there was a tougher political sell, but the state introduced its own incentive program in 2009 and has sweetened it since. Unfortunately, while the credit may sound generous, in practice it’s miserly to the point of uselessness.

by Lane Brown, Vulture |  Read more:

Image: Alvaro Dominguez

How NIL is Failing College Sports

Editor’s Note (September 2025): This article was first published in May 2025. Since then, NIL controversies have only grown—lawsuits over transfers, new collective rules, and court rulings are fueling even more debate. The problems outlined below remain at the heart of the chaos.

When the NCAA implemented its interim policy on Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) in July 2021, it was heralded as a long-overdue victory for student-athletes. Finally, college athletes could monetize their personal brands while maintaining eligibility. But three years in, the reality of NIL has exposed deep, structural problems that threaten the very foundation of college sports.

Far from the fair, equitable system its proponents envisioned, NIL has morphed into a thinly veiled pay-for-play scheme dominated by wealthy donors, corporate interests, and an increasingly professionalized amateur sports landscape that’s leaving many athletes and institutions behind.

NIL Is Bad in Its Current Form, But the Concept Isn’t

Let’s be clear: this is not to say NIL is all bad. The core principle—that athletes deserve compensation for the use of their name, image, and likeness—remains valid and important. Student-athletes absolutely deserve to get paid. But this implementation ain’t it.

The problem is the execution. NIL went from zero to 200 MPH overnight with no guardrails. It’s like giving someone a supercar capable of high speeds and letting them drive it through downtown at rush hour. Just because a car can go that fast doesn’t mean it should outside of a sanctioned and governed NASCAR race. Similarly, NIL needed careful implementation with proper rules and oversight—not the free-for-all we’re currently witnessing.

NIL Is Bad for Creating the Collective Problem: Pay-for-Play in Disguise

The most troubling development in the NIL era has been the rise of “collectives” – donor-organized groups that pool money to facilitate NIL deals for athletes at specific schools. These collectives have quickly evolved from their original purpose into recruitment vehicles that effectively function as booster-funded payrolls.

College football’s biggest donors have orchestrated business ventures distributing five-, six- and seven-figure payments to athletes under the guise of endorsement opportunities and appearance fees. While technically legal within vague NCAA guidelines, these arrangements clearly violate the spirit of what NIL was supposed to be.

Consider the case of quarterback Nico Iamaleava, whose story perfectly illustrates the chaos. After signing with Tennessee on a lucrative NIL deal, he later tried to renegotiate his contract during the 2025 offseason. When Tennessee refused both because his performance didn’t warrant the increase and the amount was too high, Iamaleava explored other options. After other schools balked at his demands, he eventually landed at UCLA for significantly less money than he was seeking. Meanwhile, Texas will spend an astounding $40 million on its football roster in 2025-26. But that’s not the issue—why wouldn’t they if they can? The problem is that if another team wants to compete, there’s only one way forward: pay up.

This isn’t about athletes receiving fair compensation for actual marketing value – it’s about wealthy boosters creating slush funds to buy talent. And as long as deals include some nominal “deliverable” from the athlete and are signed after their national letter of intent, there’s little the NCAA can do to stop it. (SportsEpreneur Update as of September 2025: read more about the NIL Clearinghouse and the first NIL deal report.)

NIL Is Bad for Boosting Egos Instead of Programs

A particularly troubling aspect that’s emerged is how NIL has become an ego-driven playground for wealthy boosters. For many donors, it’s no longer about supporting their alma mater—it’s about directly influencing outcomes and claiming credit for wins.

These boosters are essentially treating college teams like fantasy sports with real money. They get a dopamine hit from watching “their” players succeed, knowing their financial contribution made it possible. It’s an addiction—the thrill of buying talent and then basking in reflected glory when that talent performs well.

This creates a dangerous dynamic where the interests of boosters, rather than educational or developmental goals, drive decisions. Coaches find themselves answering not just to athletic directors, but to the whims of deep-pocketed collectives who can control the talent pipeline.

[ed. ...and much more:]

NIL Is Bad for Widening the Gap: Competitive Balance Destroyed

NIL Is Bad for Creating Transfer Portal Chaos: The Free Agency Problem

NIL Is Bad for Athletes Making Short-Term Decisions

NIL Is Bad for the Athlete-Fan Relationship

NIL Is Bad for Corruption and Exploitation: The Dark Side

NIL Is Bad for College Sports’ Identity Crisis

NIL Is Bad for International Student-Athletes

NIL Is Bad, But Reform Is Possible

by SportsEMedia |  Read more:

Image: Tyler Kaufman/Getty
[ed. Money is killing sports (and most everything else), and nobody pays even lip service to educational opportunities anymore. See also: Limbo Field (HCB); and,  The college football spending cap is brand new, and here’s how schools already are ignoring it (The Athletic).]

Liminal Spaces

or... The Dead Mall Society.

“How’s everybody feeling today?” Aryeh asks the crowd of thirty-odd people gathered at a bus stop on the fringes of downtown Toronto. In response, there’s sparse, nervous laughter. “No, really,” says Aryeh. “What does it feel like to be alive today?”

Horrible, whispers a woman behind me.

Undeterred, Aryeh presses on. “We’re going to feel for real today,” he tells us, before leading the group through a ramshackle guided meditation, encouraging us to pay attention to the sights and smells and sounds that surround us. I take in the pillowy, slate-coloured sky, the wads of gum mixed with concrete at my feet, the faint smell of cooking oil. At that moment, a child screams and a flock of pigeons crashes into the crowd; a few of us duck for cover. “Yes,” says Aryeh, laughing. “Even that.”

Aryeh, wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and a colourful cap with a propeller atop, is here to take us to the mall—or, more accurately, to several malls, most of which are almost completely abandoned. In his spare time, he runs an organization called Liminal Assembly, which shuttles people through a series of decaying suburban shopping malls around the Greater Toronto Area, places that seem stuck in purgatory between eras, at once eerie and beseeching. (...)

Aryeh’s tours have gained a cult following, often attracting people obsessed with “liminal spaces,” a term given to places that represent in-between stages, connecting two different eras or experiences. By this definition, a parking lot or an empty hallway can be considered a liminal space, as can an abandoned structure, paused mid-demolition. Many people report feeling unsettled or haunted in liminal spaces, and some anthropologists believe this is because our bodies innately know we’re not supposed to dwell in them. They are, after all, not a destination, but a portal, a gateway to another world. But despite this disconnect, many people report feeling a strange, forbidden pull towards liminal spaces. There are digital and in-person communities around the world dedicated to sharing these experiences. r/LiminalSpace on Reddit, for example, has one million followers who post daily photos of bridges and doorways and food courts, of highways that stretch into oblivion. “Dude, that’s so liminal,” others will respond.

For the liminal space curious, semi-abandoned suburban shopping malls are a perfect example of this phenomenon: something purpose-built that’s long-since lost that purpose, yet sits in limbo awaiting its next iteration—a nod to the past, an amorphous fumble toward the future.

But I didn’t know any of this as I slipped into the crowd at Cumberland Terrace on that winter day. I was surprised at the diversity of the people who joined the send off: hipsters, tourists, students, even a few senior couples who strolled the fluorescent, mirrored hallways hand-in-hand, perhaps imagining the mall’s glory days, a 1980s meet-cute at the Italian deli stall when the food court was still open. Days later, I called Aryeh to ask what he thought was the appeal of these deserted, liminal spaces, expecting him to say something about nostalgia and ’90s kids who simply can’t get with the times. But the depth and complexity of Aryeh’s answer surprised me. Nostalgia is part of it, he admitted. People want a reminder of simpler times, when they weren’t bombarded with “the technological future and all this short-form content.” But Aryeh told me that standing in the wreckage of these spaces unlocks a sensation people often crave, but can’t name. He called it a “rare emotion,” the same haunted feeling one experiences after a particularly powerful piece of literature or music.

