In the months before the U.S. military snatched Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from their home, President Trump justified his buildup of forces in the Caribbean as an extension of his “America First” domestic agenda. He was ordering deadly missile strikes against boats in the region because they were smuggling drugs at Maduro’s behest and those drugs were killing Americans, he claimed. A similar, if not necessarily coordinated, attack on Americans’ safety was being perpetrated at home by undocumented immigrants, whom Trump accused, without evidence, of all being violent criminals.
But as soon as the raid was over, leaving at least 60 people dead and Venezuela’s economic resources in U.S. hands, Trump and his top aides pivoted to bald-faced imperialism, musing openly about other countries they could soon put under American control.
“Cuba is ready to fall,” the president said dryly as anti-Trump protesters flooded Havana. “Colombia is very sick, too, run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and sending it to the United States, and he’s not going to be doing it very long” — an unambiguous threat against President Gustavo Petro. “Something’s going to have to be done with Mexico,” he later said. Stephen Miller used the occasion to rattle officials in Denmark as well as the putative NATO allies of the U.S. by declaring Greenland as good as ours. “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper. The administration is so eager to assert what it sees as its natural imperialist mandate that Trump has dubbed it the “Donroe Doctrine,” a winking play on President James Monroe’s 1823 declaration that foreign powers who tried to colonize the Western Hemisphere were effectively picking a fight with the U.S., the region’s sole and rightful plunderer.
The American looting of Venezuela already seems to be underway. “We are in the midst right now and in fact about to execute on a deal to take all the oil,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on January 7. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies … go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, and start making money” by “taking a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” Trump said. They were vague about logistics, and while at least some of the profits will purportedly “flow back into Venezuela to benefit the Venezuelan people,” the U.S. plans to keep some as “reimbursement,” a legal-sounding rebrand of what is essentially rich goons seizing a country’s resources at gunpoint.
Oil is not the only thing being stolen here. The U.S. government has also robbed the Venezuelan people of any semblance of self-determination. In spite of the compelling pro-democracy case for ousting Maduro, a brutal dictator who held onto power after losing his 2024 reelection bid in a landslide, Trump has blithely dismissed Maduro’s main political opponent, Nobel Peace Prize winner Carmen María Machado, as “a very nice woman” who lacks “support or respect within the country.” Instead, Trump and Rubio have propped up Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodriguez, seemingly because they think she will be easier to bully than her predecessor. (“If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price,” Trump told The Atlantic.) Whether or not that holds true, she has ensured some autocratic continuity — police in Caracas have reportedly been interrogating residents at checkpoints and boarding buses to search people’s phones, trying to suss out anyone who celebrated Maduro’s removal.
The rest of the world has taken note. French president Emmanuel Macron used an annual foreign-policy address to accuse the U.S. of turning away from the “international rules that it used to promote” and abandoning allies. “Every day, people are wondering if Greenland will be invaded, or whether Canada will face the threat of becoming the 51st state,” he said. When Trump suggested that Mexico could be his next target, President Claudia Sheinbaum replied, “The history of Latin America is clear and compelling: intervention has never brought democracy, never generated well-being, nor lasting stability.”
Yet amid the international uproar, the pretense that Trump’s foreign policy reflects an “America First” posture was undercut most profoundly by a tragedy at home. On January 7, an ICE agent fired his gun multiple times into an SUV driven by Renee Nicole Good, killing the 37-year-old mother of three on a snow-lined street in residential Minneapolis. Trump had recently ordered a surge of federal agents to Minnesota, apparently to intimidate the local Somali American population, which he had disparaged as “garbage” the month before; faced instead with rationalizing the shooting death of a white woman, the administration rushed to smear Good as a “domestic terrorist,” arguing, again without evidence, that she had put the agent’s life in danger. Homeland Security director Kristi Noem was in New York the next day announcing the arrests of “illegal criminal aliens,” her rhetoric about keeping Americans safe rendered especially hollow after what amounted to a deadly mugging in broad daylight in Minneapolis, captured from multiple camera angles by bystanders.
This, on a grand scale, has become the defining feature of the current phase of American preeminence: robbery. It is happening overseas, as Trump seeks to remake Venezuela into a U.S. vassal state, and at home, where he is stripping state governors of their authority and residents of their basic civil liberties and, as of January 7, their lives. Asked by the New York Times if there were any limits on his global powers, Trump replied, “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” As Miller put it in his conversation with Jake Tapper, “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning.”
It’s true that, in spite of the shocking developments of the past few weeks, there’s a creeping sense that we are witnessing a tale as old as time. But there’s something going here on that supersedes any assertion of brute force or regional influence put forth when the U.S. was finding its footing as a global player. This isn’t the 19th century anymore; America is the world’s leading economic and military power. That its government is as disdainful of international sovereignty as it is of its own increasingly heavily policed residents makes it the world’s most powerful thief.
The scorn that Trump’s allies continue to heap on Good can be seen as an expression of the timeless authoritarian character of American policing. (George Floyd was choked to death less than a mile from where Good was shot.) But Venezuela feels like a turning point. State violence at home is justified at all costs, as are Trump’s decisions about which foreign nations to menace, and how. It’s not clear what the end result will be, but the effect is the firm establishment of a governing principle rooted in Trump’s declaration on Fox News soon after the raid: “Nobody can stop us.”
Photo-Illustration: Dewey Saunders; source photos: Warner Bros. Pictures; Getty Images.
When Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut was released in the summer of 1999, the world shrugged. Critics didn’t know what to do with it, treating it less like the final statement of a master filmmaker and more like a bootlegged work print — understandable, given that Kubrick, who typically fussed over his movies until the last possible second, had died that March, just days after delivering a semi-finished cut to Warner Bros. The studio and his estate made the remaining tweaks. Meanwhile, audiences had been primed by the marketing to expect an explicit, boundary-pushing erotic thriller featuring an extended orgy sequence that almost triggered an NC-17 rating. What they got instead was much tamer: a slow-motion marital drama about a Manhattan doctor (Tom Cruise), rattled by his wife’s (Nicole Kidman) confession of an adulterous fantasy, who drifts through a series of lustful but unconsummated encounters before crashing a masked sex party thrown by an elite secret society in a Long Island mansion. The film’s dreamlike atmosphere veered toward the surreal, with Cruise and Kidman doing the weirdest acting of their lives and the orgygoers’ portrayal — the masks, the password, the choreography — striking many viewers as more goofy than sexy or sinister.
But Kubrick’s movies have a habit of aging into new meanings, like monoliths that take time for us apes to figure out, and Eyes Wide Shut eventually came to be seen in a different light. Beyond the orgy, there are subtler, more disturbing moments — including a scene in which a costume-shop owner appears to offer his underage daughter to Cruise’s character — that hint at a world where sex, power, and predation blur. With hindsight, those undertones seemed to foreshadow real-world horrors to come. In the 2010s, Pizzagate and QAnon dragged rumors of elite sex-trafficking rings from the fringes into the mainstream of American paranoia. Then came Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest and death, and suddenly an underappreciated film from two decades earlier started to look like an uncanny premonition.
After a while, some began to wonder if perhaps Eyes Wide Shut hadn’t been a little too prescient. Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist who spent years on each of his films and demanded dozens, sometimes hundreds, of takes per scene. So, the thinking went, every costume, prop, and line reading is there for a reason, infinite symbolism scattered across the frame for anyone determined enough to decipher it. This was the logic that led some to believe that he’d helped NASA fake the moon landing and then confessed to it by putting Danny Torrance in an Apollo 11 sweater in The Shining. That idea, along with a handful of even farther-fetched ones, was presented without comment in Rodney Ascher’s 2012 documentary, Room 237, a film presumably meant to mock such readings that may have only encouraged them. And Kubrick didn’t exactly tamp down the mythmaking. In the final years of his life, he rarely left his estate north of London and all but stopped giving interviews, allowing his work to speak for itself — and, in the absence of explanation, to be interpreted however anyone pleased. So when Eyes Wide Shut seemed to anticipate a scandal that wouldn’t come fully into view until decades later, it raised a question: What if Kubrick knew?
Soon, in exactly the parts of the internet you’d expect, a conspiracy theory took shape: Kubrick had made Eyes Wide Shut as a warning, an exposé of an actual pedophile cult hiding in plain sight among the global elite. The masked orgy wasn’t just a metaphor — for the sexual hypocrisies of the upper class, or the transactional nature of intimacy, or the secret compromises of monogamy, or whatever — it was a re-enactment of what really happened behind mansion doors. And once the wrong people caught wind of it, they had Kubrick killed so that the movie could be reedited to scrub the most incriminating details. Some claim an entire 24 minutes were cut. And yet, the theory goes, Kubrick had so masterfully embedded his clues in the film that some of them survived the posthumous meddling.
There are multiple strains of this theory, each with its own twist on which real cabal Kubrick was supposedly exposing. Some point to the usual suspects — the Illuminati, Bohemian Grove, garden-variety Satanists. Others zoom in on the Rothschild family, noting that it once owned the 19th-century mansion used for some of the movie’s orgy exteriors. Others go a few steps further, claiming that Eyes Wide Shut was not just predictive of Epstein’s crimes; it was literally about him. (The evidence? Well, for starters, in a party scene near the beginning of the movie, a couple idling behind Kidman is said to look like Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, or at least the man has gray hair.)
Across these variants, one detail is usually cited as the smoking gun. In the movie’s last scene, Bill and Alice Harford (Cruise and Kidman) are walking through a toy store with their young daughter, Helena (Madison Eginton). Just before credits roll, Helena is shown standing near two adult male extras — who, believers claim, also appear at the party that opens the film — and then following them as they head toward another aisle. This half-second beat, according to breathless video essays and blog posts stitched together from freeze-frames, is Kubrick’s final, chilling reveal: The Harfords have handed their daughter over to the cult.
This theory has become surprisingly popular. Versions of it circulate constantly on Reddit, YouTube, and TikTok, where today Kubrick may be remembered less as a filmmaker than as a whistleblower who died for telling the truth about high-society pedophiles. And if it once lived mainly in the sewers of social media, it broke into the daylight in December of last year, when Roger Avary, the co-writer of Pulp Fiction and the director of The Rules of Attraction,laid out his own variation of the conspiracy on The Joe Rogan Experience.
On the podcast, Avary told Rogan that he’d recently reread his copy of the Eyes Wide Shut shooting script, and it had gotten him thinking about all the ways the movie might’ve been different if Kubrick had lived. “It’s definitely missing third-person narration,” he said, arguing that, in particular, the scene where Cruise visits a morgue seems designed for voice-over. Avary also discussed the toy-store theory: “You see those two guys walking off with the daughter. They’re taking her away. They’ve given their daughter to the pedo cult.” Then he relayed a story he’d heard — secondhand, he admitted — about an early screening of the movie for studio executives. According to Avary, “There were people who were outside of the theater who could hear inside of the theater Kubrick yelling at all the executives and saying, ‘It’s my movie! You can’t cut it! You can’t fucking cut my film!’ Big argument going on and then he dies like four days later.”
I should probably unmask myself here as a skeptic of this alleged conspiracy, which strains credulity not just for interpretive reasons but also for extremely basic logistical ones. If someone had truly uncovered an elite sex-trafficking operation and wanted to alert the public, why on earth would he spend years of his life and a studio’s $65 million making a coded allegory about it rather than, say, telling the police or a reporter? And even if you grant that premise, why would a panicked sex cult — powerful enough to murder an internationally beloved director — then allow the film to play, even in sanitized form, on thousands of screens around the world?
These theories may have once been a fun way to overread a slippery movie, but lately they seem to be on the verge of overtaking it. And with a new Criterion Collection 4K remaster of the film available, the hunt for “hidden clues” seems likely to intensify as every Christmas light and billiard ball can now be scrutinized in even higher resolution.
That would be a shame. Eyes Wide Shut is a movie I love and one I think ranks among Kubrick’s best. For all its controlled craft, it’s looser, stranger, and more dramatically flammable than anything else he ever made. It’s also unclassifiable, never bothering to explain what exactly it is. That ambiguity is part of its power, but it’s also the void into which conspiracists pour their fantasies. Before those fantasies become the movie’s legacy, I wondered if a few calls and emails to people who worked on the film might bring some clarity.
Many were happy to help. “I can assure you that all of these speculations are total nonsense,” says Jan Harlan, a producer of five Kubrick movies as well as the director’s brother-in-law. “Stanley would’ve found these people amusing,” says Anthony Frewin, Kubrick’s longtime assistant and archivist. “This is spurious and unfounded, just another fine example of the irrelevant rubbish that followed Kubrick throughout his career,” says Nigel Galt, Eyes Wide Shut’s editor. “It’s ludicrous to think that, at that time, Kubrick would’ve been aware of Jeffrey Epstein,” says Denise Chamian, one of the film’s casting directors. “I don’t think Stanley gave a flying fuck about warning the world about anything,” says Kubrick’s co-writer, Frederic Raphael. (Cruise and Kidman declined through representatives to participate in this story.)
It’s not just that it’s doubtful or unprovable that Kubrick made Eyes Wide Shut to disrupt a secret clan of wealthy pedophiles, say his collaborators. It’s that the theory is untethered from everything we know about the movie’s origins. Eyes Wide Shut is based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella, Traumnovelle, which Kubrick was already discussing in 1968 as a potential follow-up to 2001: A Space Odyssey. He bought the rights in 1970 — when Jeffrey Epstein was still a teenager — and at one point considered adapting it as a comedy, possibly with Steve Martin in the lead. He returned to the material on and off over the years but focused on other projects for nearly three decades. If he was really on a mission to thwart real-world sex trafficking, he wasn’t in much of a hurry.
Also, what many now interpret as Kubrick’s exposé of elite perverts was, in fact, mostly Schnitzler’s doing. Eyes Wide Shut is an extremely faithful adaptation of Traumnovelle. “Of course you can see where it varies,” says Raphael, who was hired to help with the screenplay in 1994, “but the basis of the movie is still the Schnitzler story, and Stanley always insisted that we preserve its beats.” The novella includes all of the film’s major characters and story elements — including the doctor, his wife’s fantasy, the sex worker whose services he declines, the piano player who sneaks him the orgy password, and the mysterious woman who sacrifices herself to save him — except it’s set in early-20th-century Vienna instead of 1990s New York and its protagonist is named Fridolin instead of Bill. It was even adapted into an Austrian TV movie in 1969, and that version’s plot is largely the same as Kubrick’s.
The people I spoke to also say they doubt Kubrick had any special knowledge of real-world sex cults, and the one in Eyes Wide Shut was something he was still trying to conceptualize as he made the film. In Raphael’s 1999 memoir, Eyes Wide Open, he recalls that Kubrick wasn’t entirely sure what might motivate such a group. At one point, he asked Raphael to help fill in the blanks, so the writer drafted a backstory in the form of a fake FBI dossier, an imagined history of a clandestine network of powerful hedonists called “the Free” who murdered anyone who leaked their secrets. He faxed it to Kubrick, who promptly called, worried that Raphael had somehow hacked into an FBI computer. When the writer explained he’d made the whole thing up, Kubrick was relieved. “Okay. As long as we’re not,” he said, “on potentially dangerous ground here.” As Raphael tells me, “If Stanley had known about anything like that in real life, I’m sure he would’ve been much too apprehensive to get anywhere near it.”
For help imagining Eyes Wide Shut’s orgy sequence, Kubrick sought the expertise of two unconventional scholars: Gershon Legman, an erotic folklorist who provided historical context on the sexual customs of Schnitzler-era Vienna, and Dr. C.J. Scheiner, a New York emergency-room physician with a Ph.D. in erotology, who, over a series of long phone calls, gave him a crash course in 4,000 years of group sex. As production neared, Kubrick asked Scheiner about his personal knowledge of modern orgies. “I had, as a nonparticipating observer, researched this part of the social scene since the 1960s and had extensive first- and secondhand knowledge of American and European organized group sexual activity, from home parties to elegant weekend orgies in a château outside of Paris,” Scheiner tells me. Nothing in their conversations, he says, suggested the film was inspired by any real sex cult. And, “based on the questions he asked,” Scheiner adds, “my impression is that Kubrick had no — or very little — firsthand experience with orgies himself.”
Much of the conspiracy talk around Eyes Wide Shut centers on another of the film’s advisors: Larry Celona, a longtime New York Post reporter who’s credited as a “media consultant” — for one scene, Kubrick had him write a mock Post article about the death of Mandy, the woman who spares Cruise’s character from the cult’s punishment by offering herself in his place. In 2019, Celona happened to break the news of Epstein’s death, a coincidence some found too eerie to ignore. But, as Celona tells me, he’s a crime reporter for New York’s biggest tabloid, “so it’s not a far reach that I’d be the first to know” about a famous death in the city. (He was also the first to report JFK Jr.’s fatal plane crash, which occurred, in another uncanny coincidence, on July 16, 1999, the same day Eyes Wide Shut opened in theaters. In certain corners of the internet, this alignment of dates is treated like the Rosetta stone; in QAnon lore, JFK Jr. didn’t die at all but supposedly went into hiding to join a generations-long war against elite pedophiles.) Later, some theorists’ heads nearly exploded when they thought they saw “Celona” listed in Epstein’s private-jet logs, but it turned out to be sloppy handwriting; the name was actually “Celina,” which might have been Celina Midelfart, a known Epstein associate. “I obviously was never on Epstein’s plane — I’ve never met him,” Celona says. He did speak to Kubrick by phone a couple of times, but they never discussed Epstein. “Kubrick was born in the Bronx,” Celona says, “so he wanted to talk about the Yankees.”
Even the fake Post story Celona wrote for Kubrick has been overscrutinized. Some viewers noticed that a line in the second paragraph is repeated twice — a “mistake” that, to them, suggests hidden meaning. Celona noticed it, too, but never found out why it was left in. He suggests I ask Frewin, Kubrick’s former assistant, about it, and when I do, Frewin sounds surprised: “I never noticed that, and I was the one who had it typeset. Oh well, it adds to the authenticity.”
Eyes Wide Shut had a reputation for opacity even before the internet got involved. It was an unusually secretive project. Working mostly in London’s Pinewood Studios, Kubrick employed only a small crew, kept the set tightly controlled, and filmed for a long time. Production began in November 1996 and lasted for more than 15 months, a Guinness World Record for the longest continuous shoot in history. So he must have filmed much more than what ended up in the movie, right?
There were outtakes — “snippets which did not make it into the film,” says producer Jan Harlan — but nothing that would’ve gotten Kubrick in hot water with any real sex cults, say his collaborators. By most accounts, the director spent the bulk of the shoot filming take after take of the scenes that do appear in the movie. One story that’s passed into legend has the director forcing Cruise to walk through a doorway 95 times before deeming the performance believable. (Cruise, who now regularly flings himself off cliffs for fun, reportedly developed an ulcer during production.)
Madison Eick (née Eginton), who played Helena, the Harfords’ daughter, and turned 8 during the production, hasn’t given many interviews about Eyes Wide Shut since its original release. Only in retrospect did she realize how unique the shooting process was. “I never saw a full script,” she says. “In the majority of my scenes, the dialogue was improvised. Stanley would tell us the premise of the scene and then we would rehearse and rehearse and just talk naturally. There’s a scene where I talk about wanting a dog for Christmas, and all of that was improvised.” She recalls that Kubrick applied his obsessive precision to even small moments, including one brief scene that takes place in front of the Harfords’ bathroom mirror. “Stanley had me brush my teeth for — I’m not kidding — two weeks,” she says. “He was like, ‘Why aren’t you spitting while you’re brushing your teeth?’ And I was like, ‘I just spit at the end.’ And he wanted me to spit and then keep going back to brushing.” Eick is now 36 and retired from film acting. “My dentist just told me my gums are starting to recede, and I wonder if that’s why,” she joked.
When I ask Eick about the talk around the toy-store scene — the cornerstone of the entire conspiracy theory, in which some viewers claim her character is being handed off to cult members — she tells me it’s news to her. “There wasn’t ever any secret meaning about that scene that was communicated to me,” she says. “There was definitely never any suggestion from Stanley that I should go and stand by or walk off with two men.” Were those men the same background actors who also appear at the party scene at the beginning of the movie? Harlan admits that “they were from the same pool of extras” — but even if they were the same performers, it was “not deliberate. There is no ‘meaning’” to it, he says.
Some of the more baroque readings of the scene assign symbolic weight to the toys Helena picks up as she moves through the store, including a stuffed tiger (supposedly a callback to a similar toy seen earlier in the film in a sex worker’s bedroom) and a Barbie (a stand-in for sexualized innocence). Eick waves this off too. “I remember that I was improvising,” she says, “and the toys I picked up were just the ones I wanted, not because anyone told me to.”
After the shoot wrapped, Kubrick and the editor Galt spent the next 15 months shaping Eyes Wide Shut into more or less the exact movie you now know, says the latter. According to Galt, the last version Kubrick touched was “pretty much identical” to the one released in theaters. “After we showed Warner Bros. a cut,” he says, “Stanley and I discussed the things that remained outstanding. This was mostly about changing or adding a couple of establishing shots. The main titles had been set. The orgy scene is exactly the same length now as it was at the time of Stanley’s passing, and not a frame of that has ever changed” — aside from a few strategically placed computer-generated cloaked figures, added after Kubrick’s death to obscure the most explicit action and secure an R rating. Galt says that throughout the long postproduction process, to the best of his memory, Kubrick never once hinted at any real-life cults. “I sat next to Stanley in the edit room for 15 months, and the news that held his attention at the time was the war in Kosovo and the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.”
The edit was nearly complete, the finishing touches underway. Then, on March 7, 1999, Kubrick died. It probably wasn’t foul play. “He had a bad heart and died in his bedroom,” says Harlan. “He was 70 years old and looked about 120,” says Raphael. “He was very stressed, and producing that movie was enough to kill him. Nobody needed to hire anyone to do it.”
Of course, it’s always possible that everyone I spoke to was either in on a cover-up or too afraid of being murdered by a sex cult themselves to tell me the truth. Perhaps they coordinated their stories and lied. But if so, they didn’t coordinate very well. On some points, they directly contradicted each other. For example, Raphael insists that Sydney Pollack — who plays Victor Ziegler in Eyes Wide Shut and is an Oscar-winning director himself — did some editing work on the film’s billiards scene after Kubrick’s death. Galt calls this “utter nonsense.”
But one thing nearly everyone seems to agree on is that they’re dubious of what Roger Avary told Joe Rogan. Frewin says it’s “very unlikely” that Avary ever got his hands on a real shooting script for Eyes Wide Shut. Nobody I spoke to believed the film was missing any narration, either. A couple of Raphael’s early drafts included voice-over, but that idea was abandoned before postproduction. “Stanley never discussed the possibility of using narration during the edit,” says Galt.
And that explosive screening Avary claims to have heard about, the one where Kubrick supposedly got into a shouting match with studio execs? It never happened, according to Kubrick’s collaborators, who tell me Eyes Wide Shut had only three screenings while its director was still alive and there were no arguments at any of them. On March 2, 1999, Galt flew a print to New York and showed it first to Warner Bros. bosses Terry Semel and Bob Daly, then later that day to Cruise and Kidman, while Kubrick stayed home in England awaiting their reactions, which were reportedlypositive. On March 5, two days before Kubrick’s death, Cruise’s then-publicist, Pat Kingsley, watched it alone in the director’s home. “I didn’t see Stanley that day because he had a cold and stayed upstairs,” Kingsley tells me. “But we talked afterward by phone. I told him I was mesmerized by the movie.”
Still, maybe Avary knows something I don’t. He’s an Oscar winner and presumably knows more Illuminati than I do, so who am I to doubt him? I sent him an email. He initially agreed to talk, then disappeared for months, then finally replied to questions from a New York fact-checker.
Avary says he heard the anecdote about the post-screening fight from “a William Morris agent who claimed to have been outside the screening room of the studio in England.” He says it “should be taken with a grain of salt” and that he mentioned it on Rogan only because the agent in question is now deceased. As for his copy of the screenplay, he says that it’s dated August 4, 1996, and that it was given to him by a key member of the filmmaking team. It does include narration, notably during the morgue scene.
Asked about the toy-store sequence, Avary suggests Kubrick may not have shared the scene’s alleged subtext with Madison Eick. “I’ve worked with child actresses myself, and you never tell them everything,” he says. “In fact, you never tell any actor everything that’s happening. Too much information, especially for a child, creates a false artifice.” He also notes that his version of the script mentions, at several points, two anonymous men — like the ones who supposedly kidnap Helena — who seem to be trailing Cruise’s character.
The script Avary describes appears to match the purported early draft of Eyes Wide Shutthat has circulated online for years. (Avary says his “was not downloaded from the internet and looks completely different.”) NeitherFrewin or Galt or Harlan say they can confirm the legitimacy of that version, though some of its elements do correspond with fragments that are apparently preserved in the Kubrick archives. In any case, in this supposed draft, there is no suggestion that Helena is kidnapped. There’s no toy-store scene at all.
None of this, however, is likely to put a stop to any theorizing. Kubrick made movies in a time when ambiguity was better tolerated, a pact with the audience now seems outdated. Today’s viewers, trained by prestige TV, true-crime podcasts, and algorithmically optimized streaming movies—where characters routinely announce who they are, what they want, and what everything means—demand legibility. When a film refuses answers, or defies a single, authoritative meaning, it can feel less ambiguous than deliberately redacted. It’s not lost on me that, in undertaking this reporting, I was chasing a definitive answer, too.
“Kubrick’s films are riddled with knowledge of secret societies,” Avary says. “And Eyes Wide Shut feels like his most direct shot at it. It’s explicitly about a hidden elite cult wielding sex, death, and influence as tools of control. Eyes Wide Shut ends up feeling like a final chess move against power.” But, he adds, “it’s not that I endorse these conspiracy theories. It’s just cinema speculation, which for a suspicious guy like me and as a fan of Kubrick is fun to posit.”
I can remember my life before and after I saw the interview. In one of several promo radio chats for The Life of a Showgirl, Taylor Swift revealed her favorite lyric from the new album: “There’s a song called ‘Father Figure,’ where the first line of the second verse says, ‘I pay the check / Before it kisses the mahogany grain.’” She pauses and grins as if waiting for a gasp. It never arrives. She continues, undeterred: “I’m like, That’s my favorite type of writing, right? Where you have to think about, What do those words mean? Oh, somebody got the bill before it hit the table.”
Watching her explain the word mahogany, I knew I was doomed, both personally and as part of a larger species. I saw God himself signing the check for our obliteration (before it hit the table). It’s not just that Taylor Swift — one of our greatest aughts-era songwriters, who used to effortlessly shed lines like “You call me up again just to break me like a promise / So casually cruel in the name of being honest” — thought these lyrics constituted good descriptive writing. It’s not just that she smiles so proudly while providing an explicit description of paying a restaurant bill very quickly. It’s not just that the album also features the line “Did you girlboss too close to the sun?” and a startling, detailed account of how she plans to start a neighborhood full of children with inheritedCTE with the help of her fiancé’s gigantic football dick (“Have a couple kids / Got the whole block looking like you”). It’s that Swift wrote that mahogany line thinking, This is going to require a level of semiotic thinking that my audience is perhaps no longer capable of. And the thing is, she was absolutely correct. —Rachel Handler
The Stupiding of the American Mind
Within the first three minutes of Untamed, a 2025 Netflix drama about crime in the wilderness, two climbers scaling a mountain realize they’re in a tough spot. One of their anchors wobbles. A foot slips. Things already look iffy and then, from far above them, a dead body comes hurtling over the edge of the cliff, gets tangled in their ropes, and sends them careening off the rock face. Another Netflix show, Wayward, opens with a young man sprinting frantically out of what looks like a prison facility, covering his ears so he can’t hear the cultish mind-control texts being blasted at him from somewhere in the darkness. And in the first scene of Pulse (you guessed it — also Netflix), a school bus full of teens plunges off a bridge into a stormy ocean.
From a distance, it looks like a good strategy. Grab the audience instantly. Leave no space for viewers to feel bored or unengaged. Front-load the first 90 seconds of any new drama with peril, death, catastrophe, and contextless clues. Netflix is the worst but not the only offender here. This whack-you-with-a-plot mentality has proliferated on Prime this year, too. Take Ballard, which begins with Maggie Q holding an enormous gun while chasing someone through darkened streets and shattering a glass window before the guy sprawls on the floor in front of her. We Were Liars drops us into underwater footage of an unconscious woman with a head wound as the voice-over says, “Something terrible happened last summer, and I have no memory of what, or who, hurt me.” Each opening gambit becomes an advertisement for the thing you’re already watching, a blast of spoon-fed emotional stakes that treat viewers as mindless, tasteless sacks of nerve endings sensitive only to the highest-grade stimuli.
It all comes off as a cynical bid for attention based on an understanding that audiences do not react to insight or nuance or thoughtful tone-setting. No need to question, no need to wait for gratification. Even the shows aiming for prestige have to play along, at least in those first few minutes. The Beast in Me, a Claire Danes thriller, will show Danes, streaked with blood and wailing, scant seconds after we first hit “play.” For series that want to dodge the obvious choices of “person running through woods,” “person drowning,” or “instant discovery of corpse,” House of Guinness provides a model that’s somehow even more ridiculous than those. The show, about a somber, political Succession-style struggle over the future of the family business, doesn’t lend itself well to bodies falling off a cliff, so it cuts straight to big, flashing, wall-décor-style onscreen text that articulates exactly what this thing is about: Water. Malted Barley. Hops. Yeast. Copper. Oak. Fire. Family. Money. Rebellion. Power. —Kathryn VanArendonk
If the essential quality of good theater (as my colleague Sara Holdren has written) is that it should be something that can happen only in a theater — that it’s alive in the room with you, capable of literally leaping into the audience should the participants decide to do so — the relentless creep of giant glittering screens is its opposite. Now a staple of set design, the device does often serve some purpose: Jamie Lloyd’s production of Sunset Blvd. and George Clooney’s turn in Good Night, and Good Luck earlier this year, or Network and 1984 a few seasons back, deploy them to talk about issues of image and reality and surveillance. But in the actual room, the eye almost inevitably goes to the moving jumbotron image instead of the person, whether it’s a tracking shot of Nicole Scherzinger or merely projected clouds drifting behind the cast. When it’s a live feed, an extra problem can come into view: Because stage performance calls for bigger gestures and expressions than acting for the camera does, a real Broadway belter’s face can show up onscreen as a lot of straining neck cords and visible tonsils. The theatrical stage is the one place where — over 2,500 years or so — practitioners have figured out how to convey storytelling directly from one person to a roomful of viewers, fusing music and drama and comedy and dancing in three full dimensions. Now, somehow, we’ve pushed it back to two. —Christopher Bonanos
Earlier this year, I signed up to teach a course at the same prestigious university I’d attended more than a decade ago. The syllabus I prepared required students to read a short book for several of our sessions, which seemed reasonable. When I was in college, professors routinely assigned an entire novel or biography for a single class session.
A few months before the semester began, my proposed syllabus was reviewed by an academic committee. I was excited for feedback from experienced instructors, anticipating strong opinions on thematic consistency with pedagogical objectives and general rigor. But the only feedback I received was to make the readings shorter. The suggested limit was fewer than 100 pages per class, ostensibly to encourage accountability. I revised the syllabus. Narratives with movement and arc became excerpts and snapshots, curated to relay the essence and little else.
Is this really so bad? The truth is that when I was assigned a full book to read in college, I failed to finish it more often than not. But there was something in being told to try anyway, in the implication that a book worth assigning is worth experiencing in its entirety, and that the truth is best when distilled from the whole story. Students, meanwhile, are the same as ever. The ratio might have changed, but there is still a core who read and participate diligently, and I wish they could have reaped more benefit from my assignments. The rest have not done the truncated readings any more than they would have read a full book, but now they feel less guilty about it. —Anonymous
Watching debates is not a good way to learn things and form opinions about those things — change my mind! Over the past few years, debate as an activity has broken out of high-school extracurriculars, political elections, and cable news and has come to infect media and discourse at all levels. And now, it has escaped the manosphere containment zone. Debate content was once the limited domain of “Debate me, coward” dweebs like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, but in 2025, debate clips took over the internet, their snippets edited to reinforce the biases of the poster: Sam Seder “owning” Ethan Klein on leftist news feeds, the reverse on Zionist ones; Mehdi Hasan arguing with, essentially, Nazi youth. Outside the Twitch streams of individual debate-content creators like Destiny, much of this stuff comes from Jubilee, a digital-media company with 10.5 million YouTube subscribers that professes a corporate mission to “provoke understanding & create human connection.” Jubilee structures these oratorical face-offs like dystopian MrBeast challenges: “1 Conservative vs 20 Feminists,” starring Candace Owens. “1 Conservative vs 25 LGBTQ+,” starring Michael Knowles. The guest debater sits at a table with a chess timer in the middle of a circle of challengers, who enter the ring one after another to get TKO’d in a sort of battle royal for dorks.
The thing about debate as a rhetorical format is that it’s generally a dumb way to consume information. Winning strategies are often not intellectually curious or even honest: spreading, an overreliance on hounding an opponent about logical fallacies, overwhelming with a rapid-fire litany of (possibly incorrect) data, dodging, and needling. They’re more about persuasion than communication, more about building a case backward from a preordained point than building up toward something. When Charlie Kirk argues that trans women aren’t women (against 25 liberal college students), or when Mehdi Hasan faces off against 20 far-right conservatives, at least two of which turned out to be self-avowed fascists, a series of hateful, harmful lies gets repackaged into “points,” like neat little coins in a video game, toward settling a larger score. It’s brain rot with a veneer of serious infotainment. —Rebecca Alter
Rebecca Yarros occupies a rarefied spot on the best-seller list. Twelve million copies of her horny dragon books have sold in the U.S. in less than two years. The Empyrean series, which follows a young woman surviving military school with the help of a mind-body connection to a pair of dragons, was initially planned for three volumes, then stretched to five. When the third, Onyx Storm, appeared in January, it became the fastest-selling adult novel in 20 years — a curious fact given that the book is borderline incomprehensible. Of course, few readers flock to this series for its prose, but the first volume’swar-college setting, where students gather in the quad every morning to honor their peers who died the day before, scratched a dystopian-fantasy itch I hadn’t felt since completing the original Hunger Games trilogy. Onyx Storm, however, is packed with so many new characters, locations, and magical abilities that I had to use a fan-made guide to keep track of it all. A quarter of the way through, I lost track of why exactly the main characters abandon the war to end all wars brewing in their homeland to travel halfway around the world, and I eventually stopped trying to understand it altogether. —Julie Kosin
When the first Jurassic Park premiered in 1993, reviewers found plenty to admire — its originality, the cinematography, Laura Dern. But a more consistent point of praise was how the movie, in many ways taking its cues from the novel it was based on, committed to accurate, or at least plausible, science. “It was the most scientific and realistic vision of dinosaurs we’d ever had,” paleoartist John Gurche told Le Monde earlier this year. One historian wrote that the film “did actually drive and develop the science and technology of ancient DNA research.” That has changed somewhat — we now know manymost dinosaurs had feathers and velociraptors were built like poodles — but even now, Dern and an ascot-adorned Sam Neill manage to deliver lines that are conceivable to the average fan with a museum-placard level of paleontology knowledge.
This is part of the reason why, when Jurassic World: Rebirth came out earlier this year, fans were disappointed not only with its meandering plot but also by the way the film’s principal paleontologist, Dr. Loomis (a distractingly hot Jonathan Bailey), occasionally felt, let’s say, unconvincing. “The greatest scientific knowledge that he demonstrates at any point in the film is high-school level biology,” wrote an aggrieved redditor. One paleontologist speculated that, “as opposed to the first film — no paleontologist had been seriously consulted.” (The movie does credit a scientific consultant.) Of course, all six Jurassic sequels have had their scientific follies (hello, mutant locusts of Jurassic World: Dominion). But the plot of Rebirth was science-fudging less in the name of spectacle than convenience. I will spare you the entire plot, but know that it relies in part on the idea that dinosaurs can live only near the equator — a detail repeated three times in the film’s first 30 minutes — because of the warm climate and “oxygen-rich” atmosphere, which, Loomis says, is similar to what the climate was like 60 million years ago. If that sounds overly simplistic, don’t worry — it’s also just wrong. Oxygen levels today are fairly uniform worldwide and roughly the same as those in the age of the dinosaurs, and dinosaurs themselves lived in a wide range of climates. Other grievances include the fact that mosasaurs, the movie’s main species, aren’t actually dinosaurs and that, no, dinosaurs didn’t live to be centuries old because of their big hearts. Fortunately, Loomis offers another kernel of wisdom: “Intelligence is massively overrated as an adaptive trait.” —Paula Aceves
A 2024 Pew survey revealed that the group of U.S. adults most likely to consult astrology at least yearly is LGBTQ+ women, at 63 percent. Pew must not have surveyed anyone in Brooklyn: Based on my own observations, I would put the number at something closer to 102 percent. Belief in superstition and magic has peaked among my friends. They no longer just consult the planets and stars and tarot decks and Chani Nicholas; now they believe in moon phases exerting their control, bringing good and bad auspices and explaining why a Hinge date went a certain way or why everyone at work has the sniffles. I could abide tarot and astrology as tools for people to talk about their lives, but the moon stuff, to me, comes across as a symptom of some widely adopted serf mind-set, a response to the economic realities of widening wealth gaps and billionaires acting like sun gods. Throw in the rise in stories about AI-enabled religious psychosis, and the transformation of Etsy into Taskrabbit for witches,and 2025 was the year of people literally believing in ghosts in the machine. —R.A.
Typically, the Supreme Court has decided the weightiest matters through its “merits docket”: a multistep, sometimes yearslong process that involves the parties to a suit, plus interested experts and organizations, taking their best shot at making their case in writing. The justices grill advocates during oral argument and, when they’re ready, can write hundreds of pages to explain their reasoning and provide evidence and case law to back it up. It’s not that this process cannot yield outrageous or specious results, but at least the majority has to give the public an explanation.
This year, a more expedient track has been found. First, the Trump administration openly breaks the law as it has long been understood, then a lower-court judge rules against it, and then the administration appeals on the “shadow docket” — which avoids the normal briefing-and-hearing process by claiming an emergency. Since January, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, the Supreme Court has ruled at least partly for the Trump administration in 20 of an unprecedented 23 emergency appeals. In these late-night orders, the public is lucky to get a few sentences of justification. Seven had no written rationale at all. In one dissent on terminating federal grants, Justice Elena Kagan called the majority opinion’s reasoning “at the least underdeveloped, and very possibly wrong.” —Irin Carmon
The word interview used to mean something. At the very least, it implied a conversation aimed at extracting real information. That idea feels quaint in today’s video-driven media environment, in which the balance of power has flipped: Famous guests hold the power because they now have a million friendly alternatives, and hosts are just grateful to be there. The modern “interview” is thus fluffy by default, oriented more toward gimmicks, get-to-know-me games, and general sycophancy. Intentional dumbness is now virtue-signaling relatability. Beneath it all is a dynamic in which the aesthetic of the interview (people in chairs with microphones between them recalling a history of more serious images) carries more weight than the interview’s substance. That dynamic reached a peak this year when Benjamin Netanyahu appeared on the bro-y, sports-and-bullshit-heavy Full Send Podcast with the Nelk Boys in July. The segment, criticized for offering a soft platform to a world leader amid a devastating humanitarian crisis, included the following exchange:
Interviewer: “You ever tried Chick-fil-A?” Netanyahu: “Chick-fil-A is good, actually.”
—Nicholas Quah
All around me this year, I’ve observed more and more people succumbing to the ease and inaccuracy of Google’s automated summary. I first noticed the tendency to rely on AI for answers a few years ago on a family trip when an early-adopting relative told me it would be simpler to ask ChatGPT why Union soldiers won the Battle of Gettysburg than to look into a dreary, more detailed article. Ever since Google dropped the option to AI search into everyone’s hand, it’s felt as if we’ve entered a new era: one in which people know they’re consuming misinformation and just don’t care. I talked to a friend who told me she spent her time in a historic castle while on vacation in Portugal asking AI to explain what was in front of her. “It was probably wrong,” she told me, “but it captured enough of the vibe.” I knew we’d crossed the Rubicon when I noticed people using AI to ask subjective artistic questions. This past summer, I sat next to a woman at a performance of Evita who opened her phone at intermission, typed in “Why does Che narrate Evita,” and then stared at the box as if it would help her understand Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s decision-making process. It did not. —Jackson McHenry
It’s not just that Andrew Cuomo seems to hate New York City. Nor is it that everyone knows he sexually harassed former staffers. It’s not even that he was spanked in the primary and insisted on running anyway. The stupidest thing about Cuomo’s mayoral campaign, besides the fact of its existence, was his team’s wholehearted embrace of AI slop. In the spring, the campaign released a housing plan that turned out to have been put together using ChatGPT, then blamed this decision, and the plan’s typos, on an aide who has only one arm. That humiliation did not stop them. Cuomo’s people followed it up with a parade of AI-generated ads. The first featured an AI Cuomo incompetently driving a subway train and melting down on the NYSE trading floor paired with footage of the real Cuomo saying woodenly, “I know what I know, and I know what I don’t know.” How was emphasizing his inabilities supposed to help? No one explained, but this ad was nothing compared with those that followed: One blatantly racist, soon-deleted video featured an over-the-top AI-generated parade of “criminals” — including, incredibly, a Black shoplifter in a keffiyeh and a Black pimp with a van full of battered white women — cheerfully boosting Zohran Mamdani. On Halloween, Cuomo’s campaign released an ad showing an AI-generated Mamdani trick-or-treating and scooping big handfuls of candy out of a bowl offered by an appalled couple while crowing, “I’m a socialist! Some people need to get tricked so others get a treat!” These videos are so bad that, even while we watch them, it’s hard to believe they exist — that actual people were paid actual money to release them. It’s even harder to believe they thought the ads would make this loser win. —Madeline Leung Coleman
Chase Infiniti in One Battle After Another. Photo: Warner Bros.
At a press conference on October 21, House Speaker Mike Johnson — appearing in his usual mien: bespectacled, boyishly coiffed, and vaguely offended, like a ninth-grader confronted with a pop quiz on picture day — confidently blamed the left for advancing an “assassination culture” that is endangering American public servants. “They call every Republican a fascist now,” he said. The comment itself was unremarkable. Since the September 10 murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump and the GOP have labeled anti-fascist activists “domestic terrorists” and called on the FBI to investigate groups engaged in “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.”
What was a bit surprising — galling, really — was the occasion for Johnson’s remark: A reporter had asked him about an upstate New York man charged with threatening the life of the Democratic House minority leader. “Hakeem Jeffries makes a speech in a few days in NYC. I cannot allow this terrorist to live,” 34-year-old Christopher Moynihan allegedly texted an associate. “Even if I am hated he must be eliminated. I will kill him for the future.” It would not be Moynihan’s first hostile act toward an emblem of U.S. democracy. On January 6, 2021, he was one of the first rioters to break the police line and breach the Senate chamber; later, he was one of the more than 1,500 pardoned by Trump on his first day in office.