“When you go to these places that have what I like to say is importance built into them, in the detail of the tiles and the polished brass railings and all these elements, they suggest this place is a very important place,” he said. “But when you see it empty, there’s something very uncanny and eerie about that…You feel things and go, ‘huh, that is really unique.’ And I think that is the escape that people feel when they come to these liminal spaces.” He told me this is a feeling that seems to transcend cultures and geographies, that many people report feeling relieved and delighted when they find there are others who experience this pang of emotion in these spaces. “It’s something core in the human experience.”

***

But if humans themselves are in a constant search for optimization and self-improvement, so are cities as a whole. And malls, with their single-storey forms, plopped amongst a sea of unused parking spots (what some real estate developers call “lazy land”) are easy targets for the chopping block. Between 2017 and 2022, an average of 1,170 malls closed each year in the United States, nearly twice as many as during the period between 1986 and 2017. In my work as a journalist, which sometimes involves covering the urban planning beat, countless economists and land use planners have told me that the rise of e-commerce, a global recession, and population growth requiring new housing has created a perfect storm for the demise of these spaces. I tried to find data about mall closures or redevelopments in Canada, as we’re clearly not exempt from these same forces, but came up empty.

Regardless, malls are now considered so outdated that many North American municipalities—including Toronto, Metro Vancouver and Phoenix, Arizona—have unrolled mall redevelopment strategies. These often guide or incentivize the “intensification” of shopping and strip mall sites, imagining, in their wake, clusters of sleek luxury towers with airy retail units on their ground floors, side streets with artful shrubbery, places for pedestrians to sit and walk and admire the benefits of capitalism.

But as a mass trend, this hasn’t always worked out. Some redevelopment projects—like the mall we just visited with the Liminal Assembly—get stuck amid municipal red tape, while others fall victim to rising costs and construction labour shortages, leaving them in limbo, the gaping maws of excavators still poised in their parking lots. Other malls seem to be resisting this movement altogether, standing sentinel with their faux-brick tiling and plastic ferns, even as vendors abandon ship and their kiosks clank shut for the last time, having sold their final mutton roll or polyester-blend nightgown. Though our cities have always been susceptible to the whims of social, behavioral and economic forces, the truth is, even the most meticulous of plans sometimes go awry, leaving gaps between what we want and what we are given.

***

We make our way through the suburbs, spilling into low-rise malls that threaten to blur together as one: the same brown tiles and shuttered kiosks, the plastic trees and fountains parched of water. The murky glass atriums that soar over the retail corridors, now hushed and sleepy. The way all that’s left in these malls are stores that seem to sell a singular, specific item: Clocks Unlimited, Bikini Warehouse. On the bus between destinations, we talk about millennial childhoods, about the passage of time, about how disconcerting it feels to explain pivotal news events that shaped our youths, like 9/11, to a younger generation who has only the vaguest notion of them.

Christa pipes in: “Tell me about it. When students ask me about Y2K it becomes a history lesson.” We laugh, uneasily. The sands of time, and all that.

We pull into our final mall destination of the day, which Aryeh preemptively describes as “a beautiful and tragic space.” Inside, the main floor has been commandeered by a mishmash of cash-only Asian food stalls, which gives it the feel of a makeshift street market. On the mall’s perimeters, vendors sell DVDs, Filipino souvenirs, discount travel agency packages, while the building’s upper levels consist of carpeted banquet halls and space leased by a Chinese Baptist church. One or two of the walls have been painted a shade of bubblegum pink not found in nature. We run up and down the stairs, delighted by the open space, whispering to each other that there’s a payphone bank with real phonebooks from the ’90s. Of all the malls, this one feels like the most functional, as though unplugged from the “global mall system,” as Aryeh calls it. It’s gone back to the earth, becoming what its community really needs: cheap noodles and worship services and bootleg DVDs. Somewhere, a land developer is having a wet dream about turning this place into a utopian master-planned community, but for now it persists, a quiet dignity to its stubbornness.

I once read a comment on r/LiminalSpace likening the feeling of being in a liminal space to the sensation you get as you’re about to rappel off a cliff. Weight balanced between your foot and a rope, your body hovering over the drop, it’s a viscerally unsettling moment as you navigate two different experiences of gravity. But with that comes possibility, said the commenter, so many different futures awaiting as you leap into the chasm.

by Lana Hall, Hazlitt |  Read more:

Image: via

The Last Good Thing

On a late-winter Chicago day that was more gray than cold, I retrieved a binder from a neighbor’s front porch. The binder was fat and unexpectedly heavy, and I had the deranged thought that it might be filled with sand, but it wasn’t filled with sand. It was filled with 92 DVDs. DVDs can seem heavy if you haven’t held them in a while.

I had not been on the lookout for DVDs, and until I became aware of this binder, I had no special attachment to DVDs of any sort. There was no box of Criterion Collection masterpieces lugged from apartment to apartment since my college days. I certainly did not long for the color-coded cables that always had to be untangled and reconnected to the DVD player my husband weirdly couldn’t bring himself to throw away, nor did I miss hunting for the special remote that only ever made an appearance when I was looking for the regular one. Society had moved past DVDs, and frankly, so had I.

Still, the second I saw the binder—containing “practically every major kid’s cartoon movie from the last 20 years on DVD”—appear on my local Free Box Facebook group (where my neighbors give away everything from original artwork to half-empty bottles of shampoo), I wanted it deeply, covetously, like when you see someone wearing a wool sweater that is so entirely your style, you can’t believe it isn’t already yours. Ninety-two disks! Without a moment’s hesitation, I typed, “Interested!” and pressed return. And the next day, I stood awkwardly on my neighbor’s porch to collect my prize.

At this point, I still assumed my excitement about the DVDs had primarily to do with thriftiness, or perhaps a kind of rugged self-reliance. I still assumed their appeal came not from what they could offer me but from what they could free me of, namely going along with the ever-more-expensive whims of Disney+ executives.

In other words, I considered a binder containing 92 DVDs to be the children’s media equivalent of F*** You Money—Take that streaming bill and shove it!—and not, say, something to build my identity as a parent around.

Obviously.

That evening, while my husband sautéed asparagus on the stovetop and my children squabbled over whether to watch Peppa Pig on Amazon Prime or All Engines Go on Netflix, I announced to my family that we were quitting our streaming services and going analog.

“Well, more analog,” I said, suddenly unsure. “Digital analog. Is that a thing?” I sensed that it might not be, but also that this wasn’t particularly important. What was important was that our viewing habits were moving back in time to an era when watching television didn’t require keeping a credit card on file with five different companies.

Then I inhaled sharply, cringing the way one does while uncorking a particularly volatile bottle of champagne. Ditching streaming would be no great struggle for me, someone who watches about as much television as your typical giant Pacific octopus. But the rest of them?

To my surprise, the anticipated shrieks of displeasure never came. My children, whose ears shut down at six p.m. though their bodies keep kicking until eight, wouldn’t even register the change until the end of the month, when our Netflix account finally ran out of gas. At that point they would look at me as though I’d shredded a sacred contract formed between them and the universe. I would, in turn, cheerfully remind them about the DVDs.

“That’s right,” I would say. “They are very shiny. No, stop—you can’t touch them! They scratch.”