Pointing out MAGA hypocrisy is a chump’s game; likewise, looking for consistency, integrity, or the spark of human charity behind Speaker Johnson’s tortoiseshell frames. For sanity’s sake, I will state the plain facts: A man pardoned by the sitting president after engaging in a riot on his behalf was apprehended a second time, for allegedly threatening to kill a leading Democrat — and this, according to the Speaker of the House, is the fault of leftists. Here we have escaped the confines of syllogistic reason altogether; discerning the relationship of one event to another is merely a matter of whim and will.
But then a lot of fuzzy thinking and adventurous causality have characterized our new fixation on political violence. There is wide agreement that we are seeing something new — or at least something we haven’t seen since the 1960s, when assassinations were commonplace and propagandistic terror was a regular tactic in the arsenal of domestic radicals. The recent examples are well known: two assassination attempts against Trump, the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO last December, the firebombing of the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion in April, the murder of a Minnesota Democratic lawmaker and her husband in June, Kirk’s assassination, and an attack on an ICE facility in Dallas that killed two migrant detainees in late September.
In another era, we might expect the political promiscuousness of these targets to induce a détente between the factions (i.e., we won’t blame you guys if you don’t blame us). But that’s not how it’s worked out. Amid a syncopated cascade of assaults, partisans play a perverted game of hot potato: Whoever is holding the ball when the music stops is responsible. If the latest shooter is plausibly left wing, the right is faultless, and vice versa, until the next round begins. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but everybody plays. (And sometimes, of course, you cheat. In the Moynihan case, Johnson found himself holding the ball and threw it at his opponent’s chest.)
Despite the extreme hostility animating this game, Americans generally agree that politically motivated violence is on the rise — 85 percent in a recent Pew poll. This I find a bit strange. For one, by any reasonable measure, it remains incredibly rare. For another, our recent would-be assassins are far from the most legible ideologues. The politics of Kirk’s alleged shooter are ambiguous; messages on his bullet casings allude to online memes, gaming, and “furry” role-play. According to a transcript released by prosecutors, he complained, vaguely, about Kirk’s “hate.” Trump’s failed assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was a registered Republican who also donated $15 to ActBlue. In this way, the perpetrators are political normies; their outsider status is social. They are addicts, criminals, loners, and gamers. They tend to evince mental instability. Even Moynihan, who allegedly targeted Jeffries, was a drug-addicted drifter who seemed more politicized by participating in the Capitol riot — and perhaps by being pardoned — than he was inspired by any firm political conviction to attend in the first place. These men are a far cry from the white-nationalist militiamen or Marxist revolutionists who predominated previous eras of American political violence — closer to the profiles of school shooters than those of the Weather Underground.
In this light, Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, One Battle After Another, in which Teyana Taylor, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Regina Hall play members of a fictional leftist terrorist organization, the French 75, is instructive and timely. Too timely, perhaps. Conservative critics complain it has romanticized political violence in the wake of Kirk’s assassination, while leftists, pilloried by pundits and politicians for their irreverent response to Kirk’s death, relish its favorable depiction of militancy. It is Anderson’s curious fortune to have conjured a fantasy of the American left — organized, disciplined, judiciously violent — that exists, today, only in the fevered imaginations of the MAGA faithful and the impotent daydreams of online radicals. Once again, thanks to cinema, Americans are dreaming the same dream.
But what dream is that? Perhaps what we are together wishing for — unconsciously and perversely — is that our recent paroxysms of public violence were more politically legible rather than less, ideologically articulate rather than mealymouthed, opaque, deranged, and deranging. In our America, unlike Anderson’s, the breakdown between violence and everyday life mostly occurs within individual psyches, fragile American-made minds, without need for revolutionary guidance. It was admittedly unmooring to watch the opening sequence of One Battle After Another, in which radicals invade an ICE detention center, just days after the attack, by gunfire, on the facility in Dallas. But the difference between fiction and reality is pitifully stark: In Anderson’s film, the French 75 free the detainees, imprison the guards, and escape in a hail of fireworks. In Dallas, the suspected shooter — who authorities say intended to hit ICE agents — acted alone, managed to shoot three detainees, killing two, and then shot himself. Like Kirk’s alleged killer, friends remember him as internet-obsessed and not particularly political. “He liked playing video games,” one has said. Of Norlan Guzman-Fuentes, the first detainee killed during the shooting, ICE said in a statement he “suffered a senseless and tragic fatal gunshot wound during a senseless sniper assault on the ICE Dallas Field Office.” Senseless. It’s an odd word to use — twice — about an event the administration says “lays bare the deadly consequences of Democrats’ unhinged crusade against our border enforcement.” Can violence be both senseless and entirely explicable?
And what about violence that does not count as political? The state remains unapologetically violent. At least 20 detainees have died in ICE custody this year, the most since 2005. More than 1,000 Americans have been killed by police. Overall, our citizens kill themselves and each other with guns at astronomical rates — an estimated average of 125 per day. White men most often commit suicide. Huge numbers of women are shot and killed by their intimate partners. And gun homicide remains the leading cause of death for young Black men. We treat these cases as the acceptable background noise of American life. They are not “political,” so they do not require us to examine our politics.
When it comes to violence, we are ambivalent about sense-making. On the one hand, we yearn for answers, for reasons, for satisfying culprits and mechanical explanations. But on the other, we are devoted to ignorance, worshipful and protective of our non-understanding, and entranced by the logic of sacrifice, in which certain especially tragic deaths (like those of children), in their senselessness, promise redemption: “a forfeiture that purifies,” as gun-violence expert Patrick Blanchfield has written. To explain, we fear, is to rationalize, and to rationalize is to justify. Or perhaps we have already rationalized a deathly social order and we don’t want to look at it closely. We do not know whether we want to know ourselves.
In 1966, Susan Sontag put her finger on a constitutive American contradiction: that we are simultaneously “an apocalyptic country and a valetudinarian” one. Americans are obsessed by visions of doom and catastrophic violence, and we are temperamentally timorous, oversensitive, health-conscious, and fearful of death to the point of neurosis and unreality. We are a nation of end-times preachers, political militants, and holy warriors who consult longevity influencers, count calories, and go to the gym every day; we can’t decide whether to make the country Great Again via millenarian nationalism or make it Healthy Again by regulating food dyes. “The average citizen may harbor the fantasies of John Wayne,” Sontag wrote, “but he as often has the temperament of Jane Austen’s Mr. Woodhouse.” In this respect, Donald Trump, a tetchy germophobe dazzled by visions of lethal order, is utterly average.
Under ideal circumstances, this tension — between, shall we say, enmity and enema — suits American interests just fine. Within our borders, fretful self-absorption prevails: safety, security, hypochondria, and hygiene, racial and otherwise. Our repressed barbarity provides the psychic energy for American “dynamism,” that enviable attribute, by which is meant voracious acquisitiveness and frantic, death-fleeing work. Meanwhile, we export our uninhibited fantasies abroad, where the American taste for earth-shattering violence is given free rein. These military adventures, in turn, guarantee (in principle) the security of the homeland, where well-showered Americans can go on buying things and worrying over the end of the world, blissfully unaware that the world ends — every single day — for people other than themselves.
It takes a great deal of effort, mental and martial, to keep these spheres separate. Despite our harried sublimation, Sontag writes, “naked violence keeps breaking through.” Naturally, this state of affairs raises the salience of the border, where hefty maneuvering is required to preserve psychic balance. The country’s best filmmakers have always understood this sleight of hand: how American brutality is transformed into salutary myths of moral cleanliness. In John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), the rugged John Wayne undertakes an act of extralegal violence that allows Jimmy Stewart — pure and meek — to survive and take credit for bringing peace to the frontier. The truth of this arrangement is then suppressed so that the legend can be printed in the paper as fact.
This is the essential American plot: Out of chaos, a new civilization is born, underwritten by an originary, ennobling crime. “Civilization,” in the American western, writes Garry Wills, “promises to replace death and the gun with law and life.” When the civilized order is imperiled, by external threat or internal decay, the frontier remains, in the American imagination, a potential theater for recuperative violence.
Later iterations of this myth would be less subtle and elegant than Ford’s. (Wayne’s 1968 effort, The Green Berets, which displaces the frontier to Vietnam’s 17th parallel, is a case in point.) Today, American film and television are lousy with special-forces units, police detectives, and secret agents who use illegal and inhumane means (often including torture) to restore order and protect the innocent. Sometimes these bad but necessary men, like Wayne in Liberty Valance, are consumed by guilt and drink — and, in a last feeble gesture of moral purgation, die alone in despair.
We Americans love these stories for their psychic parsimony: They redeem the violence underpinning the social order while allowing us to remain, at once, tut-tutting bystanders to its cruelty and deliciously complicit in its excess. They venerate and authorize the law while preserving a vital place for the exception. They elevate American innocence and barbarity — our chief vices — to foundational virtues.
I suspect our present fixation on assassination and political violence recapitulates this fantasy. Some do long for a lone vigilante martyr to right the wrongs of our civilization with one glorious act of violence. Of the recent contenders, only Luigi Mangione, who allegedly assassinated the UnitedHealthcare executive, has achieved anything approaching folk-hero status. But political esteem for Mangione has faded into camp, irony, and juvenilia. He is no John Wayne.
For the most part, something more subtle is going on. What seems to animate our discourse about political violence is not identification with the assailants but a sort of prefigurative identification with the forces of order, those capable of reasserting control. Political violence — everyone seems to agree — threatens the constitutional order; it is undeniable evidence of our unraveling. Its elimination, then, promises restoration, a new order born from the ashes of the old. For the right, this fantasy is straightforward. Donald Trump is the gunslinger who has come to slay the forces of chaos and break a few rules (habeas corpus, the First and Fourth Amendments) to establish an empire of rule-following.
For the liberals, MAGA represents the menacing bandit gang; Trump & Co., with their vulgarity and contempt for norms, have frayed the social fabric. Liberals await an avenging authority — a new kind of candidate, a sufficiently ballsy prosecutor, a judge or general — to come along and clean up the neighborhood. The authoritarian chaos of the past decade demands a renewal of the liberal order in a more muscular form. It isn’t clear in what guise this new sheriff will arrive, but the liberals are desperate to see him ride into town.
Our current stories of political violence index all these aspirations, allowing us to imagine that a new civilized order is in the offing, if only the right sort of force can be (temporarily) applied. The perennial American delusion is that purgative violence can be used to restore our blamelessness, our purity. And many people all over the world — surrogate bandits and Comanche — have suffered for it. As Sontag noted in her 1966 essay, it was once possible to “jeer, sometimes affectionately, at American barbarism and find American innocence somewhat endearing.” But that was before the American empire held the planet’s “historical future in its King Kong paws.” It is incredible that a country so idiotic and prone to neurotic excess has managed to keep the world in its meaty grasp for so long, fondling it like Lennie with his mouse. America has made the world pay for its priggish delusions of sanity. It will surely make the world pay for its nervous breakdown.
Betsy Aidem, Adina Verson, Irene Sofia Lucio, Audrey Corsa, and Susannah Flood rehearsing the opening scene of Act Two. Photo: Sara Messinger for New York Magazine
Causes for hope can feel perilously scarce these days. In such a dire season of the spirit, it matters to hear from characters like the ones in Liberation, the extraordinary play by Bess Wohl transferring to Broadway in late October. Set in the 1970s at the meetings of a feminist consciousness-raising group — as well as in the present day, when a narrator (Susannah Flood) is telling the story of the group her mother founded — the show goes down like a bracing tonic, an antidote for the dark. It’s powered not by celebrities but by a company of superb New York theater regulars (the cast took home the Drama Desk Award for Best Ensemble) and engages in both exquisite character study and fervent political conversation — a thrilling dose of which occurs at the start of the second act during a pivotal 15-minute scene in which six cast members are entirely naked.
Like all of Liberation, the scene is funny, contemplative, and paper-cut sharp, a coup de théâtre for reasons beyond its state of undress. The show’s website discloses the nudity, and audience members are asked to put their phones in pouches during the performance, but even so, the actors tell me they’ve experienced a whole gamut of responses. “I remember this middle-aged woman was so scandalized,” says Audrey Corsa. “Guys,” says her castmate Irene Sofia Lucio, raising a practiced eyebrow, “we once heard the word titties!” Everyone groans. But, adds Flood, “the majority of people are swept up in the magic of what the scene accomplishes.” “Yes,” say several voices, one of them Betsy Aidem’s: “They don’t want someone to break the spell.”
What kind of work goes into building such a bold, prolonged, quite literally exposed sequence? To find out more, I’m sitting in on a rehearsal, and I’m not alone. My mother helped me wrestle the stroller off the subway — in it, my 4-month-old daughter is, for the moment, beatifically passed out.
Wohl had wanted to write a play about the feminist movement of the 1970s for what she calls “an embarrassingly long time, maybe 15 years.” Her mother, Lisa Cronin Wohl, worked at Ms. Magazine, and Wohl remembers going to the office with her and playing in “the tot lot.” Later, she’d go on marches with her mom and her mom’s friends. These women had been living in her head for years, but it wasn’t until she realized that she was trying to write more than a straightforward “historical play” that the project cracked open. “I didn’t even know I was writing a mother-daughter play for a while,” says Wohl. “It became a quest to understand my mom.”
Wohl’s drive as a playwright is to “put something onstage that I haven’t seen before.” For her, the image of multiple women “talking about their bodies and being naked but not being sexualized” — not “titillating or gratuitous” but compassionate and curious and rigorous — “felt a little bit radical.” It’s also historically accurate: Some feminist CR groups did indeed hold naked meetings, and Wohl — who interviewed around a dozen members of such groups while researching for the play — quickly discovered how meaningful the practice was. “It was something that the women talked about a lot and were very proud of,” she says. “This felt like a way that I could represent what they actually did — their bravery.”
Photo: Sara Messinger for New York Magazine
Susannah Flood, top and above, in rehearsal. Photo: Sara Messinger for New York Magazine
The show’s director, Whitney White (who earned a Tony nomination for Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, her Broadway debut), was aware that its nude scene would require real forethought. “I knew it would be something we’d have to dig deep for and get comfortable with and do the right way,” she says before adding wryly, “And full disclosure: I was an actor who had a horrible experience being nude onstage several times. So I often let that guide me. Like, Can you just do better than what you had?” When the show moved into rehearsal for its original Off Broadway run at Roundabout Theatre Company earlier this year, White and her team filled the room with research material. She turned to Adam Curtis’s documentaries and Angela Davis’s writing as well as news clips from the era. “What is the average American digesting?” White asks. “You could look at high art and cinema all you want, but what’s the everyday? What was on ABC at the time?”
Such sensitive, granular world-building allowed the actors, says White, “to build real women that could be different” from themselves. “We really tried to make Venn diagrams: What is similar between the character of Susie and the actor playing her, and what’s radically different? From gender presentation to all kinds of things. That made the intimacy work feel depressurized.”
A caring — not to mention playful and deeply feminist — ethos suffuses Liberation’s rehearsal room. As the actors get underway with the big scene, you can feel it. They stretch and shake out their limbs and start to recite the dialogue while White asks questions and drops in reminders from the sidelines. Gradually, they move into more full-fledged scenework. “It is insane to me that my mother ever did this,” says Flood, as the narrator, breaking the scene’s fourth wall to address the audience. “I never even saw her naked.”
No one, however, is naked right now. That’s not the point of this rehearsal and, according to the show’s team, very seldom was. “We work the text like hell, over and over, because that’s really more important,” White says. “I feel like the great challenge of the scene is to get the audience to remember that there is so much more going on, that the nudity is this tiny fraction.” I’m witnessing this rigor on its feet as White leans forward at certain moments while the actors work: “Clean that up,” she says. “Stay alive … Project it less; mean it more.”
Wohl’s characters are doing an exercise recommended by Ms. “The idea,” says Corsa’s Dora, who has brought in the magazine, “is we all go around and say one thing we love and one thing we hate about our bodies.” Kristolyn Lloyd’s Celeste, an uncompromising intellectual and the only Black woman in the group, is skeptical: “Frankly, I don’t exactly think we should be focusing on appearance at all.” But Lucio’s Isidora — an irresistibly uninhibited Sicilian filmmaker — is exuberant. “I love … my tits,” she says unapologetically. (“More Hamlet!” calls out White, and Lucio repeats the line with all the gravity of “To be, or not to be.” It kills.) Aidem’s Margie, the oldest in the group in her late 60s, cuts deep as she confesses that she hates her C-section scar, and Adina Verson’s Susie — a motorcycle-riding butch who writes brilliant punk manifestos on the backs of napkins — wins a big laugh every time she delivers the character’s laconic self-assessment: “Ass, good; tits, feh.”
To get to the moment of removing clothes on the stage during the original production, the actors worked with intimacy director Kelsey Rainwater. As Corsa describes it, Rainwater acted “as a conduit to bring us all to a place where we felt comfortable knowing that we were all going to be at different levels of comfort.”
“She also set rules and boundaries,” says Lloyd. “ We don’t talk about our bodies. You don’t say anything you like or anything you don’t like.” “My character’s relationship to their body and my relationship to my body are quite different,” says Lucio. “Finding a way to bridge that, and to almost have Isidora’s body be a costume, has been really, really helpful.” She pauses, then grins slyly: “Some of us wear merkins in the show as well, which for me added another layer of This is a flesh costume for me.” There are a few hoots and hollers as the others agree or protest. “I did not want a merkin,” says Lloyd, drawing herself up with Miss Jean Brodie rectitude as her fellow actors cackle. “I’m perfectly capable of growing my own.”
Audrey Corsa, left, in rehearsal. Photo: Sara Messinger for New York Magazine
Once the scene had been thoroughly rehearsed, the actors switched from doing it fully clothed to attempting it in underwear or camisoles provided by the show’s designers. Team members put up curtains around the room and dimmed the lights, and, says Aidem, “they had anybody male leave the room when we did it the first time in our underwear.” Then, says Verson, “a few times later, we wondered, ‘Are we ready to do it topless?’” For Verson, the tempo eventually started to chafe a little: “It was like, Let’s just fucking do it! ” But Lloyd pushes back: “Being an other in this group and having the only chocolate nipples onstage, I needed the slowness.”
Still, the actors are passionately united when it comes to the scene’s importance. “We might be providing the audience an opportunity to overcome their discomfort with naked bodies, period — but especially naked female bodies,” says Flood.“And the fact that we’re on Broadway now, we’re saying that this kind of a discussion is commercially viable.” Verson nods in excitement: “I wish when I was a teenager, I could have seen regular bodies onstage. Like, look at all the different labia! Seriously, look at all the different mons pubises! They’re all normal.”
There’s another world where this cast takes the Broadway stage, at whatever level of dress, under America’s first woman president — another timeline in which Liberation might have felt, says Wohl ruefully, like “a celebratory play about how far we’ve come.” Instead, the show has become a vessel for both deep pain and lasting, unkillable hope. “Back in March when we did it,” Wohl remembers, “people were really coming into the theater with a need to be together in this moment and collectively understand what was happening. Which was also the protagonist’s search: How did this happen? How did we get here? What went wrong?” She takes a breath. “It’s funny. I didn’t know, when we went back into rehearsals this time, how it would feel. Are the questions going to feel as urgent? Are they going to feel different? Are we more weary now? Are we more angry now? Where are we as a society? And I feel, actually, that so far the questions are still the same. They’ve just deepened in certain ways, and there’s a rawness to them. I guess we’re both more weary and it feels more urgent at the same time. It all turned out to be true.”
As my mother and I return home, I look at my daughter’s face. She’s sleeping again. “You know,” my mom says, “in college, my friend Beth was incensed that only the men had a sauna in the gym locker rooms. So one day we all just took off our clothes and marched through the men’s locker room in our towels to liberate the sauna. We were naked and all these big naked football players kept opening the door and — !” She makes a horrified face and laughs. I laugh too, and also I’m in awe. I never knew this till now.
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Charlotte, a young professional in her mid-30s who lives in Bushwick, started seeing her therapist following a serious mental-health crisis in 2021. (Like all the people referenced by first name in this story, Charlotte is using a pseudonym.) Although the therapist never revealed her politics, it became apparent over the years that she was a fairly observant Jew. At one point long before October 7, 2023, Charlotte told her therapist that she was pro-Palestine, and she said the information was accepted neutrally. But in the weeks after that cataclysmic day, Charlotte, who is also Jewish, felt deep in her bones that she couldn’t tolerate hearing anything in her therapy session other than “Free Palestine” echoed back to her — and she assumed that her therapist wasn’t up for that particular task. “I told her, ‘I don’t think that I can handle having a conversation where we don’t see eye to eye,’” Charlotte recalled. “And she said something like, ‘I understand why you feel the way you do, and I don’t think that we see fully eye to eye on this either. I respect that you have a lot of empathy and that you’re very troubled by this. And if it’s important that we have a conversation of equal opinion, then that might not be a productive conversation for us.’ She was very empathetic and caring.”
They moved on to other topics, but soon after the session, over email, Charlotte ended the relationship. She now sees a non-Jewish anti-Zionist therapist who she said understands her rage and grief but doesn’t quite grasp what she calls the “existential dark despair” of being Jewish right now. She thinks about her former therapist sometimes but doesn’t regret the switch. “I don’t think that I could be in a therapeutic relationship with somebody supportive of the State of Israel at this point. I wouldn’t feel like they have the same baseline understanding of what constitutes care and empathy and a good world,” she said. “I would not trust them enough to provide psychological care to me or to anyone, really.”
Joshua, a 30-something writer in Brooklyn, was facing perhaps the most common New York Jewish dilemma of his generation: He felt constantly stressed, trapped between conservative Zionist older family members and progressive anti-Zionist friends. His therapist — elderly, Jewish — was unable to listen neutrally as Joshua discussed his friends’ beliefs; instead, she openly argued against their viewpoints. Soon, the two found themselves in full-on debates about the nature of therapy itself. “I would argue that she was showing her hand too much and that I needed her to accept that these ideas were a large part of my life. We both lost our composure several times,” he said. “I think I took a lot of my general frustration around the fissures within the Jewish community out on her.” One session became so heated that Joshua ended the Zoom call midway through. Soon after, Joshua paused the sessions entirely, refusing his therapist’s requests to meet again to repair their relationship and restart. “I’m not particularly proud of my handling of the therapy,” Joshua wrote to me. He hasn’t seen a therapist since.
It took less than five minutes for Aubrey’s relationship with their new therapist to fall apart. Over a handful of sessions, the 37-year-old discussed their journey to sobriety, their struggles with neurodivergence at work, their nonbinary gender identity, their Jewishness, and their feelings of social isolation and grief since October 7, when many of Aubrey’s friends had declared themselves hard-line anti-Zionists, some of them calling Hamas’ attack and kidnapping of Israelis justifiable. Aubrey, who supports Israel as a Jewish state and homeland, had been plunged into social isolation with no one to talk to about their wrenchingly complicated feelings. They lost friends, cut off contact with a sponsee in their 12-step program, and ceased attending queer- and trans-focused recovery meetings. Aubrey had sought out a Jewish therapist with the hope that a shared culture could make talking about their current situation easier. The therapist “seemed like a person who was validating my experiences and feelings,” Aubrey told me from their living room in Queens, where the AC was cranked up on an unusually stifling September afternoon. “I felt like I could trust her and had positive hopes for the relationship.”
But as their third session wound down, the therapist explained that she had people in her life who were Palestinian activists and that she herself had split from her Zionist family. She said she knew colleagues who were accepting Zionist clients and didn’t have “weird dual ties.” She wondered if Aubrey would feel more “heard” with one of them. Aubrey was stunned. “I’m not anti-Palestinian or anything, and I would never hold anything against somebody who believes in Palestinian self-determination, because I also do,” Aubrey told her therapist. “I don’t see being pro-Palestinian as being anti-Israel.” Though Aubrey would have stayed in her care, the therapist continued to push to refer Aubrey to someone else. After the session, the two never spoke again.
In the months since the breakup, Aubrey has reflected on it frequently. The rejection jolted them, and what the therapist assumed about Aubrey’s beliefs offended them. “I had been seeking therapy to deal with the trauma of losing inclusive spaces,” Aubrey told me. “It felt really ironic. And hurtful.”
In the two years since Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel and the beginning of the brutal war in Gaza, the American Jewish community has ruptured. Hostile factions have formed over support of Israel, leaving just about everyone, no matter where they stand, feeling judged and alienated and angry. Colleagues and friends are horribly estranged. Family members aren’t speaking to one another. Some observant anti-Zionist Jews cannot find a place to comfortably pray. Others are afraid to gather, seeing news of deadly hate crimes, including one this Yom Kippur at a synagogue in Manchester, England. In New York City, which has the largest population of Jews in the U.S., Jewish people across the political spectrum have told me they’ve developed a new and persistent insecurity, wondering what assumptions others might be making about them and their beliefs. The terms Zionism and anti-Zionism have become proxy labels for unambiguous moral positions, said Halina Brooke, a psychotherapist and founder of the Jewish Therapist Collective, an online community that helps patients find Jewish practitioners and offers support to Jewish therapists. “When people see you as a living caricature of the worst of humanity, it’s a lot.”
Fraught relationships, guilt, loneliness, anger, anguish, fear — those are precisely the types of messy feelings often best explored in the sanctuary and confidentiality of a therapist’s office. Yet when Israel or Gaza comes up, it doesn’t take much to shatter the trust between therapist and patient. Sometimes it comes down to a single loaded word. “I’ve seen people who said their therapist said genocide and they freaked out, and then I’ve had people who themselves said genocide and their therapist freaked out,” said Yael, a Jewish therapist who works with both Zionist and anti-Zionist patients in the city. “Therapists are dropping their Jewish patients basically because they’re coming in saying, ‘My husband is Israeli, and I’m suffering,’ or ‘My father is Israeli,’ or ‘I went to Israel last summer,’” said Sasha, a Jewish psychotherapist in lower Manhattan. “They hear patients say, ‘I’m a Zionist, and it’s been really hard for me. I’ve lost a lot of my friends and family.’ And the therapist just immediately shuts it down. They are sending letters saying their values do not align.”
The contentiousness has extended beyond the cozy offices up and down Manhattan lined with John Gottman books and white-noise machines. It has ripped apart the consultation listservs and referral groups that therapists rely on to treat their patients. It has also created controversy in and around therapists’ professional organizing bodies, including the American Psychological Association and the International Psychoanalytical Association, over which topics can be discussed at conferences or what kinds of official statements should be published. In an era of desperate Facebook and Reddit pleas for like-minded practitioners (“Finding a Jewish therapist who isn’t anti-Israel?”; “Is my therapist a Zionist extremist?”; “Any other Jewish therapists feeling really alone?”), many Jews are coming to the sinking realization that some subjects are too sensitive for the therapist’s office. Eyal Rozmarin, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in Tribeca who asked to be identified as from Israel-Palestine, said the tension Jews are feeling that has spilled into therapy is particularly intense, even as the rupture has shaken so many non-Jews, too. “We were the center of one terrible story 80 years ago that has influenced the whole world with international law, and now we’re back in the center but the other way. We find ourselves in a very tricky position.”
The Catholics have confession, and the Jews have therapy,” my husband, a Jewish psychiatrist, said to me the other night as I mentioned how therapy has become, for so many New York City Jews, an awkward or contentious space. The history of the profession, especially in New York, is intricately tied up with the Jewish Diaspora — imported or informed by European Jews including Sigmund Freud, Viktor Frankl, and Alfred Adler as well as others who spread the burgeoning craft as they fled persecution in the 1930s and ’40s. More recently, a survey from the early aughts estimated that almost one in three psychiatrists in the U.S. were Jewish — compared with 13 percent of medical doctors — a figure that is especially striking when you consider how only 2.4 percent of the American population is Jewish. “Psychotherapy is a very Jewish profession,” Leonard Saxe, a social psychologist and scholar of contemporary Jewish life at Brandeis University, told me. “Jews, whether they are observant or not, are part of a culture that is introspective, questioning, and that sees personal responsibility as key,” Saxe said. “These issues are central to psychotherapy.”
The field is now populated with all kinds of practitioners, and the types of therapy that are practiced can look very different from those of a hundred, or even 20, years ago. The trope of the neutral observer sitting by a couch asking, “And how did that make you feel?,” has somewhat faded as a variety of modalities have evolved and gained popularity. Personal disclosures on the part of the therapist — once completely taboo — can now be seen as a potentially useful part of some practitioners’ therapeutic practice, a means to help patients relate and dig deeper. To varying degrees, a therapist’s background and experience have now entered the office, and patients increasingly want to know who their therapist really is. This itself puts therapists on the spot.
Philip Herschenfeld, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who has been in practice on the Upper East Side for 55 years, said that he, like many therapists, would not talk about his politics with patients but that some seek confirmation of their suspicions. “They may ask, ‘Are you outraged by what Netanyahu is doing? Are you outraged by what Hamas did?’ That sort of thing,” he told me. He handles those questions “analytically” by trying to understand what’s behind them. He may respond, “Are you trying to find out if we’re on the same team?”
Lynn Bufka, a clinical psychologist and head of the American Psychological Association’s psychology practice, said the matter of disclosing one’s relationship to Zionism or anti-Zionism is a bit of a gray area, but so is any kind of personal disclosure. “As a clinician, you think very carefully about the question of What do I reveal about myself and what I might be experiencing to any patient? and do so only in what you believe to be the interest of the patient,” she said. “It’s not about an opportunity to self-discover or to be joined with another person.”
Every topic is complicated in some way. Bufka said she had a colleague whose partner died after suffering from Parkinson’s disease. “When she has a new patient who comes in who has a family member with Parkinson’s, she has to think about, What does she say? What does she not say? How does this impact that?” If the therapist offers too much information about their own struggle with the illness, it could alienate the patient. But helping the patient relate to another person who understands what they are going through may bolster that patient’s ability to face the pain of the situation.
Kevin Hershey, a psychotherapist and licensed master social worker who practices in the Financial District, said that, for many patients, a therapist’s Zionism orientation (pro- or anti-) has become as significant as their gender or sexual identity, adding that he is seeing “way more need for Zionist and anti-Zionist therapists” on the therapist listservs he browses. One in particular is regularly inundated with specific stipulations. “I even saw one posting that was like, ‘I need a therapist who is a liberal Zionist who believes in a two-state solution,’” he said.
Some therapists — mostly anti-Zionists — have made their stance an explicit part of their treatment. Alex, a licensed master social worker in Brooklyn, identifies as anti-Zionist on their web page. “I believe in offering it as an indication that I’m a safe space for certain conversations,” they told me. I asked Alex if they had ever treated a Zionist patient, and they declined to answer, in deference to patient confidentiality. I rephrased my question: “As a policy, are you open to treating Zionist clients?” “I don’t think it would be safe or comfortable for someone who identifies as a Zionist to work with me — for them,” they said. “There would be a level of dissonance that would get in the way of their healing.”
“There’s a genocide of the Palestinian people happening, and there is a lot of focus on Jewish needs, anxieties, and perceived antisemitism,” Alex continued. “If there’s anything I say that I’d want you to publish, it would be that we have to decenter Jewish feelings.” They later clarified that they also see decentering as an active practice, urging their clients to go to rallies or to volunteer.
Another licensed mental-health counselor who sees lots of Jewish clients told me about patients they knew — people who had been actively examining their politics — who were unnerved when the therapists they saw asserted their own perspectives. The clients felt hemmed in and eventually sought new care, feeling “their therapists’ value system imposing on their sessions,” the counselor said.
In his own practice, when Hershey senses a patient wants to gauge his Zionism status, he double-checks that he has intuited their desire correctly: “I’ll ask, ‘Do you want to know what I think about this?’ Some of them have said ‘yes.’” Hershey is not Jewish but feels a kinship with the Jewish community, having participated in a Jewish social-justice leadership program. He has many Jewish patients and considers himself anti-Zionist, though he doesn’t advertise himself as such. “I’ve been pretty involved with Jewish Voice for Peace,” he told me. “I’ve told that to a couple Jewish clients. One is probably further to the left than I am about it, and I think, for him, it just helps him feel like he doesn’t have to explain himself so much.”
He also told that to an Israeli client, a woman whose stance he described as against settlements and in favor of a cease-fire but also very much wanting her homeland to continue to exist. Disclosing some of his own experience to her led to an outcome that seems rare in therapy offices and even less likely in the real world: “We discovered we can trust each other and really like each other and not have 100 percent alignment on everything.” Zionist friends of the client had cut off communication with her, and she was worried her anti-Zionist friends might do the same. She told Hershey that, though she dislikes JVP, she still felt comfortable talking to him: “She said, ‘It’s a relief that you and I can tolerate this ambiguity.’”
In a few stories I heard, the conflict in the therapist’s office just sounded like bad therapy: A Jewish attorney in her 30s told me that after October 7, when she started having panic attacks during her solo morning runs, her therapist, who was not Jewish, mentioned she had “heard Hamas was treating the hostages well.” Another client, who isn’t Jewish but has a Jewish wife, left the care of an older Jewish therapist after he implied she should vote for Andrew Cuomo because Zohran Mamdani is pro-Palestinian.
But for the most part, the therapists I talked to emphasized that they prize the patient’s therapeutic experience above all else, in some cases being hypervigilant not just about what they disclose but how they respond to their patients in the moment as they feel their stomach drop because of an offensive or divisive statement. “The whole point of therapy is to help the patient learn more about their own mind,” said -Herschenfeld. In general, “if somebody leaves their therapy over a political issue, there’s been some error on the part of the therapist, either in revealing too much or in taking a stand of some sort.”
Some therapists and patients told me therapy had been helpful and productive when it came to grappling with their angst over Israel. A 48-year-old Jewish woman in Brooklyn shared that she has felt more comfortable speaking openly about the war with her longtime therapist than with her husband, who disagrees with her on aspects of the conflict — an issue that has led to marital tension. I also talked to a Modern Orthodox queer woman in Sheepshead Bay who said her non-Jewish Caribbean therapist has listened neutrally — and with a lot of empathy — as she talks about her Zionism. Still, in many cases, I realized acrimony can have a way of creeping in despite therapists’ best intentions and regardless of the therapeutic modality. Sometimes “the patient is looking for a fight. That’s not uncommon,” Herschenfeld said.
Therapy, like so much else, is not a perfect art. “As therapists, our self is the tool,” Rozmarin said. “That’s what I have to work with — my insight, my thinking, my feeling, my unconscious.”
When a therapist has a patient who falls outside their comfort zone, cultural competency, or personal boundaries, the first step, said Bufka, “is always to try to consult with colleagues and say, ‘Here’s the dilemma I’m struggling with.’” Especially for therapists in private practice, that’s where email listservs, Facebook groups, and, more recently, Discord groups and Slack channels come in. But many people I talked to said that during the past two years, these listservs have themselves exploded over the same issues tearing therapists and clients apart.
Discussions about patient referrals have gone off the rails. Some therapists said forums that used to be populated by mundane questions about office space or insurance reimbursement have been overtaken by heated altercations, some devolving into arguments about whether it’s even acceptable to devote time and space in these forums to questions about Jewish patients. Some Jewish therapists have left these forums entirely.
“If someone is looking for anything for a Jewish person who’s been through trauma — let’s say someone says, ‘I need a Russian-speaking therapist for a Jewish family whose house burned down,’ that was one of them — the comments will be full of ‘I wonder if maybe it’s good for them to know what it’s like in Gaza.’ And it’s, like, this is a family that has never lived in Israel. This is their house in Westchester,” said Brooke, the founder of the Jewish Therapist Collective.
In Chicago earlier this year, a member of an anti-racist therapists’ Facebook group was reprimanded by the Illinois professional licensing body for creating and distributing a blacklist of therapists with Zionist affiliations. Some on the list had not publicly identified themselves as Zionist; they told Jewish Insider their only unifying factor was being Jewish. (In a twist, some redditors began recommending the blacklist as a resource for Zionist patients.) In February 2025, a group called Psychologists Against Antisemitism sent an open letter to the APA calling for, among other things, decorum on its listservs, where they say members have openly cheered for Hamas. (In July, the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace sent its own open letter to the APA endorsing a petition from Psychologists for Justice in Palestine that demands the APA change its definition of antisemitism to allow for open criticism of Israel and its supporters.)
Brooke told me she founded the Jewish Therapist Collective after an incident in a national therapists’ Facebook group in which a non-Jewish therapist asked if anyone could help with a Jewish patient feeling anxiety. A few Jewish therapists responded in the comments section to offer their guidance. “Then, all of a sudden, someone came in and went, ‘How dare you focus on Jews right now?’ Essentially as though one Facebook post would rob the space for another,” she said. “And the poor original poster apologized and turned off comments and said she was going to think about her transgressions.” (She said this Facebook group is no longer active.)
The fighting in the mental-health profession isn’t limited to online spaces or national organizations. A few months ago, the famed psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk was banned from teaching at the Omega Institute, a holistic education center upstate, after he went off-script from his talk about trauma therapy and compared Israelis to Nazis in front of an audience that included American Jews and Israelis as well as at least one descendant of Holocaust survivors. Van der Kolk later issued an apology, calling his comments “gratuitous, offensive, inaccurate and completely unnecessary.” In an email to New York Magazine, however, he wrote that he now regrets the “over the top” language in his apology and wished he had instead compared what is happening in Gaza “to what Andrew Jackson did to the Seminoles in their ‘trail of tears.’” He said in his Omega Institute talk he was speaking about how the “deep need to belong often leads to people applying completely different moral standards to their own communities.”
For Brooke, anecdotes like this underscore why many Jewish therapists have come to feel they need separate, insulated spaces for professional support. Her group now has thousands of members, many of whom, she said, use it as their primary place for referrals and advice. “The Jewish flight from greater therapy spaces to more insulated ones — we have a right to do it, and it’s important that we find care for ourselves,” Brooke said. “But my goodness, the therapists who’ve pushed us out — they have no idea the emptiness of insight that is left when the Jews leave.”
For those of us who believe in therapy at all, it’s as a place to unpack and process our heaviest issues so each of us can face the world with a deeper understanding of ourselves and a better ability to handle hardship and conflict. But when there is so much estrangement that even a longtime therapist can’t be trusted, who can be confided in? And if we can no longer use the therapist’s office as a place to explore the dark nuances of our own grief and confusion, where can we go instead?
When the first therapist I interviewed told me a therapeutic relationship could be wrecked by the mention of a Birthright Israel trip, I laughed. The idea seemed absurd. But over the hours I spent talking about it with therapists, I started to understand how quickly things could go sideways. Every so often, I felt it: the jolt of awkwardness and dislocation as I took in a comment that struck me as out of bounds — potentially even interview-ending if I’d failed to maintain a neutral demeanor. Patients and therapists, Zionist and anti-Zionist alike, blithely shared extreme viewpoints that I would have found disqualifying had they been uttered by my own therapist or that, I imagine, would have been hard to hear week after week if I were their therapist. One used the R-word to describe anti-Zionists. Another suggested there is beauty in the idea of the Jews being a placeless people. My mind flashed to my traumatized Jewish grandparents emerging from a forest in what is now Belarus, homeless and nationless, after narrowly escaping the fate of their own children, spouses, siblings, and parents. I struggled for a moment when someone referred to October 7 as “an infringement.” When another person suggested Jews shouldn’t draw attention to their anxiety, I felt sort of abandoned — like I was being told I wasn’t deserving of help.
More than a few times, I was also struck by the fact that the therapist across the Zoom screen was really wise. Gently, as they shared their therapeutic philosophies, I found my own thinking adjust. I momentarily regretted that I had now made myself ineligible to be their patient. With those practitioners, I wanted to disclose more.
Sometimes, when a therapist teared up sharing a story of discomfort or their own difficulty in dealing with this moment, I felt as if I were the therapist’s therapist. I could see how much this crisis pained them on so many levels. But the stories that really stuck with me were from Jewish patients who had been scared off from therapy entirely after alienating experiences or, somewhat more hauntingly, who love working with their therapist and find themselves unwilling to risk the breach that might occur if they shared how they feel or the hard things they grapple with about their Judaism. With so few like-minded Jews to talk to, they can’t afford to lose another important relationship and disrupt a peaceful rapport.
Eliza, who lives on the Upper West Side, was on maternity leave with her second daughter on October 7, 2023. Like many Jewish mothers I know, she struggled to turn away from the news and photos of slain and kidnapped Jewish children, seeing her own babies looking back at her. She became familiar with individual hostage stories and grieved the victims as if they were her own family members. She talked about this often with her therapist, who helped her feel less broken and abnormal for letting a tragedy that happened to strangers affect her so deeply. On one particularly rough news day, Eliza broke down in tears, and her therapist, perhaps no longer able to keep her guard up, or perhaps having intentionally opted to disclose her own emotions, began to weep too. At the time, the shared grief was healing — an emotional release for Eliza alongside the best therapist she’d ever had. But months later, Eliza has come to realize that knowing the depth of her therapist’s sadness and connection to Israel is also getting in the way of her own evolution.
As time passed and the hostages became less central to the news, Eliza told me she has been able to look at the situation as more of an uninvolved observer, and she has diversified her reading with books about the history of the land. In doing so, her support for Israel has begun to waver. The process has left her at loose ends: “I feel like I shouldn’t be wishy-washy. I’m confused, and I feel like I shouldn’t be confused, like I should be able to take a stance quickly. Why does my mind feel like cobwebs all the time — like I’m still trying to figure out what I’m thinking and what is real?” She told me she also carries shame that her parents are proud Zionists who lived on a kibbutz and that she herself feels attached to what they love about the country. She hasn’t told her therapist about any of this.
“My husband will be like, ‘Did you talk to her today?’ And I can’t — there’s a block. I don’t want her to be disappointed in me, and I don’t want to feel that way about her. But it’s fine,” Eliza told me, hurrying the interview to its conclusion. “Honestly, I’ve moved past it.”
Long novels demand respect. Entering a bookstore and picking up a 600-page literary novel, many readers will make an instinctive calculation: This must be serious. No author would spill so much ink without having something essential to say. A reader’s expectations may rise further if the writer were, say, a hermetic celebrity who has not published a book for 19 years — and higher still if that famous novelist were writing about writing, staking her claim on the form of the novel itself.
In this instance, the writer is Kiran Desai, the novel is The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, and the page count is 688. Booker longlisted already, it’s the follow-up to Desai’s 2006 Booker-winning superhit The Inheritance of Loss. And it is a big swing. Set primarily in India and the United States between 1996 and 2002, and told in an omniscient third person that nods to the 19th-century Russian novel, it combines various traditions of realism: It’s part marriage plot, part trauma plot, and part novel of manners. Most ambitiously, it’s a book concerned with Indian identity that levels a metacommentary on the very act of writing about identity. Desai’s protagonists — Sunny, a reporter, and Sonia, an aspiring novelist — are isolated cosmopolitan writers. By choosing as protagonists two people writing about loneliness and identity — perennial themes in immigrant fiction — Desai aims to make well-trodden terrain her own.
The marriage plot forms the spine of the novel and is largely successful. The love story is an arranged-marriage tale, something Sonia’s first boyfriend calls a cliché in Indian fiction. Yet Desai offers a twist: The novel opens with the protagonists’ families attempting to matchmake; however, the initial proposal fails because Sunny secretly has a white girlfriend. Later, Sonia and Sunny get together on their own terms. Desai’s multipart meet-cute lets her challenge neat old-world–new-world dichotomies. Her marriage plot is about the complex ways immigration inflects intimacy and how the romantic is political. Sonia, who studied in the U.S. but cannot get a visa to return, feels like a burden to Sunny, who guards his green card jealously. “She was giving Sunny too much bad news, like a Third World relative whom your only choice is to ditch before their problems disrupt your First World life,” Desai writes. When the couple travel to Italy and Sunny can’t stop talking about refugees, they have a rare fight. Sonia tells Sunny, to his dismay, that she wants to enjoy her trip to the First World without worrying about “other Third-Worlders.” Here, Desai intelligently recasts the 19th-century marriage plot as a 21st-century story of global identity.