Even my husband merely nodded and flipped the asparagus. I could only assume that he was deep in thought, considering the transformative possibilities of spending less time watching television. The two of us have always shared some private dismay about not being altogether more impressive people—Times obit–worthy, ideally, but at the very least, people who exercise more often. Besides, it went without saying that I would not be canceling YouTube Premium, which is where my husband watches sports highlights. In my quest to become a thriftier parent, I had no desire to become a single parent.

An honest account of the binder’s out-of-nowhere appeal should also include observing how neatly DVDs’ technological primacy aligns with my own “reminiscence bump.” This is what psychologists call the increased salience for the autobiographical memories we form between the ages of approximately 10 and 30. For the rest of our lives, although what came before and after will predictably recede, the events of those 20 years will maintain their privileged place in our minds. Researchers aren’t entirely sure why this is. Some suspect novelty: New things are inherently more memorable, and this is a time of new things. Others chalk it up to the sheer number of culturally significant milestones that happen during our teens and 20s, from first kisses and summer jobs and driver’s licenses to weddings and college graduations and—well, more common until recently—first homes. Another theory focuses on storytelling: As we come of age, the places we go and the music we listen to and the people we bond with become the settings and soundtracks and characters for the stories we tell ourselves about the people we are becoming, stories that we’ll carry all our lives.

If these theories sound similar, it’s because they’re all trying to explain the same phenomenon: why our formative years are so very formative. They are all trying to explain why some part of a reasonably well-adjusted, middle-aged woman with a husband and two kids will always be a teenager with spiky hair, trying desperately to convince herself that she likes watching low-budget horror movies.

Low-budget horror movies on DVD, that is. In 1997, when the disks first hit American shelves, I was just 13; by the time revenue from streaming eventually eclipsed that from DVDs (and their higher-definition Blu-Ray cousins), I had already left my 20s behind. Which means that for me, the pinnacle of home entertainment is and will always be synonymous with a fat binder of DVDs.

For a few weeks, quitting our streaming services and embracing DVDs indeed seemed like a sacrifice. Quickly, though, the experiment morphed into something quite different. I found myself proselytizing about the Way of the DVD. They’re so cheap, I’d say to another parent at pre-K pickup. People are literally giving them away. Go to a garage sale of any size and there you go: more DVDs for the collection.

It’s nice to really own a thing, I’d say to a colleague with children of her own. It’s nice not to worry something will go poof in the night.

It’s great for the kids to have choices but not too many choices, I’d say to anyone still listening. It’s great when what they want to watch is in the binder, and it’s great when it isn’t and they have to decide whether they want to purchase How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World with their tooth-fairy money (both of my kids were in highly productive tooth-losing phases) or wait for a free disk to arrive at the library. Because when everything can be yours just like that, is anything even real?

It’s good for movies to be real, I’d say. Treat them badly—roll them down the stairs or throw them like frisbees or wear them because it’s fun to pretend to have large, glassy robot eyes—and they will scratch. Natural consequences! It’s good for there to be natural consequences. (...)

Unlike VHS tapes, DVDs encode data digitally, allowing for higher video resolution and superior audio quality. DVDs also store more data, and they store the information more efficiently. This is what frees up space for the bells and whistles: dubbed audio tracks and subtitles, director’s cuts and deleted scenes. DVDs are read by laser; so long as they aren’t used as coasters or hockey pucks, they shouldn’t wear or tear at all. On a commercial DVD, even the most determined fool cannot accidentally tape over a favorite movie. And remember the days before opening menus, when you stood by the television and pressed “REW” on the VCR until the members of your family screamed that you’d gone too far, in which case you’d press “FF” until they screamed again? DVDs have menus, and when they arrived, America let out a collective, “Hell yeah.”

But VHS, the technology that DVDs supplanted, was the truly transformative one. VHS was what let us all own movies in the first place, to watch whenever we wanted to. Or was it color television that transformed home entertainment? The rise of network programming? That very first public broadcast? It hardly matters. By the time DVDs came along, the latest crest among so many waves of progress, it seemed inevitable that they would be good, and that the technology that eventually replaced them would be even better.

A lot of things seemed inevitable then.

I grew up, after all, when the growing up was good. The Berlin Wall was coming down, and the world was opening up. The economy was strong and college attendance was on the rise and Americans were more optimistic that children would live better lives than their parents. There were problems, sure, but they were problems that would resolve themselves in time, as a new, more enlightened generation took the helm. I grew up when time itself seemed on my side.

I watched social media connect us, and then I watched it detonate us into a billion tiny factions. I watched smartphones liberate us, and then I watched them capture us all over again. Now I see artificial intelligence on the horizon, and even as I am awestruck by its potential, I shudder.

“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck,” said the philosopher Paul Virilio. Here’s the thing: I grew up when it still felt possible that we could invent the ship and then put our heads together to avoid the shipwreck. In the world bequeathed to my children, it can seem like there is no avoiding the wreck. And in this world, in this widening gyre of uncertain outcomes and frictionless gratification, DVDs are shiny and real and the same shape as life preservers. DVDs are the last unambiguously good thing: the last technology that arrived and only made things better and would never ever let us down.

by Jess Love, The American Scholar |  Read more:

Image: Gracia Lamb

Can Cruising Survive Influencers?

It was a balmy July day and Joseph had dick on the brain. The 25-year-old Brooklyn barista had agreed to walk a friend’s dog in Washington Square Park, so he figured that while he was in Manhattan he’d check in on one of his favorite cruising spots: a men’s restroom at Penn Station. Those in the know know this bathroom; Joseph (his middle name) estimates he’d cruised for sex there about eight times before. He likes that among the fresh faces he will often see the same old queens catching up in their de facto third space. Sure, he could open Grindr or Scruff to find a hookup, but then he’ll get picky and end up scrolling endlessly. Cruising feels more authentic, more real. It’s a ritual. A hunt.

In the early hours of the afternoon, he’d expected the restroom to be livelier. (Rush hour can bring too many commuters seeking to use the bathroom for its intended purpose.) But there was one guy standing at a urinal: a handsome Latino man with dark hair and eyes, and big, beefy arms protruding from his orange high-visability safety vest. This man nodded to Joseph as he entered, which he took as a sign to install himself at the adjacent urinal. The construction worker appeared to be rubbing himself and smiling, Joseph recalled. “He was looking at me. He was trying to peek over. He was doing it. He seemed seasoned at this,” Joseph said. “He was giving an Oscar-winning performance.”

That performance ended when Joseph, thinking he’d met a fellow traveler, flashed the guy his penis. “We got one,” the undercover Amtrak police officer immediately said into a radio microphone hidden in his collar. Stunned and embarrassed, Joseph barely had time to put his penis away before he was handcuffed and marched through the station—his fly still unbuttoned—to a holding room, where he spent the next few hours. One other man was already there, looking humiliated and sad. Two more were eventually brought in as part of the same sting operation: one who was adamant he’d just been in the bathroom to pee and another man in his 20s who spoke only Spanish. Joseph then watched as this man, freaking out, was eventually handed over to immigration agents.

Joseph is among almost 200 people who have been arrested since June 1 as part of a crackdown on cruising in the Penn Station restroom, an Amtrak spokesperson told me. At least 20 of these men were immigrants transferred to ICE custody. While other mass public indecency arrests were made in Indiana, Arizona, and Illinois during the same period, the Penn Station operation was unique in its scale and length. Rep. Jerry Nadler and other outraged lawmakers dubbed it a “hostile arrest campaign reminiscent of anti-LGBTQ policing from the Stonewall era.”

There is a major difference, though, between that era and now: the once-secret world of cruising has never been more out in the open. As Amtrak police were arresting men, nearby cinemas were screening Plainclothes, a movie in which Tom Blyth portrays an undercover New York cop who patrols bathrooms and falls for one of his targets, played by Russell Tovey. When thousands gathered in a Clinton Hill warehouse during Pride Month for the “Twinks vs. Dolls” event, they did so amid ample signage and merchandise from co-sponsor, Sniffies, the map-based cruising app. Mainstream media stories about cruising and orgies have outraged some gay men who say that their safe spaces have been exposed.

But cruising’s real “outing” has occurred on social media, where a growing cottage industry of men are vying to become the Rick Steves of cruising. Guys on TikTok or Instagram will now teach you how to cruise at your gym or how to avoid getting caught in the steamroom. You can learn the best ways to pick up guys in a Barnes & Noble (Step One: “Pick a book you’re not actually reading”) or at your Lowes hardware store. (Step One: “Dress like you know your way around wood.”) You can see videos of men following each other among trees in public parks or tapping their feet in bathroom stalls in the manner of Larry Craig. One creator named Connor (who did not respond to requests for comment) has amassed over 375,000 followers over various accounts with a seemingly endless stream of videos in which he boasts graphically about cruising in airport bathrooms, waterparks, or at his local Macy’s. On X, where content guidelines are much freer, adult performers with hundreds of thousands of followers share explicit videos of themselves having sex with blurry-faced strangers in what appear to be department store changing rooms.

“I’m a teacher by nature and so I thought, Hey, cruising has been around forever. It’s part of our history. Why not teach on it?” said Chandler (his last name), a 34-year-old adult creator who posts instructional guides or suggestive stories themed to what he calls “CruiseTok.” He puts his openness on social media down to a desire for authenticity. “I think in today’s world, it’s more acceptable to be who you are. If that means showing your expression or passion, then yeah!”

But amid a resurgent right-wing that has sought to wind back LGBTQ rights, all this openness has left some, including Joseph, uncomfortable or even worried about what they see as unwanted attention. “I think calling attention to it and trying to get your social media clout from it is annoying,” he said. “The whole point—the whole, historical purpose of cruising was to be super low-key and discreet.” While information about cruising has always been available for people who wanted to seek it out, it’s now being entrusted to algorithms that can push it on people who aren’t, including, potentially, the authorities. All this has left some men wondering whether certain things should still be gate-kept.

“A lot of these much younger people that are 22 and excited about this activity, their natural inclination is just supposed to post it online. There’s no way to control that fire,” said Leo Herrera, an artist and author who self-published a guide to cruising last year. He likened cruising to manning a grill: You need some exposure to act as oxygen to get the fire going, but you want to be able to control it. In the past, cruising might have been fueled by scribbles on bathroom doors or gay hotlines or newspapers, but now it’s an algorithm. “It supercharges it to a level where it just kind of blows up in our face,” Herrera said. “How do we celebrate our sexuality while protecting it?”

by David Mack, The Cut |  Read more:

Image: blissbodywork_, dbchandler_, showoffjonah

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI Slop

Lately, everywhere I scroll, I keep seeing the same fish-eyed CCTV view: a grainy wide shot from the corner of a living room, a driveway at night, an empty grocery store. Then something impossible happens. JD Vance shows up at the doorstep in a crazy outfit. A car folds into itself like paper and drives away. A cat comes in and starts hanging out with capybaras and bears, as if in some weird modern fairy tale.

This fake-surveillance look has become one of the signature flavors of what people now call AI slop. For those of us who spend time online watching short videos, slop feels inescapable: a flood of repetitive, often nonsensical AI-generated clips that washes across TikTok, Instagram, and beyond. For that, you can thank new tools like OpenAI’s Sora (which exploded in popularity after launching in app form in September), Google’s Veo series, and AI models built by Runway. Now anyone can make videos, with just a few taps on a screen.

If I were to locate the moment slop broke through into popular consciousness, I’d pick the video of rabbits bouncing on a trampoline that went viral this summer. For many savvy internet users, myself included, it was the first time we were fooled by an AI video, and it ended up spawning a wave of almost identical riffs, with people making videos of all kinds of animals and objects bouncing on the same trampoline.

My first reaction was that, broadly speaking, all of this sucked. That’s become a familiar refrain, in think pieces and at dinner parties. Everything online is slop now—the internet “enshittified,” with AI taking much of the blame. Initially, I largely agreed, quickly scrolling past every AI video in a futile attempt to send a message to my algorithm. But then friends started sharing AI clips in group chats that were compellingly weird, or funny. Some even had a grain of brilliance buried in the nonsense. I had to admit I didn’t fully understand what I was rejecting—what I found so objectionable.

To try to get to the bottom of how I felt (and why), I recently spoke to the people making the videos, a company creating bespoke tools for creators, and experts who study how new media becomes culture. What I found convinced me that maybe generative AI will not end up ruining everything. Maybe we have been too quick to dismiss AI slop. Maybe there’s a case for looking beyond the surface and seeing a new kind of creativity—one we’re watching take shape in real time, with many of us actually playing a part.

by Caiwei Chen, MIT Technology Review | Read more:
Image:@niceaunties (Wenhui lim)
[ed. See also: Let's Hear It for Slop (word of the year) - with bouncing bunnies included; or here.]

Stop, Shop, and Scroll

Commerce has long been central to social media; as long as ads keep the lights on at Meta, TikTok, and YouTube, we will all be pressured to buy, buy, buy. Instagram was a mall even before #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt and Pinterest became an “AI-enabled shopping assistant.” The influencer industry — which Goldman Sachs has predicted will grow to nearly half a trillion dollars by 2027 — has snowballed into a possible side hustle for anyone with access to a phone. There’s a handful of MrBeasts and Alix Earles at the top and an untold number of micro-influencers hawking goods and services at the bottom. For audiences, it means we have spent the better part of a decade living within a 24/7 digital infomercial, with social media — sponsored content and organic posts alike — resembling not much more than a buying guide, a catalog of unabashed and conspicuous consumption. Some audience members find themselves in deep debt or describe their behavior as a full-blown shopping addiction; others have developed careful strategies in an effort to limit their consumption. We have never been so aware of all the things there are to purchase, and the frictionlessness of shopping apps disguised as social media has created an army of voracious buyers. What has this abundance done to us? (...)

The impulse to shop is not exactly a secret — there’s often a resigned self-awareness to it. In a video viewed 1.5 million times, a woman stitches together clips of herself from random moments in her daily life. With a deadpan voice, and Radiohead’s “No Surprises” twinkling in the background, she recites highly specific products like she’s filling out a Mad Libs page: Chan Luu crystal toe ring. Arc’teryx hiking shoes. Vintage hoodie. “This is just the last 48 hours, mind you,” the caption reads.

This kind of video has become a mini-trend, with the idea being that the mere utterance of a temptation might soothe the part of your brain that wants to buy the item. (...)

We see so much marketing material that in certain subcultures online it is not just common but the expectation. In traditional marketing, it was understood that brands had to expose consumers to their message three times before they actually engaged with it, like going physically to a store to buy a product. In the age of social media and algorithmic overload, that number is now seven, says Mara Einstein, a marketing-professional-turned-critic and author of the book Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults. For one, the vastness of the internet has allowed for the number of available products to bloat beyond imagination — there are simply too many things. But how we learn about products has changed drastically as well; as media has fragmented to a million sites, feeds, screens, and algorithms, so too has the advertising we see. There is no one TV commercial a quarter of households are seeing, then telling their friends about. Instead we see a digital display ad here, an influencer’s video there.