The romance, however, competes with the tale of trauma. Early on, Sonia falls into an abusive relationship with an older painter, Ilan — a romantic dynamic that Desai acknowledges as “a tedious stereotype of older, monster male artist and younger, aspiring female artist.” Desai tries to write past this stereotype by introducing a surreal plot point: Sonia literally loses her creative powers to Ilan when he steals her family heirloom, a protective amulet. Then, when she and Sunny get together, they are both haunted by a “ghost hound,” a manifestation of Sonia’s trauma. Such a high-concept literalization of trauma is, in 2025, about as clichéd as the stereotype it attempts to represent.
In the case of the novel of manners, Desai’s metanarration offers up as intertext Anna Karenina, which a rapt young Sonia reads. Desai does have a Tolstoyan talent for both empathizing with and skewering the upper classes from within. Sonia, Sunny, and their kin — people who can afford to vacation in Europe, though only after being humiliatingly interrogated to get a visa — are case studies in uneven privilege. When Desai writes into these complications, she triumphs. Sunny, for example, feels solidarity with his working-class immigrant neighbors in Queens while repressing the fact that his family funded his education with black money. Desai especially shines when rendering Sunny’s mother, Babita, a petty widow who raised her son to immigrate yet resents him for leaving her in India; her trip to London is ruined by the shameful sight of a desi cleaning a toilet, and she seeks out an exhibit about maharajas (the impressive kind of Indian) to inflate her sense of self. Through Babita, Desai puts forth many cogent observations about cosmopolitan Indians: “this striving to escape India felt patriotic,” she writes. “If you were a worthy Indian, you became an American.”
Material details are Desai’s specialty. Her gaze captures everything from a bobby-pinned henna toupee to a potato-chip bag floating downriver. At times, though, Desai goes too far, and those “millions of observations” make for purple prose. A kurta is “woven in the red of coconut husk, the khaki under a banyan, the purple of sea monsters drawn from the depths by monsoon tides and cast upon the beach.” The sentences get sloppier as the book nears its conclusion, a sure sign it is straining under the weight of its many competing elements.
The reason for the strain may lie in the novel’s least convincing preoccupation: the loneliness of migration and the difficulty of articulating one’s identity in a world that erases Indians. Because these themes form the framework that holds it all together, Desai must make the most of them for the novel to cohere. This task requires her to dramatize the concepts of loneliness and identity to say something original and surprising. This is challenging, in part because loneliness is such a familiar theme in the 21st-century Indian American novel (blame Jhumpa Lahiri and her literary inheritors). Of course, with precisely sketched social worlds, deep character development, and plots that turn ideas into narrative, novelists can always find new riffs on old themes. Indeed, with her well-imagined side characters and subplots, Desai does make loneliness specific: Babita’s loneliness leads to an intriguingly bloody (albeit rushed) crime story line, while Sunny’s friend Satya’s loneliness sends him on a comically meandering quest for an Indian bride.
The protagonists’ many plotlines, however, do not advance the concepts at stake in Sonia and Sunny. Desai’s attempts to relate Sonia and Sunny’s love story to her wider themes lead her to indulge in cliché. When they meet, they are immediately infatuated because they have both been lonely Indians in the West and because they are both fleeing relationships with shallowly characterized racists who sling insults about curry. In trying to capture the comfort of being with a fellow Indian, Desai uses essentializing platitudes: Sonia imagines Sunny and herself bound by “a culture so deep” with its “eternal waters”; Sunny, too, enjoying Sonia’s company, reflects that “dusk in India felt always settled, ancient, a civilization that had come to fullness.” These are uncritically written descriptions of immigrant nostalgia that readers of immigrant fiction will have encountered many times before — two people flattening a country and a culture, making it easier to imagine and easier to yearn for. A 2025 novel about immigrant identity, especially one that aims to say something about the representation of immigrant identity, owes its readers a bit more nuance.
It is a pity that the metacommentary in Sonia and Sunny is so inchoate, because, as an author and public figure, Desai is well positioned to sort through the rubble of our often inane representation discourse (and to articulate its wider social consequences). In addition to being a respected Indian novelist in her own right, Desai is a genetic heir to the postcolonial novel as a daughter of three-time Booker-shortlisted Anita Desai. She is also no stranger to the sensitivities and stakes of representing India for a western audience. While many global readers celebrated The Inheritance of Loss, the novel incited controversy on the subcontinent for its representation of Nepalis; there were threats of book-burnings in Kalimpong. Yet the essayistic musings in Sonia and Sunny read more like armchair postcolonialism than a major writer laying muscular claim to the novel as form.
Had Desai wished to more deeply explore such sociopolitical themes through the lives of her subjects, her ingeniously imagined secondary characters are waiting in the wings. In addition to Babita and Satya, there is Sonia’s aunt Mina Foi, a Hindu-raised woman besotted with Christianity. Desai might also have engaged more explicitly with politics. Sonia and Sunny takes place between two historic moments of anti-Muslim violence: the 1992 razing of a mosque in Ayodhya and the 2002 riots in Gujarat. The Hindu majority behind much of this violence also invoke the idea that a nation-state has a soul. It would have been fascinating to see Desai do more to contrast Sonia and Sunny’s perhaps “legitimate” desire to capture the truth of India with the logic of the conservative movements that lurk at the edges of the novel.
It is tempting to admire long novels solely for the sheer labor that goes into crafting them. And long novels are sometimes even more pleasurable for their glorious mess, assuming they add up to something fresh. But upon reaching page 688, it is disappointing to feel, despite Desai’s many talents, that Sonia and Sunny is ending very close to where it began.
Election day is rapidly approaching, and Andrew Cuomo is losing. But the Cuomo camp still has a long-shot plan to defeat Democrat Zohran Mamdani in November. It requires several things to come together: The field must shrink, then shrink further. Then deep-pocketed donors must make a last-minute pivot to Cuomo, who will use their money to peel off part of the Democratic voter base from the front-runner.
“I am not going to blow smoke. It is a narrow path,” said Cornell Belcher, a pollster for Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns who recently joined Cuomo’s campaign. “But I haven’t worked for a candidate in the past decade who didn’t have a narrow path to victory.”
The polls, to be sure, are bad, showing Cuomo trailing Mamdani by an average of 19 points. The labor unions and elected officials who endorsed the former governor in the Democratic primary have almost entirely abandoned him. Cuomo is losing the money race, and the national media has all but anointed the 33-year-old democratic socialist as the Next Big Thing.
Longtime aides and allies concede it’s a daunting challenge, especially given that Cuoma will be running on a third-party line in a city where almost two-thirds of registered voters are Democrats.
It doesn’t help that the Cuomo campaign’s multipronged approach rests on something happening that keeps not happening, despite constant rumors that it might. “There is very much a path here for us,” said one Cuomo official. “But the first step is that Eric Adams has to get the fuck out of this race.” But Adams, running a distant fourth, insists that he is not dropping out and that Cuomo is at fault for suggesting he will.
As a result, members of the Cuomo camp have been treating Adams cautiously, fearful not just that he will attack them more but also that any efforts to nudge him out will backfire. When billionaire hedge-funder and onetime Adams supporter Bill Ackman tweeted, “It is time for Mayor Adams to step aside,” some close to Cuomo cringed, knowing the mayor would be less likely to leave if he felt pushed.
Adams’s exit wouldn’t have a major impact on the polls. But, for Team Cuomo, consolidating the race from four candidates to three would unlock the second part of the plan: resetting the political chessboard in the race’s final weeks and getting anti-Mamdani donors to start shelling out money again. “If Eric gets out, there is going to be a gush of money coming Andrew’s way, $20 million to $30 million in a matter of weeks,” said one supporter of Cuomo’s.
Once that happens, Cuomo’s advisers see part three playing out: the sidelining of Curtis Sliwa. The Republican, now running third, has been even more adamant than Adams about staying in the race. But a sample of what could be in store for Sliwa came recently, when Trump made an appearance on the Fox & Friends couch and proceeded to belittle the perpetually bereted Guardian Angels founder and radio host.
“I’m a Republican, but Curtis is not exactly prime time,” Trump said. “He wants cats to be in Gracie Mansion. That’s the magnificent home of the mayor. It’s beautiful. We don’t need to have thousands of cats there.”
Sure, Sliwa is a Republican, Trump transmitted to the MAGA faithful. But he’s also something of a weirdo — more a character than a mayor.
Cuomo’s people were thrilled by Trump’s remarks, hoping they give other Republicans permission to dismiss Sliwa too. One adviser to Cuomo told me they believe as much as half of Sliwa’s vote — currently hovering around 15 percent — would be gettable for Cuomo. Add that to the share of the Adams vote Cuomo would be likely to receive and it could put him within five points of Mamdani.
“I think this is going to come down to a two-person race at the end of the day, and I don’t think people are going to waste their vote,” Cuomo said when asked about the possibility of Adams (or even Sliwa) staying in the contest. “That would be the natural resolution, as it was in the primary. And in the primary, there were candidates who had 14 points, and they wound up with three. Why? People see who’s viable and who’s not, and there are only going to be two viable candidates in my opinion.”
Getting over the top would involve reclaiming some working-class Democratic voters who supported Cuomo in the primary while trying to dampen enthusiasm for Mamdani among his most fervent fans: young voters on the left (who historically have not turned out en masse).
For his part, Mamdani is engaged in a similar, if reversed, two-step: trying to keep his left-wing base energized while also expanding his tent to include Democratic moderates. In one day, Mamdani both doubled down on his pledge to arrest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and expressed regret for his 2020 tweet that called the NYPD “racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety.” (Social-media posts from voices on the left angry over Mamdani’s backpedaling on some progressive rhetoric have been gleefully passed around on pro-Cuomo group chats.)
Cuomo needs around 30 percent of Democrats to support him in the general. There is a belief in his camp that the Democratic primary, even in this heavily Democratic city, is not reflective of the general electorate. One person involved in a potential outside spending effort on Cuomo’s behalf said that according to their metrics, more than half of Democratic voters in November won’t have voted in the primary and that they tilt far more moderate than the primary electorate.
“If you narrow this down to a two-person race and you look at the voters that are the most fluid on everything from crime to affordability to who can do the job, Cuomo has a significant lead with those voters,” said Belcher.
Current polls show that in a four-person field, Cuomo is trailing in nearly every demographic subgroup. But the campaign believes he can win loyal Democratic constituencies like Black, Hispanic, and Jewish voters, who tend to vote straight down the ticket for the Democratic nominee but may be persuadable that Mamdani is too much of a risk.
Many Cuomo advisers have discussed Rudy Giuliani’s 1993 victory, when half of the city’s electorate turned out to defeat David Dinkins. “You have to frighten people to give them a reason to go to the polls,” said one close Cuomo ally. “There is just a lot there,” said another. “There is public safety, there is the whole communist thing, there is the fact that if we elect this 33-year-old, then the city is going to go to shit. It will be de Blasio 2.0, and who wants that?”
With Mamdani nationalizing the race, bringing in figures like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on his behalf, the Cuomo camp thinks it can do a version of the same. “What is a Mayor Mamdani going to mean for our efforts to take back the House? What is a Mayor Mamdani going to mean for Kathy Hochul’s reelection or for the 2028 race?” said one person close to Cuomo. The race, in this vision, would be a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party — one in which democratic socialists are preparingto mount a takeover and Cuomo, who has been dogged by his close association with Trump throughout this race, manages to flip the narrative and become the person who is going save the city from the Trumpian menace.
“They are going to have to go scorched earth,” said Adam Carlson, a pollster not involved in the race. “It will have to be different from the primary — something like, ‘I am the only thing standing between New York City and a complete Trump authoritarian takeover.’ And Cuomo then becomes the ‘Don’t rock the boat’ guy.”
Still, much of this hangs on Adams getting out of the race.
“The next two weeks are crunch time,” said Democratic operative Chris Coffey, who advised Cuomo in the primary. “Because if you don’t see movement from Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa, it just gets harder for Cuomo to put something together.”
Election day is rapidly approaching, and Andrew Cuomo is losing. But the Cuomo camp still has a long-shot plan to defeat Democrat Zohran Mamdani in November. It requires several things to come together: The field must shrink, then shrink further. Then deep-pocketed donors must make a last-minute pivot to Cuomo, who will use their money to peel off part of the Democratic voter base from the front-runner.
“I am not going to blow smoke. It is a narrow path,” said Cornell Belcher, a pollster for Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns who recently joined Cuomo’s campaign. “But I haven’t worked for a candidate in the past decade who didn’t have a narrow path to victory.”
The polls, to be sure, are bad, showing Cuomo trailing Mamdani by an average of 19 points. The labor unions and elected officials who endorsed the former governor in the Democratic primary have almost entirely abandoned him. Cuomo is losing the money race, and the national media has all but anointed the 33-year-old democratic socialist as the Next Big Thing.
Longtime aides and allies concede it’s a daunting challenge, especially given that Cuoma will be running on a third-party line in a city where almost two-thirds of registered voters are Democrats.
It doesn’t help that the Cuomo campaign’s multipronged approach rests on something happening that keeps not happening, despite constant rumors that it might. “There is very much a path here for us,” said one Cuomo official. “But the first step is that Eric Adams has to get the fuck out of this race.” But Adams, running a distant fourth, insists that he is not dropping out and that Cuomo is at fault for suggesting he will.
As a result, members of the Cuomo camp have been treating Adams cautiously, fearful not just that he will attack them more but also that any efforts to nudge him out will backfire. When billionaire hedge-funder and onetime Adams supporter Bill Ackman tweeted, “It is time for Mayor Adams to step aside,” some close to Cuomo cringed, knowing the mayor would be less likely to leave if he felt pushed.
Adams’s exit wouldn’t have a major impact on the polls. But, for Team Cuomo, consolidating the race from four candidates to three would unlock the second part of the plan: resetting the political chessboard in the race’s final weeks and getting anti-Mamdani donors to start shelling out money again. “If Eric gets out, there is going to be a gush of money coming Andrew’s way, $20 million to $30 million in a matter of weeks,” said one supporter of Cuomo’s.
Once that happens, Cuomo’s advisers see part three playing out: the sidelining of Curtis Sliwa. The Republican, now running third, has been even more adamant than Adams about staying in the race. But a sample of what could be in store for Sliwa came recently, when Trump made an appearance on the Fox & Friends couch and proceeded to belittle the perpetually bereted Guardian Angels founder and radio host.
“I’m a Republican, but Curtis is not exactly prime time,” Trump said. “He wants cats to be in Gracie Mansion. That’s the magnificent home of the mayor. It’s beautiful. We don’t need to have thousands of cats there.”
Sure, Sliwa is a Republican, Trump transmitted to the MAGA faithful. But he’s also something of a weirdo — more a character than a mayor.
Cuomo’s people were thrilled by Trump’s remarks, hoping they give other Republicans permission to dismiss Sliwa too. One adviser to Cuomo told me they believe as much as half of Sliwa’s vote — currently hovering around 15 percent — would be gettable for Cuomo. Add that to the share of the Adams vote Cuomo would be likely to receive and it could put him within five points of Mamdani.
“I think this is going to come down to a two-person race at the end of the day, and I don’t think people are going to waste their vote,” Cuomo said when asked about the possibility of Adams (or even Sliwa) staying in the contest. “That would be the natural resolution, as it was in the primary. And in the primary, there were candidates who had 14 points, and they wound up with three. Why? People see who’s viable and who’s not, and there are only going to be two viable candidates in my opinion.”
Getting over the top would involve reclaiming some working-class Democratic voters who supported Cuomo in the primary while trying to dampen enthusiasm for Mamdani among his most fervent fans: young voters on the left (who historically have not turned out en masse).
For his part, Mamdani is engaged in a similar, if reversed, two-step: trying to keep his left-wing base energized while also expanding his tent to include Democratic moderates. In one day, Mamdani both doubled down on his pledge to arrest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and expressed regret for his 2020 tweet that called the NYPD “racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety.” (Social-media posts from voices on the left angry over Mamdani’s backpedaling on some progressive rhetoric have been gleefully passed around on pro-Cuomo group chats.)
Cuomo needs around 30 percent of Democrats to support him in the general. There is a belief in his camp that the Democratic primary, even in this heavily Democratic city, is not reflective of the general electorate. One person involved in a potential outside spending effort on Cuomo’s behalf said that according to their metrics, more than half of Democratic voters in November won’t have voted in the primary and that they tilt far more moderate than the primary electorate.
“If you narrow this down to a two-person race and you look at the voters that are the most fluid on everything from crime to affordability to who can do the job, Cuomo has a significant lead with those voters,” said Belcher.
Current polls show that in a four-person field, Cuomo is trailing in nearly every demographic subgroup. But the campaign believes he can win loyal Democratic constituencies like Black, Hispanic, and Jewish voters, who tend to vote straight down the ticket for the Democratic nominee but may be persuadable that Mamdani is too much of a risk.
Many Cuomo advisers have discussed Rudy Giuliani’s 1993 victory, when half of the city’s electorate turned out to defeat David Dinkins. “You have to frighten people to give them a reason to go to the polls,” said one close Cuomo ally. “There is just a lot there,” said another. “There is public safety, there is the whole communist thing, there is the fact that if we elect this 33-year-old, then the city is going to go to shit. It will be de Blasio 2.0, and who wants that?”
With Mamdani nationalizing the race, bringing in figures like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on his behalf, the Cuomo camp thinks it can do a version of the same. “What is a Mayor Mamdani going to mean for our efforts to take back the House? What is a Mayor Mamdani going to mean for Kathy Hochul’s reelection or for the 2028 race?” said one person close to Cuomo. The race, in this vision, would be a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party — one in which democratic socialists are preparingto mount a takeover and Cuomo, who has been dogged by his close association with Trump throughout this race, manages to flip the narrative and become the person who is going save the city from the Trumpian menace.
“They are going to have to go scorched earth,” said Adam Carlson, a pollster not involved in the race. “It will have to be different from the primary — something like, ‘I am the only thing standing between New York City and a complete Trump authoritarian takeover.’ And Cuomo then becomes the ‘Don’t rock the boat’ guy.”
Still, much of this hangs on Adams getting out of the race.
“The next two weeks are crunch time,” said Democratic operative Chris Coffey, who advised Cuomo in the primary. “Because if you don’t see movement from Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa, it just gets harder for Cuomo to put something together.”
Like watching Rome burn,” one news anchor said as Donald Trump’s attack on the media industry entered a new phase. The president has never done well with criticism, constantly going after news organizations and private companies and individuals perceived to be insufficiently supportive or ingratiating. “This is the environment that we’re all operating in, and we’ve known this for a while, where, whether it’s legitimate or not, you have the government as an actor trying to control and shape coverage through a combination of means, one of which is threats,” the news anchor said. But lately those threats feel less empty: The assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk has given the administration further opportunity to use its power to influence the media industry and its output — “consequence culture,” as they are calling it. So far, companies have largely shown an unwillingness to fight back. Coincidentally or not, this timidity comes at a moment of intense consolidation in the business, as David Ellison, right after taking over Paramount, sets his sights on Warner Bros. Discovery, with help from father Larry, a recent Trump ally who is expected to be a major investor in the American-owned version of TikTok.
On Wednesday, September 17, FCC chairman Brendan Carr dangled the possibility of punishing ABC over remarks Jimmy Kimmel had made days before about Kirk’s assassination; the late-night host had suggested “the MAGA gang” was “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.” It happened quickly from there: Nexstar, which owns numerous ABC affiliates throughout the country, said it would pull Kimmel’s show from the airwaves; within minutes, Sinclair, another owner of ABC affiliates, followed suit; then an ABC spokesperson told the press that new episodes of Jimmy Kimmel Live! would be “preempted indefinitely.” Trump and Carr took a victory lap, and the president seemed to suggest a similar fate for NBC late-night stars Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers. On Thursday, Trump, who earlier in the week had sued the New York Times for $15 billion over articles questioning his success, issued another threat, musing that networks giving him negative coverage deserve to have their licenses revoked.
Inside the media and entertainment companies, the mood among those creating the content under attack is somber. “I haven’t seen a lot of comedy writers or hosts choosing to censor themselves after watching our colleagues get literally canceled. It’s more that we’re horrified and embarrassed by the cowardice of the networks and the choices they’re making,” said a writer for a late-night show. “The people who have the most money and power are the first to give up, and frankly that should be mortifying for them.” Said another late-night writer: “The broadcast networks are beholden to Trump’s FCC in a way cable channels aren’t, but that’s hardly reassuring.” (Cable channels, unlike broadcast, do not use public airwaves and therefore don’t require FCC licenses.)
The decision to pull Kimmel off the air came two months after CBS, following its settlement of a lawsuit with Trump, canceled Stephen Colbert’s show. The latter move at least appeared couched in financial reasons, some insiders I spoke to noted; The Late Show With Stephen Colbert was expensive to produce — more than $100 million a year — and reportedly ran tens of millions of dollars in the red. “We had no idea how much of it was business motivated,” a late-night staffer said of the Colbert decision. “But this is just cut and dry.” As one prominent talent executive put it: “The FCC commissioner threatened ABC and its station partners, and the station partners and ABC took an action based on that threat. It’s never been that clear before.”
Pulling Kimmel was a decision that came from the very top of Disney with CEO Bob Iger and head of television Dana Walden reportedly fielding concerns from advertisers and affiliates. Kimmel had planned to address Carr’s comments on air Wednesday night, but Walden and other senior executives feared that would further inflame the situation, especially as staff on Kimmel’s show had been doxed and received threatening emails, according to The Wall Street Journal. Nexstar, for its part, denied that its decision was influenced by Carr’s remarks or FCC pressure, but, notably, the conglomerate is in the midst of trying to get a $6.2 billion merger with Tegna approved by the agency. “No one is confused — this is all about Tegna and Sinclair’s regulatory approval,” said another talent executive. “It’s super-specific. But it has real impact if it’s not limited in scope.” Multiple executives across television and print publishing said the focus is on ensuring their staffers can continue doing the work. “This is just the latest, right? We are just keeping our heads down and doing reporting,” said one.
At all levels of the industry, the question hung in the air of whether this moment marks a turning point. On Thursday, Carr told CNBC, “We’re not done yet,” and suggested The View, another ABC program, could be subject to review. “Clients are scared for what it suggests is to come. If Kimmel can get fired for that, what might they get fired for?” said another prominent talent executive. Late-night writers are also in a precarious position. “Our show is not in a position to pretend nothing happened in the way that others might be able to,” said one. “If our format didn’t demand it, I think some people who work here would feel safer not putting a target on their backs by commenting on it — which is the point of political censorship.” This writer described feeling newly paranoid: “I haven’t liked or shared any political commentary on social media since Kirk’s killing last week. It all feels like evidence that could be used in bad faith for some future persecution.”
Many feel something fundamental is changing in the industry. “The consolidation happening in the media world is incredibly unhelpful to this. Everyone feels like there’s no safe space, no corporate parent that’s going to stand up for you or protect you,” said the news anchor. “I don’t know that anybody knows how it’s going to end, but I think everybody recognizes the danger that we’re all in.” The Ellisons loom large with reported plans to acquire the Free Press and possibly put founder Bari Weiss in a leadership role atop CBS News. A Warner Bros. Discovery deal would give the family control over CNN too. Some see media companies’ capitulation as yet another indication of their waning power — that in an effort to slow down their decline, they’ve accelerated it. “They’re continuing to remind the audience and the population of their growing irrelevance,” said one network executive. “Personally, I would be a lot more concerned if Jimmy Kimmel got canceled from YouTube.”
For now, there haven’t been explicit directives for journalists or late-night writers to pull punches. But the menacing environment is impossible to ignore. “It’s front of mind, and front of coverage, and you’re living it while also reporting on it,” said a veteran news editor at the New York Times. Still, the Times, in the face of Trump’s suit, finds itself in a better position than other organizations Trump has picked on. “We do not have millions of dollars of research grants from the federal government. We do not need to do business in front of the courts. We are one of the few institutions in America that he has no leverage over,” a Times reporter noted.
Times executives have come out forcefully in response to the lawsuit. Publisher A. G. Sulzberger called it “frivolous,” and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien described it as an authoritarian-like attempt to intimidate independent journalists. (A federal judge essentially agreed, calling the suit “improper and impermissible” as filed.) “The New York Times will not be cowed by this,” she said. “A.G. is the person who I feel like was kind of made for this moment and is increasingly alone in this industry,” said the veteran news editor. “In the past, we could, you know, join with the Washington Post and the L.A. Times, put out a statement about this. It does feel increasingly singular and not in a good way.”
Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images (Cuomo), Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg (Mamdani).
When Andrew Cuomo decided to ignore the advice of many of his supporters and jump back into the New York City mayoral election after a bruising primary defeat, his campaign knew it needed to do one thing: turn the race into a two-person contest with Zohran Mamdani. And so Cuomo savaged Mamdani over his rent-stabilized apartment, ties to the Democratic Socialists of America, a vacation to Uganda, and his shifting positions on policing, while mostly ignoring the rest of the field.
With some eight weeks till Election Day, it looks as if Cuomo is finally going to get the two-man race he wants. But the terms of the contest have been completely upended. In a city that has seen its share of bizarre political moments over the past couple of decades, from a congressman’s penis pictures to the election of a congressional fabulist, the 2025 mayoral race is somehow still breaking new boundaries in political weirdness. Cuomo, the resistance hero who was once seen as a potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, has been talking up his close ties to Donald Trump. Mamdani, the democratic socialist who won the primary despite statements about how the NYPD is a rogue organization that should be abolished and capitalism equals theft, has been meeting with business leaders and racking up endorsements from rank-and-file Democrats. Eric Adams inherited a rush of enthusiasm (and donor money) after the primary but failed to translate any of that into a polling bump. Republican Curtis Sliwa’s proposal to unleash a feral-cat brigade to clean up the city’s rat population was somehow the least-surreal thing happening.
And then, the week after Labor Day, news broke that Trump was trying to edge Adams and Sliwa out of the race, floating administration jobs or plush sinecures for each of them if they dropped out to make a lane for Cuomo. Supporters of both the president and the former governor, including billionaire supermarket magnate John Catsimatidis, had been pressing the case that Mamdani would be a disaster for the city. When asked at a press conference about his involvement in the race, Trump said, “I’d prefer not to have a communist mayor of New York City.”
Mamdani immediately accused Cuomo of behind-the-scenes machinations. “I’ve heard rumors of this for months,” Mamdani told me on September 3 after an “emergency” press conference he held on the news. The president, he said, “knows that Andrew Cuomo represents the very kind of politics that he practices. He knows that he could pick up the phone and have a conversation with him without even having to consider the impact it would have on New Yorkers and that the entire conversation would be about the two of them and their interests.” Cuomo denied he had any involvement in Trump’s meddling, though he recently told a crowd of Hamptons donors he knows Trump well and believes “there’s a big piece of him that actually wants redemption in New York.”
Both Sliwa and Adams denied having any intention of leaving the race. Adams held a press conference in which he took aim at Cuomo, calling him a snake and a liar, asserting that only the sitting mayor could beat Mamdani. But the damage was done. For Adams, it was made worse when the New York Timesreported that he had flown to Florida to meet secretly with Steve Witkoff, one of Trump’s advisers, a sign the mayor was at least not totally oblivious to the realities of his struggling campaign.
It was a swift fall after a dizzying rebound. In June, Wall Street and real-estate titans were apoplectic over the notion that the Democratic nominee would install Trotskyite cadres across city government. Cuomo still hadn’t said if he was running in the general election. So in the mad scramble among the donor class to find someone to stop Mamdani, money poured into Adams’s coffers. One wealthy financier reached out with an offer to host a $50,000 fundraiser, and the Adams campaign turned him down. At that time, a mere $50,000 fundraiser simply wasn’t worth it.
By the end of the summer, Adams would have taken whatever change could be shaken out of the seat cushions. He was caught in a new swirl of scandal, baroque even by often-embattled mayors’ standards: One aide slipped a wad of cash concealed in a bag of potato chips to a reporter, and another was indicted (for a second time) for trading a cameo on a Hulu show for scrapping a planned bike lane in Brooklyn, among other allegations. No fewer than five senior police officials sued the administration for creating a culture of corruption and favor-trading at the NYPD. Polls showed Adams in the single digits, just a few points above Jim Walden, an all but unknown wealthy attorney who dropped out of the mayoral race at the start of September. Sliwa was polling higher in the mid-teens.
Still, Cuomo needed all other candidates besides the front-runner fully sidelined because he was polling around 15 points behind Mamdani. In a head-to-head race, however, the same surveys showed the possibility for a dead heat or, in one instance from a July poll, a double-digit Cuomo lead.
Mamdani has had mixed success breaking 40 percent in the polls, and the fear among his supporters is that he has a ceiling somewhere below 50. All summer he worked to consolidate the Democratic Party behind him, assuaging the concerns of sympathetic business leaders and disavowing some of his earlier, more radical statements. He also won the support of Democratic officials and labor unions that had backed Cuomo in the primary.
But campaigning as a regular Democrat was an uncomfortable fit for someone who only a few years ago was trying to make it in the music and entertainment industries. Mamdani has privately lamented that the trappings of being the Democratic nominee, with its chauffeured SUVs and security, take him away from the hand-to-hand contact that propelled his primary win. And the campaign has wrestled internally with the question of whether or not Mamdani should position himself as more of a normie Democrat in a city where Democrats out-number Republicans six to one or lean into the youthful outsider idealism that got him where he is in the first place. After all, it’s not as if Democrats are incredibly popular right now, and the entire universe of Democratic institutional support did Cuomo close to no good in the primary.
Then came the news that Trump wanted to intervene on Cuomo’s behalf. Had Adams or Sliwa simply quietly dropped out and ended up with an administration appointment months down the line, the link between them and Trump wouldn’t have been as clear. But the ham-handed and nearly public machinations by Trump and people supportive of Cuomo have been so shameless that it’s fair to wonder if the whole thing is a psyop, a scheme to secretly boost Mamdani so that Trump can have him as a foil. Regardless, Trump casting himself as Cuomo’s virtual running mate lit a fire for the Mamdani campaign.
At his emergency press conference, Mamdani spoke with the kind of passion that he hasn’t much harnessed since winning the primary in June, calling Trump’s parachuting into the race “an affront to what makes so many of us proud to be Americans: that we choose our own leaders, not that they get to pick themselves.” His campaign sees this as an opportunity to reignite youth interest as well as energize the center-left Democrats Mamdani needs to attract.
“This is no longer a race between Zohran and an opponent trying to cobble together a coalition of voters who don’t like him,” said Morris Katz, a senior Mamdani adviser. “It’s a race between Zohran and Donald Trump.”
I’m waiting for Kieran Culkin at the tip of the Greenpoint ferry platform, where he’s suggested we meet on a Friday morning to get on the boat, take it a few stops to Dumbo, then walk across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan — a sort of hung-over New Yorker’s triathlon. He’s late and sending me self-effacing riffs about it: “I was just about to text you to see if you were also running late or if you were the kind of person that was professional and an actual adult, unlike myself.” The ferry pulls into the dock at the exact moment that I spot him on the horizon. He is instantly recognizable, clad in all black and wearing a pair of sunglasses, eyebrows perma-arched, hair like an inverted comma, walking with distinct hustle but not running. The boat starts boarding right as he reaches me, a little out of breath and visibly relieved that he pulled it off. “This is what I do,” he says. “I pull up to airports, I don’t even know what airline I’m flying. Sometimes I don’t know what city I’m going to. I still get on the plane and everything’s fine.”
As we line up to show our tickets, Culkin, a lifelong New Yorker who rode the subway around the city alone by 13 and who contains all of the ungovernability and bullshit-detecting that this implies, digresses into a spontaneous but deeply felt spiel about the ferry’s flawed digital ticketing system (“The physical ticket, I can just put it in my pocket. I just have to get here early enough to go to the kiosk and fucking do it. But I’m lazy. And now I’m bitching about how lazy I am”). I will soon learn that this is his greatest talent, second only to his ability to wring humor, poignancy, and a sense of total reality from the dozens of onscreen characters he’s been playing since early childhood. Later, he will joyfully go full Larry David on everything from coffee-lid sizes to the concept of wearing shorts (“It’s a weird garment”).
Culkin, 42, has made his career portraying boys, teenagers, and now adult men not unlike himself: hyperverbose and stubborn, skin-of-their-teeth charming, effortlessly funny, irascible and self-lacerating. He’s mastered the art of playing people who think they’ve mastered the art of the carefree, loutish façade but whose pathos and pain glisten through the cracks. He uncovered that instinct as a part of the brief but powerful Culkin Child-Actor Dynasty in blazingly earnest ’90s films like The Mighty and The Cider House Rules and Father of the Bride, sharpened it as a teen in artier fare like Igby Goes Down and The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, and most recently and famously perfected it on HBO’s Succession as sad perverted clown Roman Roy.
He’ll next star in the film A Real Pain, a dramedy about a pair of cousins who embark on a Holocaust tour of Poland in memory of their late grandmother. Culkin is at the apex of his idiosyncratic powers as the magnetic charmer Benji, whose easy banter with his fellow tourgoers gives way to increasingly volatile moods that reveal a tormented core. Jesse Eisenberg — who wrote, directed, and stars opposite Culkin — is the ostensible protagonist David, Benji’s uptight, socially awkward cousin who envies and pities him in equal measure, but A Real Pain is Culkin’s showcase. Eisenberg remembers being consistently astonished by Culkin’s ability to show up on set with no idea which scene they were filming that day, scan his lines, then casually deliver “the greatest acting I’ve ever seen in my life.” Its Sundance and Telluride premieres received glowing reviews praising Culkin’s performance specifically, entering him into the Best Supporting Actor Oscar conversation.
And Culkin nearly dropped out of the film. He’s notoriously picky about taking jobs; he turned several of them down in the years after 2002’s Igby, unsure if he wanted what he saw as a fun childhood hobby to be a proper career. “Things were coming,” he recalls of that time, like movies written specifically for him, and “I freaked out, ran away.” He eventually got comfortable taking on more parts, only saying “yes” when he really connected with something — which is exactly what happened when he read the script for A Real Pain while filming Succession’s final season in 2022.
“It was one of the very, very, very rare scripts that I laughed out loud reading,” he says as we disembark and begin our trek toward the bridge, both sweating in the early-September sun as he curses himself for coming up with this activity and then showing up for it in an entirely black outfit. “It was that rare thing of, Oh, I know who this character is and I know how to do it.” Specifically, he recognized Benji as a near-perfect doppelgänger of someone unnamed whom he knows in real life as well as in a sort of a quantum-multiverse, Sliding Doors version of himself. “I’m one quick little misstep away from being that person,” he says, and he credits his decision to stop smoking weed in his 20s as one of the things that saved him from a lonely, depressive, Benji-esque fate. He took the role after the Real Pain producers told him the film wasn’t shooting for another year. “I’m like, ‘Oh, a year? That’s not real life.’ Then that year was up. And I had a panic.”
Culkin is a consummate wife guy who brings up his spouse of 11 and a half years, Jazz Charton, dozens of times unprompted and tells me his ideal job would be a stay-at-home dad. “Some people say that but don’t really mean it,” he says, knowing how the whole thing sounds. “And some definitely just couldn’t do that.” So he was particularly stressed by the idea of being separated from Charton and their two kids. He learned while making Succession that eight days is the maximum he can be away from them without plunging into dissociative despair. “I don’t know who I am without them,” he says. As we exited the ferry, Culkin instinctively reached to grab a stroller from the storage area. “Where are my fucking kids?!” he joked.
He tried to pull out of A Real Pain just before production began and ended up on the phone with Emma Stone, his onetime girlfriend and a producer of the film. “She did an almost reverse-psychology thing on me,” he says, laughing. “She was like, ‘Oh, I totally get that. If I were you, I’d probably feel that way.’ And I was like, ‘But have they started?’ She goes, ‘Oh, yeah. They’re actually already in Poland scouting locations; people are hired.’ I was like, ‘It’s not like people would be out of a job?’ She’s like, ‘No, no, they would, but it’s not on you. You said ‘yes,’ but if you have your reasons for not doing it, you’re not responsible for these people’s jobs. It’s fine; you do whatever you want.’ And I got off the phone and I went, ‘Ah.’ ” Stone laughs recalling the conversation. “I can’t believe he talked about it publicly,” she says. “Producing, I’ve realized now, is like parenting — every kid needs different things.” Stone got on the plane with Culkin, his wife, and their kids to make sure he made the journey. “I was so grateful that he did it, but, also, thank fucking God. Because it would’ve been catastrophic,” she says.His family was able to join him for a good chunk of the shoot but not all. When I ask how he pushed through the 25 days without them, he deadpans, “Alcohol.”
Eisenberg didn’t learn about Culkin’s attempt to back out until after the film was finished. But when Culkin eventually told him, he was relatively nonplussed. “It was just another thing in a long line of, like, Who is this person?” Eisenberg says. He cast Culkin without ever having seen him perform in anything. The two had only met briefly — once on the set of Zombieland (where Culkin was visiting Stone) and once at an audition for Adventureland, which Culkin didn’t get but Eisenberg did, and where, Culkin tells me, he made the spontaneous artistic choice to pinch Eisenberg’s nipples through his shirt as part of the audition scene and forgot to remove his hands once the director called cut. When I bring this up to Eisenberg, he pauses thoughtfully. “I had forgotten about that. That’s right,” he says. “We’ve never discussed it. I think he squeezed my breasts.” While the breast-squeezing left no lasting impression, what did was Culkin’s “magic trick” ability to project both lightness and darkness simultaneously and in equal measure. He “exhibits real quickness, but there’s also a kind of real-world heaviness to him,” Eisenberg says.
Culkin isn’t Jewish, which was a major discussion, Eisenberg says: “I have 17,000 thoughts about this, and where I come out is he gave me an amazing gift by helping to tell this story that is very personal for my family.” As Benji, Culkin is as enchanting as he is impulsive and infuriating, casually befriending other people on the tour to the astonished envy of David then later berating their sweet guide for his “constant barrage of stats.” In a vivid moment roughly midway through the film, he publicly melts down about the cognitive dissonance of traveling first class on a Polish train on a Holocaust tour, embarrassing David and baffling his peers. David in particular can’t seem to understand why Benji is so consistently plagued by suffering. “You see how people love you? You see what happens when you walk into a room?” he goes on to ask him. “I would give anything to know what that feels like, man.”
With Jesse Eisenberg in A Real Pain. Photo: Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
Unlike a lot of actors, who tend to try to distance themselves from their most widely known role in fear of being existentially stuck or typecast, Culkin constantly and happily steers our conversation back to Succession. The show was deeply meaningful to him — it was where he says he finally realized he wanted to be an actor. On a personal level, he was such a fan of the series that he almost always watched it with Charton as it aired each Sunday night, though he mostly avoided the internet discourse. “My wife would tell me certain things, like, ‘Oh, people are making fun of the way you sit.’ And she’ll show me on her phone. And I’m scrolling, like, ‘Oh, yeah, I sit weird in the show. I didn’t know that.’” He still hasn’t seen the final episode, in part because he was already in Poland filming A Real Pain when it aired. It’s been so long now that he and Charton are planning a rewatch going back to episode one. He admits he might also be avoiding the finale because then the whole thing will really be over. He still daydreams about a spontaneous fifth-season pickup: “There’s part of me that feels like, When are they going to call?” he says. “I think maybe the reason is because I didn’t get the closure of watching the last fucking episode.” Suddenly, we are confronted by the half-naked body of his Succession co-star Alexander Skarsgård hovering above us on a gigantic billboard. Culkin stops talking and looks up at him, beaming with pride. “Well!” he says. “There he is.”
While filming Succession, where he was encouraged to play around with his lines and his character, Culkin developed a sort of free-associative acting style, but he won’t go so far as to call it improv (“That has a certain feel to it”). Instead, he calls it blagging, British slang he picked up from his wife that loosely translates to “fake it till you make it.” He doesn’t like to talk too much about how he does this or try to analyze it; to look at it too hard might ruin the whole thing. “It’s written, and I understand the character, and then some shit comes out sometimes; that’s it. And I don’t force it,” he says.
The not-improv improv of it all caused an initial clash between Eisenberg and Culkin on the set of A Real Pain. Eisenberg is a type-A planner and had each scene carefully blocked and plotted out. Culkin felt stifled by the relative formality. “It felt a little bit like going backward,” he says. “Jesse had set up shots before I got there to be like, ‘You’re going to stand here.’ And I’m like, ‘How do you know?’ He goes, ‘Why wouldn’t you?’ I’m like, ‘Well, we haven’t tried it yet is all I’m saying.’ I tried to go along with him those first couple of days, and it felt like, Why am I hired?” Eisenberg remembers changing his mind after filming a specific scene in which he asked Culkin to run up to co-star Jennifer Grey, who plays a tourgoer who bonds with Benji, and say whatever he wanted because they weren’t going to use the audio. “He was so free and funny that I didn’t mind throwing out the blueprints.”
Photo: Mark Seliger for New York Magazine
We’re in the East Village now, Culkin’s erstwhile neighborhood of 20-plus years, where he’s meeting up with Charton. He spots her from across the street and makes a loud birdcall to get her attention. Charton is disarming and funny, and the two are clearly enamored with each other, falling into natural repartee about their kids and each other. Charton lovingly mocks Culkin for being winded from our walk. “We went to our daughter’s school, and you’re only supposed to use the elevator for an emergency or if you have to, so we took the stairs and Kieran was out of breath at the second floor,” she says, laughing. Culkin picks up the story: “I made it to the third, and I took a break. She thought I was kidding.” Charton imitates Culkin: “‘I can feel my heart!’”
In January, Culkin got up onstage at the Emmys and informed the world that he’d like to have another baby, which Charton promised him she’d consider if he won. “She had no faith that I was going to,” he explains, shaking his head. “I didn’t have that forethought of like, What’s going to be the response to this?” It backfired somewhat. “I was very moved, No. 1,” Charton says. “And then I was very confused that he would bring up my uterus.” Culkin nods cheerfully, willing to accept notes. “That I was calling you out publicly,” he adds. “I mean, luckily he’s not super-famous or anything, but I got weird messages from friends and family about it,” Charton says. “I feel like my uterus is now public domain.” He is openly apologetic about the bad blag, and the possibility of another kid is still on the table.
Culkin’s next big project is Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway, opposite Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr, in the spring. He agreed to do the play because he thought it would give him more time with his family. “Then I talked to friends who do theater and have young kids, and I was like, ‘Wait, is it good?’ They’re like, ‘No, you never see your kids. You’re working every night. You never do bath time, bedtime. You get one night a week,’ ” he says. Instead of trying to get out of it, he asked the producers to change the schedule so he could have Sundays off. To his surprise, they said “yes” and moved the show to Mondays. “I’ve never heard of the show going dark on a Sunday,” he says. “Now I get one day a week dedicated to just being a dad.”