“You may be finding out information from people and so on, but you’re increasingly spending time in a space where you’re constantly being bombarded by sales messages,” Einstein says. Influencers know how to stay on message, constantly priming viewers to give in and buy something.

Being influenced is nothing new, of course. But the short- and mid-form video format creates a new type of intimacy and allure, especially if you are already looking for something to buy. It’s hard to argue with a sales pitch when you are watching someone in their home actually using the product they are trying to sell you.

The content doesn’t even have to be explicitly promotional: I recall a video I made last year about my reporting being used without credit by content creators. My frustration had hit a breaking point, so I recorded a selfie-style TikTok complaining about the contemporary media ecosystem. Only my head and a portion of my shoulders were in the video, but someone wanted to know where my blouse was from.

TikTok itself has only bolstered the idea that every piece of content is an opportunity to consume. Through TikTok Shop, anyone can become a digital salesperson. In much crueler, more tasteless examples, TikTok has added shopping prompts to videos coming out of Gaza: A woman in a head covering becomes a promotion for similar-looking garments with headscarves. A bespectacled Israeli activist protesting their government’s besiegement is a billboard for a pair of glasses. (...)

It’s easy to blame the influencers for all of this — and many do, regularly, like clockwork. The most recent discourse cycle, in late September, was kicked off by a TikTok video with 390,000 views and arguments that stretched on for weeks.

“These influencers make way too much fucking money,” the video begins. “You’re just getting paid to sell people shit they don’t fucking need. It’s literally just overconsumption … You’re perpetuating this cycle that’s really keeping us trapped.”

Content creators are admittedly a perfect target for the general rage many of us carry around. Many of them seem unencumbered by the endless horrors of the world, with daily routines that include blocks of time for “warm water” and to-do lists with “plan out mocktails for the new year.” Their digital presence exists suspended in time, where there is always something new to recommend, packages of shiny new things waiting for them, and a willing audience that completes the positive feedback loop. Wouldn’t it be nice — as people are in line at food banks, fighting for a precious few job listings, and snatched off streets by masked agents — to sit in your home and talk to yourself for a living?

But the draw of the influencer is powerful; even if you cannot become her, you can own the same things she does. For Antoinette Hocbo, who picked up hobbies via TikTok, the characters she encounters on her For You page seem effortlessly cool. They have an eye for design, they’re interested in the arts, they drink wine. You buy into the person first, and eventually — hopefully — you buy the stuff, too.

“[There’s] the whole idea of parasocial relationships,” Einstein, the marketing expert, says. “If somebody has gotten to the point where they’re spending that much time online with someone, they’re vested in what that person has to say.” The feeling of intimacy is physical: When followers watch their favorite TikToker, they are literally holding them in the palm of their hand. (...)

TikTok made going viral a possibility for a whole new slate of people. Now the hard part is how to keep things rolling when it happens to you. Most of the platforms themselves do not pay much for views, but brands eager to partner with buzzy people do. Creators often talk about their work in terms of self-discovery or self-actualization: This is who I want to be online, and these are the products and tips I truly, honestly want to share.

The tension comes then with the “very real commercial realities of playing to an audience, bowing to commercial sponsorships if you were lucky enough to have them,” Duffy says. “And then the new dimension, which doesn’t have the same precursors in legacy media, which is playing to the algorithm.” A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 62 percent of adults on TikTok are there to find product reviews and recommendations — especially young women. (...)

Project Pan, as a concept, is both clever and strange. For years, a community of people organized largely on the internet have committed themselves to finishing their beauty and personal care products — the name coming from your promise to hit the bottom of the pan that holds your blush, for example. It’s smart for the way it gamifies something people struggle with. (Who among us doesn’t have half-used bottles of soap or barely touched tubes of lipstick?) It’s also deeply revealing: These products are meant to be used, and we collectively are so bad at finishing them off that we need a little game to make it happen. Off the top of my head I can confidently say that I’ve never once “panned” a compact of blush; I have expensive tubes of red lipstick that didn’t end up being my color, but that I can’t bear to throw out; and I have four bottles of sunscreen that crowd my cabinet, waiting for the summer they’re finally used up. There are many more products that I could — should — Project Pan that I’ve forgotten I even own.

Cassandra Silva, on the other hand, knows exactly what she has. She knows, for example, that she spent $2,857.98 AUD on makeup in 2024 and panned products totaling $1,654.13. She owns eight eyeliners, but her ideal number would be four. In 2023 she panned seven mascaras, 11 colored lip products, and one blush, among many others, all lined up in a photo of the totally empty containers that show her progress. She keeps all this data in a giant spreadsheet that she shares with me after we talk, and as I scroll through it, I realize I have never seen an eyeshadow palette where every color is completely empty.

“Compared to beauty YouTube, it’s not insane insane, but it’s still more than any one human could ever reasonably use,” Silva says of her inventory.

She watches beauty YouTube channels, but needs to be careful about what she consumes: She tries to stay away from content showing off hauls, new releases, or the ever-tempting limited-edition holiday releases.

“I am as conscious as I can be for a makeup addict,” Silva says. “I try, and I am freaking susceptible. It’s so bad.” Recently, a palette of neutral eyeshadows hounded her Instagram feed — she caved and bought it, only to be thoroughly disappointed when it arrived. As a panner, Silva will be stuck with it for years until it’s finished.

Chessie Domrongchai used to make the kind of content that Silva perhaps would steer clear of — she was the one tempting makeup lovers with all of these products. As a beauty YouTuber, Domrongchai shared in-depth product review videos for brands like the once-buzzy direct-to-consumer brand Glossier and tested fistfuls of lip glosses in subtly different shades for her 40,000 subscribers. She shared new releases, compared similar products from different brands, and recommended items for upcoming sales. In a 2019 video, she walks viewers through her pinky-brown nude lipstick collection — 15 shades, not including lip glosses and liquid lipsticks. She followed makeup brands and watched other YouTubers, accumulating more and more products to explore ($10,000, she says, feels like a conservative estimate of the value of her collection at its peak). In makeup, Domrongchai found self-expression, creativity, and community.

Until one day in 2022, when a switch went off in her head.

“I started to view a lot of the overconsumption that I was seeing online as kind of disgusting and wrong, and I recognized a lot of the way that I showed up on the internet was to overconsume,” Domrongchai says. Not only that, but she felt her online presence also influenced viewers to keep buying more and more.

“These are just regular people that are just now stuck with the burden of their overconsumption,” she says. But as a content creator, it was hard to be part of the beauty space without having a constant parade of new products.

In recent months, Domrongchai has developed a new routine for the many products littering her home. One by one, she meticulously peels off stickers and labels: from shampoo and olive oil bottles, from dish soap dispensers and face wash. Using a mix of baking soda, mineral oil, and rubbing alcohol, she goes to town on brand names printed on the packaging of eyeshadow palettes and lipsticks, scrubbing away their origins and the millions of dollars of marketing that went into them — arguably why they are in Domrongchai’s house to begin with. The result is shelves and countertops full of bare bottles and tubes and pumps filled with product but stripped of just about everything else. Watching her videos, I’m slightly horrified at my own ability to recognize the specific products even without all the labeling, the colors and shapes of bottles acting like an afterimage of a CeraVe cleanser.

“Of course I’m going to buy the face cleanser that keeps my skin clear, but I don’t need it to continue to market to me in my own home,” Domrongchai says. “In the past I had three different [lotions] and all of their labels and their marketing on these products … They’re all kind of yelling at you trying to convince you to use it. They’re kind of [in] competition with each other.” In other words, it felt like a social media feed.