That night, he and I meet up at a Gramercy steakhouse whose interior is emblazoned with a gigantic sign that reads “Beef and Liberty,” the sort of place that the Roman Roys of the world might conspicuously snort cocaine off a leather banquette and where, across the street, the entire Lohan family is dining outside. When I ask Culkin if he knows Lindsay, he corrects me on the pronunciation of her name (LO-uhn) and says he doesn’t ever recognize any famous people except for the anchors on NY1; recently, he says, he chatted up a very important higher-up at Disney without having any idea who he was. We order dirty martinis — “Very, very, very dry, barely any vermouth” — and Culkin deliberates for a very long time about which steak to choose, asking the waiter pointed questions about its provenance before landing on a huge bone-in so he can take the rest home for his family. But later, when he asks for a to-go box, he hands it all to me, insisting on giving me the leftovers because he wants me to make a steak soup that one of his brothers once cooked for him. He takes a deep breath and begins describing the recipe for it in passionate, exacting detail.
In a series called Mondo Appropriato, Culled Culture examines how “on the nose” something is in the pop cultural and/or political landscape.
Where once it was easy to bill any Kennedy “tragedy” as merely part of the “Kennedy curse,” it seems that, more and more, the overshadowing word is “scandal” rather than “tragedy.” And most of it is less a “curse” than largely being the making of the (often depraved) Kennedy men. The latest to outshine some of his forebears’ former “glory” in that department is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. While, sure, one might have thought that his brand couldn’t possibly be more damaged after years of anti-vaccine rhetoric, a bid for president in 2024 that has almost been as embarrassing as Donald Trump’s and admissions to two separate incidents of “bizarre” (to say the least) behavior with dead animals (specifically, a bear cub and a whale), it turns out, they were wrong. There was so much more damaging to do in 2024.
The latest scandal in the Kennedy arsenal in general and the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. arsenal in particular is Olivia Nuzzi’s admission to having a “personal relationship” with the presidential hopeful earlier this year while on the campaign trail. And yes, the vagueness of the term “personal relationship” leaves far too much to the imagination. Described as a “star reporter” for New York Magazine, Nuzzi was suspended from the publication after “acknowledging” her close dynamic with RFK Jr. (evidently, close enough to risk her entire career on this confession), though she was certain to stress that the relationship wasn’t physical. Even so, as any woman who has ever had to deal with a boyfriend or husband’s “best friend” in a female form, there is obviously such a thing as an emotional affair (which is oftentimes even worse than a physical one). And it’s likely just as grating to Cheryl Hines as it is to any other woman.
Per a statement released by NY Mag,
“Recently our Washington Correspondent Olivia Nuzzi acknowledged to the magazine’s editors that she had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign, a violation of the magazine’s standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures. Had the magazine been aware of this relationship, she would not have continued to cover the presidential campaign. An internal review of her published work has found no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias. She is currently on leave from the magazine, and the magazine is conducting a more thorough third-party review. We regret this violation of our readers’ trust.”
Alas, it’s unlikely that RFK Jr. would ever apologize for the violation of Hines’ trust. Then again, the Kennedy men are more than somewhat known for their penchants for having affairs and doing a very shitty job of being discreet about it. Leaving the door open for people to say that Hines should have “expected” it/“known better.” Especially considering his ex-wife, Mary Kathleen Richardson, killed herself after discovering a journal of RFK Jr.’s detailing how he slept with thirty-seven women in 2001 alone (which means who knows what the total number of women he had affairs with really added up to in the years before and beyond that). In other words, while RFK Jr. was usually in a non-marriage bed, Hines should have seen that she was making her own to lie in. But those who would try to fault her with “I told you so” logic, well, they clearly haven’t been subjected to “the heart wants what it wants” phenomena.
In the male Kennedys’ case, however, that saying has always been “the dick wants what it wants.” And damn the aftermath. Perhaps that’s what makes the Nuzzi “incident” one of the more unique ones for Kennedy shame in that RFK Jr. didn’t even “go all the way,” despite probably knowing somewhere deep down that there would be an inevitable fallout (so why not make it all slightly worth it with an orgasm here and there?). And, apparently, plenty of email/sext exchanges showcasing the nature of his and Nuzzi’s emotionally intimate rapport.
As for Nuzzi, it will be for her just as it has been for every woman that has suffered at the hands of a Kennedy scandal: her reputation will still end up being more tarnished than his (which is, quite simply, the patriarchy in active motion). Particularly because she’s a journalist now facing an extreme loss of credibility, even more so due to the fact that she’ll be billed as some kind of Jezebel in future dealings with male subjects. Indeed, her behavior is liable to be met with plenty of contempt from fellow journalists of the belief that the last thing the industry needed was another reason for the public to doubt it. And the last thing the Kennedy “dynasty” needed was yet another (cum) stain on it thanks to a man who couldn’t resist a flirtation that turned into something far more unseemly.
Illustration: Pablo Delcan/Source Photographs: Getty Images
What a split screen,” Doug Emhoff said to a crowd at a private fundraiser on the coast of Maine in the last days of July. The Second Gentleman was referring to Donald Trump’s remarks that afternoon to the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago, where he berated Rachel Scott of ABC News for being “nasty” and suggested that Kamala Harris had only recently “turned Black.” Emhoff appeared gobsmacked by the raw vulgarity. “The contrast could not be clearer,” he said.
Since Joe Biden’s decision to step aside, the loudest contrast in the presidential race has been between the elderly white man at the head of the Republican ticket and the younger Black and Indian American woman on the other side. But a disparity of the intragender variety has also come to the fore: the difference between how the men of the right and the left define masculinity.
On the one hand is the Republican Party’s view of manhood: its furious resentments toward women and their power, its mean obsession with forcing women to be baby-makers. On the other hand is the emergence of a Democratic man newly confident in his equal-to-subsidiary status: happily deferential, unapologetically supportive of women’s rights, committed to partnership.
The new Democratic man is embodied by Harris surrogates like Emhoff, whose first solo public appearance since his wife became the de facto nominee was at a Planned Parenthood in Portland, Maine, and Harris’s vice-presidential pick, Governor Tim Walz, the former National Guardsman and football coach whom the right has taken to calling “Tampon Tim” for passing a law in his home state of Minnesota requiring public schools to stock free menstrual products in all school bathrooms.
This is not to suggest that these Democratic guys represent some perfect specimen of evolved masculinity. But taken as a whole, as male Democrats fall over one another in an effort to elect a woman to the presidency, they are presenting a different definition of masculine strength tied to women’s liberation and full civic participation and all but declaring it a new norm.
That Trump is terrible toward and for women hardly needs repeating. But the Republican convention in July was nevertheless a startling window into just how wholly unconcerned the GOP is about its abysmal reputation. Speakers included Hulk Hogan, the former professional wrestler accused of domestic abuse, and Dana White, the Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO who was once filmed engaging in a physical altercation with his wife. There were right-wing misogynists like Tucker Carlson, who lost his job at Fox News amid sexual-harassment allegations and has called women “extremely primitive and basic,” and Representative Matt Gaetz, who has been accused of having sex with a minor and has called reproductive-rights activists “odious on the inside and out.” Where Harris’s walk-out music is Beyoncé’s “Freedom,” both Trump and running mate J. D. Vance have been using James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.”
Trump and his buddies’ hoary views of women as either sexualized objects or pigs are almost old hat. What’s new is the way the contemporary right is practically vibrating with the creepier energies of the online manosphere, which tells young men that women have robbed them of their power. It’s the worldview of men like Andrew Tate, who has been arrested for human trafficking and rape and who tweeted in April, “Dear white men you’re fucked. You’re being replaced because none of you have children.” Elon Musk, who is a vocal supporter of Trump’s campaign (and has also been accused of harassment), has echoed this natalist version of the Great Replacement Theory, saying that “birth control and abortion” have put civilization at risk and suggesting that childless people should not be able to vote.
While the ideas that these men espouse have become common currency across the right, they remain somewhat foreign to the political mainstream. That’s why the discourse this summer was dominated by bewildered responses to unearthed remarks by Vance, who has described childless women as “deranged,” “sociopathic,” and “childless cat ladies” and argued that parents should get extra votes. Republicans’ recent obsession with overturning no-fault-divorce laws is also informed by incel culture and online sexist outrage. Vance has bemoaned the fact that people can more easily leave marriages, even violent ones, “like they change their underwear.”
This is not about ensuring that more babies are born. If it were, Republicans would be supporting child tax credits, federal paid-leave legislation, affordable housing, subsidized day-care programs, and maternal-health-care bills. They would not be imperiling IVF treatments. It’s about the domination of women and the reinscription of patriarchal power.
Then, on that split screen, there are the men of the Democratic Party. Emhoff takes care to emphasize, in a way that is new for Democratic men, that reproductive rights is “not just an issue for women,” it’s “an issue for all of us.” In Portland this summer, he described a “post-Dobbsian hellscape” in which “you can’t get a Pap smear; you can’t get basic care.” That’s right: Men in the post-Biden Democratic Party can comfortably say Pap smear.
As Harris weighed the decision of who would be her running mate, it was understood that she would be seeking a white man to balance out the historically disruptive nature of her candidacy, and the nation got a glimpse of an array of guys who seemed eager to serve a female boss. They were masculine in a lot of traditional ways: veterans and astronauts and high-powered lawyers who could talk about guns and fixing cars but also child care and parenthood. This is a version of masculinity that is open and optimistic and appears to really love women. To many of us, this winds up reading as a lot more manly than, for instance, Vance’s half-hearted attempts to defend his mixed-race marriage from white-supremacist criticism.
It is thus poetic that Harris encountered Walz, who as governor had signed a series of expansive protections of abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, at a Planned Parenthood in St. Paul in March, the first visit by any sitting vice-president to a facility that provides abortion care. Walz, 60, looks like a beardless Santa Claus and has the vibe of a neighbor who will fix your lawn mower. His lightning-strike audition for the veep slot was accompanied by photographs online showing him snuggling dogs, cats, and piglets and being embraced by groups of happy children after he signed new child-care-benefit laws. Walz speaks often, including at his first campaign rally with Harris in August, of the IVF struggles he and his wife, Gwen, experienced.
It is invigorating to see Walz’s traditional form of public masculinity — “big dad energy,” as Axios put it — in service of a party that seems finally to be taking women’s rights and liberation as a central moral concern. Just a few decades ago, that stance would have gotten Democrats derisively labeled “the mommy party.”
But this is where Walz’s great rhetorical contribution to the campaign comes in: his use of the word weird to describe the backward, bizarre positions of the opposition. It’s not just that weird is an effective descriptor that drives Republicans up the wall. It’s that it also reflects its inverse: normal. For while the right has been terrifyingly successful at rolling back laws and rights, it seems to be having a tougher time altering what have become new gender norms. When Vance describes child care as “class war against normal people,” it sounds weird. When Fox News’ Jesse Watters suggests that “when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman,” it sounds really weird. And when Democratic men speak of women as their partners, friends, colleagues, and bosses, when they make it clear that people need Pap smears and tampons and abortion care, when they show themselves willing to work for a woman to become president, they sound, well, normal.
In their home office with their dog, Pepper. Photo: Ashley Markle
I can tell you who I’m writing for, and I can tell you who I’m keeping in mind,” romance novelist Casey McQuiston says. We are one cocktail in at the Scarlet Lounge, an Upper West Side bar co-owned by the actor Michael Imperioli. “I am writing for trans people — capital-F For,” McQuiston says. “Trans people, queer people, those are a lot of the people who engage with my work in ways that make me feel like they got it.” But McQuiston, blockbuster queer-romance author of The Pairing (out in August), is always aware of the broad audience of American romance readers. There’s the old-school image of the straight white midwestern wife tucking a mass-market paperback into her purse, and there’s the more probable reader of today, someone who might pick up The Pairing at a Target with no idea that its leads are queer. “You’re gonna be 60 percent of the way in before you know that’s what you’re reading, and I have now Trojan-horsed you into reading a trans romance,” they say. “I’m really interested in those people, too. I think they have often been underestimated. And I think they should peg their husbands.”
Red, White & Royal Blue, which came out in 2019 and was McQuiston’s first novel, is a publishing fairy tale. A love story about Alex, the politically driven son of the first woman U.S. president, and Henry, a reserved British prince, the book is maximalist and swoony, leaning unabashedly into joyful sentimentality. The line “History, huh?,” which Alex first mentions in a letter he writes to Henry about a possible gay romance between Alexander Hamilton and a Revolutionary War hero, becomes a rallying cry for supporters of Alex and Henry in the book as well as in real life, where the quote is a popular catchphrase on RW&RB–inspired merchandise and emblematic of the kind of Obama-era earnestness the novel evokes. With little publicity, the book became so popular that it quickly required multiple printings. By the end of 2019, there were 100,000 copies in circulation.
McQuiston has published two more novels since then: One Last Stop, a sapphic mass-transit time-traveling romance, and I Kissed Shara Wheeler, a more personal YA novel about growing up queer in a southern conservative Christian community. Their ability to move among genres while retaining an unmistakable core identity in their work has been crucial to their success. “It would be impossible for me to overstate how important Casey is to the development of queer romance and traditional publishing,” says Leah Koch, co-owner of the romance bookstore the Ripped Bodice. Isabel Kaufman, a literary agent and a friend of McQuiston’s, agrees. Their fans are devoted, “which means they can bring their readers with them wherever they go,” Kaufman says. Amazon Studios released an adaptation of Red, White & Royal Blue in 2023 starring Nicholas Galitzine and Taylor Zakhar Perez, and the film did so well (including an Emmy nomination) that McQuiston is currently working on the screenplay for a sequel. Their newest novel, The Pairing, is all the things McQuiston is best known for — a book about queerness and found families and self-knowledge, full of humor and the intense awareness of how hot a blunt jawline can be.
But there’s also a noticeable shift in the questions and ideas that animate The Pairing compared with those that define Red, White & Royal Blue. Published when queer romance was still vanishingly rare at the major publishing houses, RW&RB hinges on the story of Henry and Alex coming out of the closet, insisting that their polished, high-profile public personae can include their queerness. RW&RB is full of tenderness and careful first steps. The Pairing is hotter, for one thing — more bodily, more sensory. The book follows two bisexual exes named Theo and Kit who reunite on a food-and-wine tour of Europe as they eat and drink and lust their way across the Continent; it is not a coming-out book or a story about the public celebration of queer identity. Kit is a cisgender man, and in a recent Instagram post McQuiston describes Theo as having “an abundance of gender.” But those qualities are part of who Kit and Theo are, not a driving plot mechanism. Instead, amid its joyful gluttony, the book focuses on misunderstanding, on all the ways that visibility is not the end of the story and how being seen is not the same as being understood, an idea that keeps driving Theo and Kit apart even as they embark on increasingly horny European escapades.
Despite McQuiston’s enormous success, being misunderstood is still a source of anxiety for them. Some of it is just who they are: They love lists and diagrams, they love fully committing to a bit, they need to know exactly what each of their characters is carrying in their bags and what songs are on their playlists. Some of it has to do with gender and sexuality. “I knew that I was queer by the time that I was 20,” they say, “but the gender thing was more of a Saturn-return situation.” They have been publicly out as nonbinary since 2021, but The Pairing is their first adult book to be published since then, and because the film adaptation of RW&RB was released during the writers’ and actors’ strikes, they haven’t done much publicity in those years. “It’s been two years since I’ve been out in the world promoting my work,” they say, “and I feel like I’ve gotten spoiled in this little bubble. Most of the time, I’m engaging with people who know me and understand me and gender me correctly. I forget that sometimes I have to go back out into the wider world.”
McQuiston, 33, grew up in Louisiana, where their high-school experience was much like the one in I Kissed Shara Wheeler. They attended a private Southern Baptist high school, though McQuiston’s family was Catholic; their parents chose it for the small class size and academic rigor, not specifically for the Christianity. “I don’t think they knew the extent of what it was like,” McQuiston says. “Its packaging is ‘Christ-centered education,’ but they’re not going to lead with, like, ‘We’re going to have chapel services where we tell all your children that they’re going to hell if they’re gay.’” As restrictive as the school was, McQuiston says it made them resourceful. “It made me a better writer because I felt so weird and alone and wrong and mismatched in this place,” they say. “I was looking to create my own little book and live there.”
They read everything from Harry Potter to ThePicture of Dorian Gray to TV recaps, but they imagined a future as a YA writer in the vein of John Green or maybe someone with more of a fantasy bent. They attended Louisiana State University, where they studied journalism in an attempt to be practical. They had been thinking about moving to L.A. after graduation, maybe writing criticism or pursuing journalism full time, but after their father died, they decided to stay closer to home, working for a local newspaper and writing romance in the off-hours, a side project they started toying with when the fantasy books they had earlier considered writing didn’t materialize. “As soon as I figured out what genre I was supposed to be writing in, all these blocks I ran into every other time I’d tried to write a book just came down. It was like, Oh, I was always supposed to be a romance writer,” they say.
They began writing RW&RB in 2016, inspired by the election and the 2015 romance novel The Royal We. When RW&RB sold in March 2018, they used their advance to move to Colorado, where several of their friends had landed. They stayed there for two years, living in Fort Collins, renting a house with college buddies, and working odd jobs. Once the book started taking off, they moved to New York just before the pandemic began and have been there ever since. They now live in Queens with their partner, who works in publicity at a publishing firm. They’re planning to get engaged — they even have rings they’ve both designed and made and plans for how to propose — but have not had the time: “I know what I’m doing, he knows what he’s doing, but it’s like, work is really busy right now, man!”
McQuiston has been crafting two projects at once over the past several months. One of them is the movie sequel to RW&RB, which they’re co-writing with playwright Matthew López, who directed and co-wrote the screenplay for the first film. At test screenings, he says, they were getting comments about how the film was a little corny. “When it came to those ‘cheesy’ comments, I was like, You know what? I’m going to view that as a good thing. It’s going to operate in this realm, just the way the book does.”
Writing the sequel’s screenplay has presented interesting challenges, especially because there’s no book to work from. “It’s a mind-fuck!” McQuiston says. “We have things that were left out of the movie, and there’s a little bonus chapter I wrote for the collector’s edition. Other than that, we’re making it up as we go. But I’m also considering it as a different canon. Changes that were made in adapting ripple out into character and story.” Book Alex decides to go to law school, but the movie characters are older, at different inflection points in their lives. What does that mean about what they want now and what they care about?
The other project occupying McQuiston’s mind is the one that will become their next book. It’ll be a spinoff of The Pairing, though they can’t yet say which character will play the central role. Shortly after our time together, McQuiston and their sister depart for a research trip to the Basque Country, where some portion of the next novel will be set.
They love this part of the writing process. Travel and the time and space to research were not available to them earlier in their career. On a day trip to San Sebastian, they realized the beach was full of people swimming in various states of nudity and decided to go for it. “I swam out to my shoulders and rolled my swimsuit down and was like, Here I am,” they say. They had top surgery in November and had never swum with their shirt off before. “I had this moment of floating in the ocean, in this bay, looking at this castle and these mountains in this city full of amazing food and all these different kinds of bodies and people.” They’re so happy to be at this place of freedom with their work. “It is exactly what I want to be putting out as an artist right now.”
In the fall of 2011, a high-school girl in Le Roy started to display motor tics initially resembling Tourette’s syndrome. Her face twitched. Her arms flailed. She experienced difficulties with speech and became prone to verbal outbursts. But then a second girl at the school began to display the same behavior. After the second, another. Two makes for a curiosity; three a concern. By the time the tally metastasized past a dozen girls, it looked like a contagion. “As the weather grew colder in Le Roy that fall, the symptoms continued to come to life,” narrates Dan Taberski in Hysterical, an audio docuseries that revisits the medical mystery more than a decade later. “An irregular heartbeat finding rhythm.”
Competing theories emerged. Some unaffected students suspected that their peers were faking the malady for attention. Later, the specter of environmental pollution came into play, a natural hypothesis for the industrial town about an hour from Niagara Falls, where the Love Canal disaster, in which toxic-chemical dumping was discovered in the late 1970s to have harmed residents over decades, still looms large. In the case of these girls, state authorities, the media, and large swathes of the community coalesced on a more striking explanation: “conversion disorder,” or the condition in which a person exhibits physiological responses to emotional trauma or extreme stress. In other words, the girls were deemed to be suffering from mass hysteria. The mystery was the stuff of media frenzies, perfect fodder for cable news and daytime shows as it played out.
Taberski, a son of Western New York, grew up not far from Le Roy. He says that he spent a lot of his life there “wearing giant winter coats with giant knit hats with giant pom-poms on top.” Balancing a strong adoration for his old stomping grounds with a sense of moral clarity, the seven-part Hysterical, which he makes with longtime collaborator Henry Molofsky and a team of producers, sees him mounting an interrogation of the “mass hysteria” diagnosis with an explicit intent to keep the girls’ experience front and center.
In this, the series carries some spiritual connection to The Retrievals, the Serial Productions–New York Times audio project from last year that grappled with the failure of key American systems to seriously consider women’s pain. When Taberski asks Emily, who was in eighth grade when she contracted symptoms, whether she experienced any undisclosed trauma at the time, the response feels deflating. “Not anything that would’ve made it into something like this,” she says. “Typical eighth-grade trauma.” Taberski is a preternaturally empathetic documentarian, approaching the story with care where it’s dearly needed and skepticism where it’s sorely deserved. He’s also a seasoned hand who knows the culture of the medium he works in — sadly, podcasting is increasingly home to salacious Investigation Discovery–style storytelling — and so he follows Emily’s response by cutting off any Galaxy Brain suggestions. “There’s no subtext here, by the way, no suggestion that anyone is hiding something or in denial about what’s really going on,” he cuts in over narration. “For a lot of the girls and the parents in Le Roy, it just didn’t feel true.”