For some panners, finishing a product can elicit the same rush that buying something new does — that same dopamine rush of hitting “place order” creeps in when you hit that pan. Then you post it online for other panners to see, adding to the thrill. Finishing products becomes a task to complete, just like shopping is.

“What it can do — which I don’t love to admit to — is you’ll put more blush on than you would,” Silva says. “You just slather it on.” Silva shows me her spreadsheet page from 2024 showing colored lip products she used up: 23. Silva estimates that the average person finishes maybe one lipstick a year. In order to pan that many products, she was reapplying them 15 to 20 times a day, she says. Sometimes Silva wonders if she should ditch panning, too, like she did consumption-focused beauty spaces.

“When you first get into it, it’s so helpful, and you really get that community and you can turn some products over. Then the longer that you’re in the panning community, it’s like, all right, now panning is a problem,” she laughs. “Now I’ve taken all the problems I had with makeup consumption and translated them into late-stage panning. It’s like late-stage capitalism.”

by Mia Sato, The Verge |  Read more:

Image: Cath Virginia

John & Yoko: One to One

A fire alert disrupts the Venice screening of One to One: John & Yoko, Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards’ documentary about Lennon’s rambunctious post-Beatles heyday, when he and his artist wife Ono were first putting down roots in New York. Inside the hushed screening room, the flashing red lights and blaring alarm provide the second big surprise of the night. The first was how much I was enjoying the show.

Short of a documentary that unearths incontrovertible new evidence that he faked his own death, I’m not convinced that the world needs another John Lennon film. The medium, surely, has him well covered already. But Macdonald and Rice-Edwards have managed to find and mine a rich source of material, tightly tucked away amid all the other wildcat wells. Their film turns back the clock to the early 1970s and a benefit gig that occurred around the time of Lennon’s deportation battle with Nixon (see previous documentaries for details) and his extended lost weekend with May Pang (ditto). Crucially, too, it throws this concert against the maelstrom of the US political scene, with a channel-surfing aesthetic that skips from car and Coke commercials to the Attica prison riot and the near-fatal shooting of Alabama governor George Wallace.

While Lennon claims that he spent his first year in New York mostly watching TV, One to One suggests otherwise. Instead he hit the ground running, hurling himself at the action to become the standard bearer and figurehead for whatever progressive leftist cause was doing the rounds that week. The film blends archive footage with a trove of previously unheard phone conversations to show the ways in which he and Ono leveraged their celebrity status and surrounded themselves with a crew of colourful upstarts, from Allen Ginsberg to Jerry Rubin. The oddest of these, perhaps, is the activist AJ Weberman, who is tasked with a mission to raid Bob Dylan’s bins in order to prove what a “multimillionaire hypocrite” the singer has become. Ono pleads with Weberman to apologise, explaining that they need Dylan to perform at a planned “Free the People” concert in Miami, but AJ is unrepentant and initially won’t be budged.

In the event, the Free the People event was cancelled. But Lennon promptly finds a new focus with the One to One benefit for disabled children from the Willowbrook state school. Macdonald and Rice-Edwards have remastered Phil Spector’s muddy original recording so that the footage now plays with a fresh, bullish swagger. This was Lennon’s first full-length concert since the Beatles performed at Candlestick Park and, it transpired, the last he would ever play.

If only more nostalgic music documentaries could muster such a fun, fierce and full-blooded take on old, familiar material. One to One, against the odds, makes Lennon feel somehow vital again. It catches him like a butterfly at arguably his most interesting period, when he felt liberated and unfettered and was living “like a student” in a two-room loft in Greenwich Village. He’s radioactive with charisma, tilting at windmills and kicking out sparks. 

by Xan Brooks, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: One to One/YT

[ed. Haven't seen this yet, but the link above about May Pang and her relationship with John was fascinating. Didn't know Yoko set them up to take pressure off of John's straying, and that, after a couple years (and an alleged affair of her own), became jealous and reeled him back in.]

Favorite Rob Reiner Credits

When Rob Reiner was killed earlier this week, along with his wife and creative partner Michelle, the world of film lost one of its most beloved and respected figures, an artist who had done very good and extremely popular work in a variety of genres, first in front of the camera, then behind it as a writer, producer, and director, and then again in his later life as an actor. All the while, Reiner maintained a spotless reputation as a mensch, in an industry with vanishingly few of those. He was one of the most sophisticated and successful political activists in California, and his work (and money) helped pass the state's groundbreaking marriage equality law. Few filmmakers have had as vast or varied an impact on American life over the last 50 years, which is something that Reiner would surely have found very funny. Here are some of Reiner's films and roles that we love:

Stand By Me

Stand By Me is probably the purest chunk of schmaltz in Rob Reiner's generational early-career run. The movie is oozing with sentiment, factory-designed to squeeze profundity out of every otherwise mundane childhood interaction, and some not so mundane. It pulls out every trouble-at-home cliché to make you root for the kids and add dramatic heft. Richard Dreyfuss's narration should come with an insulin pump.

And yet it works! It works. You root for the kids, and you identify with them; you laugh when you're meant to laugh and cry when you're supposed to; and yes, through the sheen of memory, all those moments with your own childhood pals take on a patina that preserves them as something meaningful. It's distilled nostalgia, which in moviemaking is much easier to fuck up than to get right.

Weapons-grade middlebrow competence was Reiner's strength. That's a compliment, to be clear, especially as Hollywood has come to devalue that skillset and the type of work it produced. He was visually unflashy, almost to an extent that it became his signature as a director. I'm not sure what a Rob Reiner film "looks like." He mostly picked great scripts, made his visual and storytelling choices, and got out of the way to let his actors cook. In Stand By Me, his first crucial decision was to give the movie a main character; the novella focuses on all four boys equally. The second was the casting. Reiner reportedly auditioned more than 300 kids, and got all four exactly right. A Mount Rushmore of child actors could credibly just be the four boys from this film.

It can be easy and is tempting to think of a movie as something that just sort of happens, and succeeds and fails for ineffable reasons, but it's really just a collection of a million different choices being made—most of the big ones by the director—and any one of which, if misguided, could torpedo the whole thing. Stand By Me doesn't work if the kids don't work. For its flaws, every choice that Reiner needed to nail in this movie, he nailed. You can more or less say the same for his entire first 12 years of directing. His hit rate was a miracle—no, not a miracle, that denies agency. It is the collective work of a real-deal genius.  (...)

- Barry Petchesky

When Harry Met Sally

It’s like 90 minutes, and all of them are perfect. Harry and Sally might suffer for their neuroses, but the greatest gift a director can give an audience is a film whose every detail was obsessed over. New York, warm and orange, has never looked better. Carrie Fisher says her lines the only way they could ever sound: You’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right. I want you to know that I will never want that wagon wheel coffee table.

That a film so brisk can feel so lived-in owes to Nora Ephron’s screenplay and also to Reiner’s neat choices, like the split-screen that makes it look like Harry and Sally are watching Casablanca in the same bed, an effect dialed up later in a continuously shot four-way phone call scene that took 60 tries to get right. Every time I watch When Harry Met Sally, I think it must have been impossible to make; the coziness of the movie is cut with something sad and mischievous and hard to describe. Estelle Reiner’s deadpan line reading at Katz’s Deli is a classic, and every family Pictionary night in our house began with someone guessing “baby fish mouth,” but the bit that came to mind first was this scene set at a Giants game: Harry tells Jess about his wife’s affair between rounds of the wave.

- Maitreyi Anantharaman

Michael "Meathead" Stivic in All In The Family

Rob Reiner was proof that every once in a rare while, nepotism is a great idea. Of all the lessons he could glean from his father Carl, one of this nation's undisputed comedic geniuses, he put nearly all of them to best use over his voluminous IMDB page.

The credit that Reiner broke out with was the one that seemed with hindsight to be the least consequential of them all—his straight man/son-in-law/earnest doofus role in the Norman Lear sitcom All In The Family. The show, which for several years was the nation's defining situation comedy, ran through the risible but weirdly prescient venom of Carroll O'Connor's towering performance, and positioned Reiner as the stereotypically liberal son-in-law and foil for O'Connor's cardboard conservative Archie Bunker. Reiner helped frame the show, while mostly serving up setups for O'Connor. He played the part well, but it was not an especially dignified one. I mean, his character's name was Mike Stivic, but he became known universally as "Meathead" because Bunker only referred to him as such. Reiner learned from his father's years with Mel Brooks how to be that acquiescent foil, and if his work in that part did not make him a recognized comedian except to those folks who knew how comedy actually works, it indisputably gave him an eight-year advanced education on all the things required to make funny. Those studies would serve him well in his director's chair. His gift was not in being the funny, but in building sturdy and elegant setups for the funny, and there has never been a good comedy movie without that. The Princess Bride doesn't work for 10 minutes without Cary Elwes, and Elwes's performance wouldn't work if his director did not repeatedly put him in position to succeed.

Maybe Reiner would not have gotten the AITF gig without being his father's son—Richard Dreyfuss also wanted the role and Harrison Ford turned it down, for what that may be worth—but sometimes nepotism works for those outside the family. Reiner wrote three of the 174 episodes in which he appeared; he learned to thrive behind and off to the side of the camera. It all counted, it all contributed, and every credit Reiner is credited with here owes some of its shine to that television show, which in turn owes its existence to The Dick Van Dyke Show and his father and Mel Brooks's work with The 2000-Year-Old Man and Your Show Of Shows. That takes us back 75 years, into the earliest days of the medium, which may as well be the entire history of American comedy. Every giant stood on the shoulders of another, and that giant did the same. It is all of a piece, and IMDB would be half as large a quarter as useful without them, and him. 

- Ray Ratto

This Is Spinal Tap

In a particularly on-brand bit of trivia, I first became aware of This Is Spinal Tap through Guitar Hero II. The titular band’s hit “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight” was downloadable content for that game, and I spent hours trying to perfect it before I ever thought about watching the movie it hailed from. I did eventually do it, and I remember exactly where I was—in Venezuela in the summer of 2007, traveling around for the Copa América—because Spinal Tap is a near-flawless movie, and one that seared itself into my brain. I can’t recall with certainty, but I’m pretty sure that this is when I first became aware of Rob Reiner—I knew his dad from Ocean’s Eleven, another perfect movie—and Spinal Tap is such a stunning collection of talent that it’s hard to pick out a favorite role or MVP. Here’s the thing about that, though: The best and most important performance in the film might be from Reiner himself, because the movie doesn’t work as well as it does without him.

On the one hand, this is obvious; he directed the movie and co-wrote it, so his fingerprints are quite naturally all over it. And yet, in a movie full of massive characters and comedians perfectly suited for those roles, Reiner’s performance as the flabbergasted documentarian is what makes the whole thing hang together. Reiner was a comedic genius in his own right, but I think the thing I appreciate most about Spinal Tap whenever I watch it is how much he understands about his cast’s strengths and how much he allows himself to recede into the background while still working to guide the jokes to their best conclusions. Every great comedy needs a straight man, and Reiner’s Marty DiBergi is certainly that, but the movie is so funny, and Reiner is such a welcome presence on screen, that even DiBergi gets to be effortlessly hilarious. He does this, for the most part, just by playing an ostensibly normal person and turning that all up to, well, 11.

Let’s take what I consider one of the most iconic comedic scenes of all time, and certainly the one that I have quoted the most in my life: “It’s one louder.”

Christopher Guest is perfect in this scene, unsurprisingly; his Nigel Tufnel is an idiot, and the movie gets a lot of humor out of that fact throughout, and especially here. However, Reiner’s plain-spoken incredulity over the idiocy is what really elevates the scene to me. You can feel his character grappling with this concept throughout: First with a plain-spoken revelation (“Oh I see, and most of the amps go to 10”), but then he comes in with the setup: “Why don’t you just make 10 louder and make 10 be the top number, and make that a little louder?” Every single time I watch this scene, the pause before Guest goes “These go to eleven” makes me giggle in anticipation.

Spinal Tap is hilarious in its own right, and also birthed the mockumentary genre; it’s crazy to think about all of the things that the movie directly influenced, from Guest’s own filmmaking work (shout out Best In Show), to Drop Dead Gorgeous, on through Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. God, I love that last one, and so many things that work in Popstar are directly traceable to the work Reiner did on Spinal Tap. (Spinal Tap also birthed a sequel just this year; I haven’t watched it yet, mainly because of how much I love the original and don’t need more from this stupid British band, but I am relieved to report that I’ve heard it’s a fine enough time at the movies.)

That This Is Spinal Tap was Reiner’s directorial debut only adds to the absurdity. Who produces not just a masterpiece, but such an utterly distinctive piece of work in their first real attempt? The answer, really, is that Reiner was a master, and he would go on to prove that over a historic run over the next decade, making Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, and A Few Good Men in just eight years. Ridiculous. This Is Spinal Tap is my favorite of all of those, though, and one of the most rewatchable movies ever made. Hell, as I’m writing this, I just remembered the scene where Reiner reads the band some reviews (“The review you had on Shark Sandwich, which was merely a two-word review just said … Shit Sandwich”) which is also among the funniest things put to film. The whole movie is strewn with gems like that. What a gift.

- Luis Paez-Pumar

by Defector Staff, Defector |  Read more:
Images: Andy Schwartz/Fotos International/Getty Images; Harry Met Sally, Spinal Tap (YouTube).]

[ed. See also: As You Wish: Rob Reiner (1947-2025). Ebert.com]

The Quiet Collapse of Surveys: Fewer Humans (and More AI Agents) Are Answering Survey Questions

Surveys are the bedrock of political polling, market research, and public policy. Want to know what voters think? Survey them. Need to price a product? Survey. Trying to understand shifts in public opinion or workplace satisfaction? You guessed it.

But there is a fundamental problem: fewer and fewer people are answering - and more and more of those who do are AI agents.

I explore these two converging trends below. Then, I’ll show that anybody (including me) can easily set-up an AI agent to earn some money with taking surveys. I’ll then estimate the impact of this further down the line in three main fields and propose some solutions.

Problem 1: The increase of non-response rates

If you use survey data, it probably hasn’t gone unnoticed: survey response rates have plummeted. In the 1970s and 1980s, response rates ranged between 30% and 50%. Today, they can be as low as 5% .

To give some (shocking) examples: the UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS) experienced a drop in response rates from approximately 40% to 13%, leading to instances where only five individuals responded to certain labor market survey questions. In the US, the current population survey dropped from a 90% response rate to a record low of 65%. (...)

Problem 2: The increase of AI agents

How difficult is it to build an agent? So… I did what any overcaffeinated social data nerd would do. I built a simple python pipeline for my own AI agent to take surveys for me (don’t worry I promise that I didn’t actually use it!). The pipeline I built just requires me to:

• Access to a powerful language model (I just used OpenAI’s API - but perhaps for research representativeness of the distribution an uncensored model is way better!).

• A survey parser: this can be as simple as a list of questions in a .txt file or a JSON pulled from Qualtrics or Typeform. The real pros would scrape the survey live though!

• I prompted it with a persona. The easiest is to built a mini “persona generator” that rotates between types: urban lefty, rural centrist, climate pessimist, you name it.

Overall how long did this take? Not too long at all, the most difficult and time consuming part is making it interact with the interface of the survey and tool/website.

That’s it. With a bit more effort, this could scale to dozens or hundreds of bots. Vibe coding from scratch (see my previous Substack on how to do vibe coding ) would work perfectly too.

Don’t worry btw, I didn’t deploy it on a real platform. But other people did. Below, I extrapolated the trends of AI agents based on data points in existing research since data is very hard to find...

Downstream problems

Let’s explore how this impacts three main fields in which surveys are used: political polls, market research and public policy.

Political polls. Many polls depend heavily on post-stratification weighting to correct for underrepresentation in key demographic groups. But when response rates fall and LLM answers increase, the core assumptions behind these corrections collapse. For instance, turn-out models become unstable: if synthetic agents overrepresent politically “typical” speech (e.g., centrist or non-committal), models overfit the middle and underpredict edges. Similarly, calibration failures increase: AI-generated responses often mirror majority-opinion trends scraped from high-volume internet sources (like Reddit or Twitter), not the minority voter. This results in high-confidence and stable predictions that are systematically biased.

Market research. AI-generated responses are, by design, probabilistic aggregations of likely human language conditioned on previous examples. That’s great for fluency and coherence, but not good for capturing edge-case consumer behavior. Real customer data is heteroskedastic and noisy: people contradict themselves, change preferences, or click randomly. AI, in contrast, minimises entropy. Synthetic consumers will never hate a product irrationally, misunderstand your user interface, or misinterpret your branding. This results in product teams building for a latent mean user, resulting in poor performance across actual market segments, particularly underserved or hard-to-model populations.

Public policy. Governments often rely on survey data to estimate local needs and allocate resources: think of labor force participation surveys, housing needs assessments, or vaccine uptake intention polls. When the data is LLM generated this can result in vulnerable populations becoming statistically invisible and lead to underprovision of services in areas with the greatest need. Even worse, AI-generated answers may introduce feedback loops: as agencies “validate” demand based on polluted data, their future sampling and resource targeting become increasingly skewed.

So what can we actually do about this?

Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet (believe me - if there were, my start-up dream would be reality and I’d already have a VC pitch deck and a logo). But here are a few underdeveloped but in my humble opinion promising ideas:

by Lauren Leek, Lauren's Data Substack |  Read more:

Image: Lauren Leek compilation of sources

[ed. I never answer surveys because, why assist people in figuring out new and innovative ways to manipulate and sell me things (including politicans)? So, I'm not surprised this tool is tanking. What is surprising is the claim that AI bots are a significant reason. I guess if you're a professional survey taker and have the coding skills then yeah, it would make sense to automate the process (more surveys, more money). But really, how many people can do that? More than anything, I'm surprised that prediction markets aren't mentioned here. Those seem to be the most accurate and granular tools for achieving the same purpose these days.]

The Utah Look

There’s a Reason You Can’t Tell the ‘Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ Cast Apart

Does Hulu’s Secret Lives on Mormon Wives season 3 have you squinting at the TV, struggling to tell Jessi Ngatikaura and Demi Engemann apart with their identical, long, sleek waves and indistinguishable wide, thick lashes? Even diehard fans of the show admit to frequently mixing up the cast. And viewers regularly post about getting castmates confused. “Anyone else watch ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ but can’t keep up bc they all look exactly alike??” wrote one fan on Facebook.

It’s been a hot topic since season 1 and, according to some, this isn’t a simple case of women on reality TV wanting to be conventionally attractive. It’s the dogged pursuit of what many call the “Utah look.”

“Utah has insanely high standards for girls,” says fitness TikToker eharmany95. “Everybody is competing with the girl next to them to be just as perfect, just as tan, just as fit.” Or take it from Vanna Einerson, a 21-year-old Salt Lake City native on the most recent season of Love Island, whose filler and breast implants were a source of judgment and fascination online. “There’s a Utah girl stereotype,” she told castmate Ace Greene. “All the girls are, like, tan, blonde.”

“I have never felt uglier than I did living in Utah,” says TikToker @avemarin in a video explaining Vanna's look. “It’s not just being white and thin that is desired here, but what has been praised the most is extremely tiny bodies, blonde hair, blue eyes, big lips, immediate boob job—like right out of high school—and a very symmetrical face. Hence the filler and lip injections.”

Utah—and Salt Lake City, its capital—is a mecca for cosmetic procedures that help women conform to these standards. Salt Lake City has more surgeons per capita than Los Angeles (and almost as many as Miami). Residents google “breast augmentation” and other cosmetic surgeries in higher numbers than pretty much any other city. One particularly popular surgery is the “mommy makeover,” a combination of multiple procedures, including but not limited to a breast lift, tummy tuck, liposuction and labiaplasty. 

Although Utah is hardly the only place where women feel pressure to be thin and have long hair, by many accounts the expectation here is more intense. At least some of this has to do with the Mormon Church, also known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A cultural behemoth across the state, LDS members are 90 percent white and, according to some experts, this sameness—in religion, race, and region—leads to an extreme pressure to conform to a very conventional standard of beauty...

Aubree Bunderson, a 26-year-old stay-at-home mom and lifelong member of the LDS church, says she can always tell a fellow Deseret native down to the “Utah curls” (think beachy waves with straight ends achieved with a clamped curling iron) and her very blonde dye job.

“You see a different kind of blonde in different states. It’s not as rich, and it’s not as soft,” she says. “Anytime I’m traveling anywhere, you can almost tell who’s from Utah and who’s not. She’s that bleach-blonde girl with Utah curls. You know she has a woman that specializes in platinum blondes do her hair. There’s not very many blondes out there. And then, here in Utah, we’re full of blondes. We’re full of athletic wear. We love the idea of the gym and being healthy and having the perfect body and beauty standards when it comes to skincare and makeup. We want to look our best and feel our best.”

For Bunderson, the widespread conformity to these ideas of beauty is inspiring. “I’m encouraged by other women that I find attractive. I’m like, I want that body. I want her hair. I want her eyelashes. I want her skin. So many influencers are from Utah. They’re in my face, looking beautiful. They look fake, but they just look amazing in my eyes.”...

Is this religion or just Utah? Can we even separate the two? Bunderson and several other women who spoke with Cosmopolitan mentioned physical “perfection” as the goal of the blonde curls and mommy makeovers. Perfection is a core value in the LDS Church, the Book of Mormon commands followers to “be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”...

While reality TV stars are anecdotal evidence of this tendency for sameness in the quest for “perfection,” data also bears this out. A recent survey on body image in the LDS church found that 14 percent of church members had a cosmetic procedure compared to 4 percent nationally. The report also concluded that although the LDS church promotes a positive body image, many religious Mormons (particularly wealthy ones) “may erroneously believe that religion is tied to perfection in a variety of ways, including physical appearance or finances, and they may attempt to conform to what is referred to as the ‘thin ideal’ in U.S. culture. Perhaps appearing to be a perfect, worthy, righteous member of the church means ‘looking the part’ as well.”

by Hannah Malach, Cosmopolitan |  Read more:
Image: Mary Fama/Disney/Pamela Littky/Getty Images
[ed. The Stepford look, updated. There's even something called Christian Girl Autumn Look. Maybe we'll see Recovering Tradwife in Therapy look or Housewives of Bulimia look.]