Taberski also cuts off any indication that Hysterical will drive toward a clear answer to the mystery. He chases down many of the case’s hypotheses and oddities, but the human brain remains a black box of mysteries through the end. This does not mean that Hysterical does not arrive at an outcome. The natural human desire to scramble for meaning, even if the explanation harms individuals, emerges as the real subject. Late in the series, we learn about how a student who actually suffered from Tourette’s was treated by the school and the community as a kind of scapegoat for the outbreak. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and you are the few,” she recounts being told, an absolutely horrible thing for a high-school child to hear. But as easy as it might have been for Hysterical to paint the scene in simple terms of persecutors and the persecuted, Taberski practices a remarkable empathy for where the broader community was coming from. Everyone just wants their own child to be safe, even if they ultimately have to turn on each other; therein lies the tragedy.
Taberski is one of the finest audio documentarians working today, yet he still seems underappreciated. Part of this likely has to do with the waning power of narrative audio, which has become displaced in recent years by aggressively corporate celebrity–centric chat podcasts. But even during the so-called golden age of narrative podcasting (2014 to 2022-ish), his work was never fêted as widely and as often as, say, This American Life and its widening diaspora of producers. This could be owed to the nature of his breakout hit, 2017’s Missing Richard Simmons, an impish jaunt that sought to track down the titular reclusive fitness star (who died earlier this summer) while doubling as an adoring biography that drew pearl-clutching condemnation from the Times, which called it “morally suspect” for what it deemed to be excessively invasive tactics. I never quite shared that assessment. In any case, Taberski has gone on to produce a body of work that’s as striking for its humanism as its formalistic diversity. Among his projects: Running From COPS, an extended critique of the copaganda reality show; The Line, a vigorous investigation into a war crime in Iraq; and 9/12, an essayistic series taking stock of the manifold experiences processing the long tail of the September 11 attacks.
What happened to the girls in Le Roy is ripe territory for narrative podcasting — far enough in the past to sort through the mess undisturbed, close enough to the present to feel urgent, and inconclusive enough to beg for more investigation. Conversion disorder is a tricky and fundamentally gendered diagnosis. When social media was inevitably fingered as a suspected disease vector, the situation firmly resembled a case of ancient prejudices against young girls being adapted to fit contemporary freak-outs.
All the traits that make Taberski’s work so distinct — a sobriety over the material, a gloriously wry writing voice, a strong knack for compassionate interviewing — are very much present in the series. But Hysterical sees Taberski taking a step further into philosophical territory with a greater, quiet willingness to sit with the abyss. This series explores our constant failure to deal with uncertainty and how fear of the unknown often turns us into monsters. To be hysterical is to be human, and this is a truth that’s both depressing to live with and liberating to learn.
Last year, Yorgos Lanthimos directed a dark comedy about a woman named Bella who was assembled from the body of an adult and the brain of a fetus in a Frankenstein-like surgery and who went on to fuck her way to self-actualization across a fantastical Europe. It was the most accessible thing the Athens-born director had ever made, which really says more about his overall body of work than it does about Poor Things.
Lanthimos is one of film’s reigning sadists, though he’s always funny about it — if not funny haha, then funny in a tone so arid as to render the humor borderline subliminal. He makes films set in deadpan universes that sit at Dutch angles to our own and feature characters struggling to live in accordance with arbitrary and frequently cruel conventions. All of which is true of Poor Things as well. What sets it apart is the way that Bella, the wiped-blank heroine played by Emma Stone, rejects the rules and strictures she’s told she has to abide by as she speedruns her way from child to woman of the world. Lanthimos, as unlikely as it seemed, had created a story of empowerment as well as something tailor-made to polarize the internet.
The frankness of the sexual content — which begins with Bella’s innocent explorations of her own body, progresses to her voracious pursuit of what she calls “furious jumping” with a louche lawyer played by Mark Ruffalo, and eventually brings her to work in a Parisian brothel — kicked off arguments about the degree to which Poor Things is mired in the male gaze. It seemed as though the only person who didn’t care to weigh in on the validity of the film’s feminism was the filmmaker himself, who shied away from the label like someone being introduced as a boyfriend by a person they thought they were just casually dating.
Watching the world discover Lanthimos by way of one of his least characteristic and, honestly, weakest films has been akin to watching someone you know become the internet’s latest main character, stripped of other context with their actions scrutinized via a very specific lens. Lanthimos is many things — a champion absurdist, an arguable nihilist, an occasional edgelord, and an artist who has maintained a decidedly Euro sensibility despite having worked in English with Hollywood actors since 2015. His movies have the brain-burrowing quality of an insomniac’s thought spiral and are so insistently off-kilter that the Greek Weird Wave, the movement he’s sometimes described as being a part of, feels less like a trend in national cinema and more like a summary of how his distinct sensibility has filtered through to some of his peers. If he considers himself a feminist — and there’s no reason to believe he wouldn’t, even if there is a “please clap” quality to Bella’s journey in Poor Things that leaves it lacking in conviction — it has felt largely incidental until this point.
His work does have an awareness of the role that gender plays in the abuse of power and in sexual violence, and his films feature their own fun-house-mirror versions of patriarchy. But when it comes to the degradations his characters are subjected to, he’s equal opportunity. The most challenging aspect of his movies, which run the gamut from the brilliant (Dogtooth,The Favourite) to the irritatingly opaque (Kinetta,The Killing of a Sacred Deer), has more to do with the impassivity of his gaze and the delectable swagger behind it. He skewers his characters like he’s pinning butterflies to corkboard, and it’s not always evident whether that’s done in service of some greater purpose or out of a more basic desire to provoke. Kinds of Kindness, his hilariously hostile follow-up to Poor Things, is a return to the director’s primary interest, which has always been control. In particular, he’s fascinated by what makes people continue to obey, how they fumblingly fit themselves into roles laid out for them, why they might submit to the will of others even when it causes them harm.
The anthology film, which premiered earlier this year at Cannes, is made up of a trio of surreal fables rife with coercion, druggings, assaults, and self-mutilation. In its first section, Jesse Plemons plays a man who lives his entire life — from the clothes he wears to the house he lives in, the woman he marries, and the size of their family (he puts an abortifacient in his wife’s coffee to maintain their childless state) — according to the dictates of his boss (Willem Dafoe). In the second, Plemons is a cop who subjects a woman (Stone) who claims to be his missing wife to a series of escalating tests in order to prove she’s an impostor. (The ensemble, which includes Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, Hong Chau, and Margaret Qualley, recurs across each part.) And in the third, Stone belongs to a cult whose members pledge sexual fidelity to its two leaders and are in search of a messiah — a position that involves being able to raise the dead but also having the correct distance between your nipples. Lanthimos has made inroads with American audiences, but Kinds of Kindness brings to mind his earlier and less approachable work, which is in Greek and focuses on the dynamics of people devoted to inscrutable group activities that involve turning yourself over to someone else’s whims.
There’s also an obsessive cop in Kinetta, Lanthimos’s barely parsable 2005 solo debut, one consumed with coaching a hotel maid and a photoshop clerk through reenactments of violent crimes, a project they keep coming back to despite its appearing to make them miserable. There’s a cultlike collective in his 2011 Alps, a group of four people who, as a service to the bereaved, fill in for people who have died, wearing the deceased’s clothing and parroting past conversations — a process that leads one of its members, played by Lanthimos’s favorite non-American leading lady, Angeliki Papoulia, to become destructively overinvested. These aren’t films about people who overcome limitations and discover themselves but something uneasier: films about people who barely have a sense of self at all and who accept being told what to do because they’re at a loss otherwise.
It’s fair to say that all of Lanthimos’s movies are meant to be received as comedies, even 2017’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which takes on the contours of a thriller when members of a family learn they’re required to sacrifice one of their own. But he isn’t in any way a warm filmmaker, which may have something to do with how so many of the oddball enterprises his characters are involved in read as distorted versions of filmmaking with someone in charge of direction and others playing parts. His characters are unfailingly stilted and juvenile and a little alien, designed to keep the viewer at arm’s length rather than to invite sympathy. Given how regularly his films veer toward debasement, that distance serves as a protective measure, a means of making the ludicrous and disturbing situations he conjures up easier to tolerate.
The most excruciating sequence in his entire filmography, in 2009’s Dogtooth, rests entirely on the mechanical behavior of its participants. Papoulia, as one of three adult siblings who were raised in stunted isolation, is directed to have sex with her brother by their parents, who have created a whole mythology about the dangers of the outside world but who fully buy into the idea that men have urges that must be tended to. Lanthimos shoots the encounter in a series of frank, static shots that leave nothing to the imagination until the end, when the film cuts to Papoulia’s character in profile, her brother visible only in the reflection of the mirror as he moves above her, her face contorted in an involuntary grimace. This framing is echoed in Kinds of Kindness in a scene in which one of Stone’s characters is roofied and then raped, her head jostling as her unconscious body is assaulted by someone offscreen. These aren’t moments anyone would trumpet as feminist, though what’s upsetting about them isn’t that they feel exploitative — it’s that they’re presented impassively, with no more compassion than prurience and with an unsparing gaze that provides no guidance for what a viewer is supposed to feel aside from discomfort.
There’s something haunting about how Lanthimos keeps returning to these dynamics. He treats the desire to be dominated as an elemental aspect of human nature, though it’s one he prefers to explore on a granular level. He may not offer empathy to these characters, but he doesn’t hold himself apart from them. If the triumphant found-family ending of Poor Things rings false, that’s only because it provides closure when his efforts are very much ongoing.
It’s ridiculous to allow the executive you work for to decide what you should read at night and how many children you can have, but it’s worth reflecting on the forces shaping each of our own decisions on those matters. That’s not an especially friendly way to think about how we all exist in the world — but then Yorgos Lanthimos was never your friend.
Donald Trump’s guest list in court includes Lara Trump, Eric Trump, Lauren Boebert, Mike Johnson, Judge Jeanine, Matt Gaetz, Susie Wiles, Vivek Ramaswamy, and J.D. Vance (among others). Art: Isabelle Brourman
Another day in paradise at the courthouse!” Jason Miller told me. A former aide to Rudy Giuliani, Miller was a Republican operative well known in New York and Washington, D.C., when he became a senior communications adviser on Trump’s first presidential campaign. Since then, he has floated in and out of official roles with a stint in the middle at Gettr, a rival to Trump’s own Truth Social. For the 2024 campaign, he holds the vague title of senior adviser; in practice, he is more like Trump’s shadow, his status in the campaign hierarchy confirmed by his fixed proximity to the candidate. On this occasion, he was speaking from a holding room adjacent to the 15th-floor courtroom where Trump now spends most of his weekdays captive to the whims of a judge. From roughly 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, the court maintains custody of the candidate. On Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, the campaign gets custody of the defendant. Donald J. Trump for President 2024 has, by necessity, moved its operational headquarters from Palm Beach to the criminal court at 100 Centre Street.
While the area outside the courthouse has become an open-mic lounge for MAGA sycophants and Republican leaders who have determined they must convincingly mimic the behaviors of those political animals to survive in Trump’s kingdom, the holding room is where Miller and other campaign officials monitor trial proceedings as they tend to the business of trying to install Trump back in the White House. “We can listen and watch what’s going on, and we can do important things like call you back,” Miller said in his perma-ironic lilt. “He’s full time in the courtroom, and he’s somehow full time on the campaign trail. We are maximizing every single minute the president has. If we can’t be on the campaign trail, we’ll bring the campaign trail to President Trump.”
It’s The Campaign Trial.
Some Trump 2024 campaign staff began their migration back to New York in April when jury selection got underway. In 2016, the campaign was run from a studio on the fifth floor of Trump Tower, where The Apprentice was once filmed, and the 2020 reelect was based in a sleek building in Rosslyn, Virginia, across the Potomac from the White House. But unlike on most campaigns, the real nerve center of the operation was always the area directly surrounding the candidate; to work in an office and out of Trump’s sight was to run the risk of falling out of the loop or an internal rival getting in his ear and killing you off. Trump was — is — simply too vulnerable to influence and too inclined to chaos. As his 2016 rally schedule became more grueling, with the 757 crisscrossing the country throughout the week, senior leadership kept themselves at his side and on the road. Whenever possible, Trump would fly back to New York, preferring to spend his nights in his own bed. History’s greatest extrovert is, paradoxically, a homebody, and his residences — Trump Tower, the White House, Mar-a-Lago, Bedminster — are always also his places of business. For Trump 2024, a rotation of staffers travels with the candidate wherever he goes, forming a roving satellite campaign that, until the verdict is in, finds itself stationed mostly in lower Manhattan. Adapted to Florida heat, Trump had trouble adjusting to the initially freezing temperatures inside the courtroom, which is now quite warm (though Trump and his disciples, even as some of them visibly sweat while seated behind their leader during the proceedings, insist it’s still cold).
With the candidate out of control of his own whereabouts on trial days, the campaign must be run from wherever the defendant happens to be. Often, that means the motorcade on the way downtown to the courthouse in the morning or back uptown at the end of the day. “We use things such as traveling on the plane, even traveling from Trump Tower to the courthouse,” Miller said. It was “fake news,” he added, when asked if it was true that Trump fell asleep in the car. “Sometimes we’ll meet with him in his office in Trump Tower on the 26th floor. Sometimes there’ll be meetings in the personal residence. It’s a balance because he’s been forced to essentially be full time here in the courtroom.” When he’s in the courtroom, the campaign hums along elsewhere in the building, making it a kind of co-working space for Team Trump and the other defendants who await their own court appearances in literal jail cells on adjacent floors.
During trial proceedings on May 13, Trump appeared to be most awake and alert while reviewing polling numbers as others around him — a roomful of lawyers and a jury who will decide whether to make him the first former president in American history to be convicted of a crime — focused on the case. A Trump assistant reportedly travels with a portable printer for the purpose of keeping him updated on news related to his existence in analog, his preferred medium. “It’s the staff’s job to keep him informed of what’s happening while he’s in the icebox,” Miller said.
Miller denied that the campaign is run from the courthouse war room where he admits he now spends many of his weekdays running the campaign. “Far from it,” he said. “Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita run the campaign from our headquarters in West Palm Beach.” But senior campaign officials have been spotted filing into the two rows of benches on the left side of the courtroom, behind the defendant, including Wiles herself, who made an appearance seated next to Eric Trump, the only immediate member of the family who has attended the proceedings so far. “I don’t think he wants us there,” Eric’s wife, Lara, now the nominal president of the Republican National Committee, told me last month at a Saturday-night cocktail party in Washington. “I think he wants to keep us away from that.” Of the trial itself, she added, “I mean, I think it’s ridiculous.” I told her it seemed lonely in the courtroom for her father-in-law. “And cold. And boring,” she said. Eric showed up for the first time soon after and has been a regular presence ever since, alongside Boris Epshteyn, an adviser recently indicted in Arizona for his role in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and Andrew Giuliani, whose father, Rudy, was indicted in the same Arizona case. On Monday, Senator J. D. Vance attended the proceedings, a development that suggested Trump’s vice-presidential selection process had moved to the courthouse too. On Tuesday, Vance’s act was followed by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (though only in the hallway), Vivek Ramaswamy, and Governor of One of the Dakotas Doug Burgum. Lara showed her face for the first time too — an admission that her initial read of her father-in-law’s desires was wrong or that those desires are evolving as the trial wears on. Thursday’s hearing brought a flock of eager Freedom Caucusers, including Representatives Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert.
At the courthouse, I was thinking about Aristotle. Not because the law is reason free from passion but because he theorized that eels spring into existence through a kind of mud metamorphosis. Scientists now believe the European eel is spawned in the Sargasso Sea, then swims across the Atlantic, and when it reaches maturity, it migrates thousands of miles back there, to the location of its birth, to spawn and die. There is a similarly disorienting circular quality to Trump’s current stint in New York.
What year is it? From his penthouse in Trump Tower, the candidate’s relationship to his phone is compulsive and his output on social media is prolific. He calls in to Hannity, his picture frozen onscreen as he offers rolling commentary on a breaking-news event in his familiar rasp. He fires off a post in which he says an MSNBC personality “looks like shit.” He emerges through the gilded doors of the Fifth Avenue high-rise dressed in his uniform of too-big Brioni suit and too-long red tie, trailed by security and yes-men and a beautiful assistant. He boards an idling SUV. He delivers a winding campaign speech with asides about Chris Christie, Hillary Clinton, and Frank Sinatra, and in exchange for the entertainment, his fans charge his life force with their attention. Miller is around. Dan Scavino too. So is Omarosa. And Hope Hicks. And Stormy Daniels. I’m on the phone with Sam Nunberg. I’m texting Michael Cohen, Kellyanne Conway, and Steve Bannon. Roger Stone is not speaking to me, and it’s anyone’s guess as to what he’s upset about this time. I’m sure he’ll get over it, whatever it is. He always does.
The experience for many of those people is very different today, of course. Hicks is not his spokeswoman but a witness for the prosecution; when she arrived on the stand, she hadn’t seen Trump in about two years. Cohen is no longer his fixer but a witness, too. Daniels is not defined by her bought-and-paid-for silence but by her testimony. And Omarosa is still on television, as God intended, but when she sits down next to me for one of CNN’s Last Supper panels, it’s to spin against Trump, not on his behalf.
For all witnesses, the experience of reliving the 2016 campaign has been blurring. Much was made of Hicks crying on the stand. Pundits speculated that the tears were the result of a realization that her testimony had damned her former boss. Yet just before she broke down, Hicks, a crier by nature, had been talking about February 2018, an era defined by her relationship falling apart and tabloids hounding her and 17 people getting shot to death at a high school in Parkland, Florida; at the time, she had to remind Trump to tell the victims’ families “I hear you.” She quit her job (for the first time) six weeks later. When the defense began cross-examination, Hicks was asked about the very start of her time with Trump — a man she had helped elect president of the United States; a man she maintained great personal affection for until he finally made that impossible as he squandered the presidency through his narcissism and sociopathy; a man who was now sitting feet away from her as a criminal defendant. Almost ten years earlier, when she accepted a casual invitation to fly with him to Iowa, she could not have imagined this was where she would land. Call her naïve, but she had been so hopeful then.
Or take Cohen. He had lived much of his life in service to Trump. He was a company man, snapping up real estate in Trump buildings. Even now, after he had served time in prison for lying on his boss’s behalf and spent the ensuing years in what amounted to a protracted public-therapy session, trying to figure out why he had fallen victim to what he had come to see as a cult, he still lived in a Trump building on Park Avenue. In the weeks leading up to the trial, he was nervy and anxious. He lost sleep. He lost weight. He wanted to be a good witness. And he wanted revenge, definitely. But he also wanted something he knew he would probably never get. As he readied himself for this most cinematic of betrayals of his former boss — serving as the star witness in his criminal trial — he was desperate to understand how Trump had been able to betray him. Really, this was another way of asking if a man he once loved had ever loved him back.
In the nine years since he began his unlikely political rise, Trump was elected president, impeached, voted out of office, and impeached again after he tried and failed to overturn the results of the election he lost and his supporters staged a violent attack on the Capitol. There were also innumerable outrages and absurdities that at any other time would have upended an administration and outright ended the political career of its leader.
Yet despite or perhaps because of that, one of America’s two major political parties was fully remade in his image. The ideological topography of the country is now defined by a fault that splits it with about half the population convinced that he’s a savior and about half convinced that he belongs in jail for any number of the crimes he is alleged to have committed across 88 counts in four criminal indictments. Never mind the civil trials. And never mind the crimes against good taste.
When Miller calls from the Trump courthouse war room and strikes an upbeat tone as he yaps about how he loves Diet Coke, the preferred beverage of his boss, so much so that he travels to the trial with his own supply of the stuff, it is tempting to laugh because, well, the campaign is being run from a criminal courthouse. (Trump must suffer without a steady hit of aspartame, however. “Nobody is allowed to bring Diet Cokes into the courtroom,” Miller said. Trump drinks it instead during lunch breaks — “He doesn’t have to request it. We have it there already,” per Miller — where he adheres to The Standard Trump Diet. McDonald’s, Miller said, is “one of our many menu options we have in rotation for court days.”)
And yet despite or perhaps because of all this, it is possible and maybe even likely that Trump will become president again. Most general-election surveys show the former president functionally tied with President Joe Biden. When independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is factored in, the tie becomes a Trump victory of more than four percentage points. “President Trump’s numbers just keep going up,” Miller said. “I don’t think this is having the effect that Biden and the Democrats hoped that it would.”
From the perspective of the Trump campaign, the past few weeks have gone pretty well. If it feels like 2016 again, great. That was the election they managed to win, after all, even if the alleged means by which they achieved the outcome are the reasons they find themselves working from the courthouse today. “The excitement level feels like we’re in the home stretch of 2016,” Miller said. “The major difference this time,” he added, is not that the campaign is being run from a criminal courthouse but that the candidate is more experienced at running for president on his third attempt. “He knows exactly what he wants to say. So it’s really kind of the best of both worlds.”
How could things be going better? If the candidate goes to jail for contempt, he’s a martyr. “I don’t mind being Nelson Mandela because I’m doing it for a reason,” Trump said. If he is found guilty, it’s a witch hunt, like he’s always said, and he’ll appeal. If he gets off, he was always right when he said, as he always has, that he did nothing wrong.
Just as it was strangely true that each successive indictment seemed to make Trump a stronger candidate in the Republican primary, it is also the case that the trial is making him a better performer on the trail. At after-court stops and onstage at rallies, he has become a kind of SuperTrump, a monstrously turbocharged version of the original model. Quicker and noticeably happier. He even smiles.
After court, Trump has made the most of his drives back uptown, stopping at bodegas and construction sites. On May 2, a campaign official told me to arrive at a fire station at 51st and Third by 3 p.m. Although Trump would be in court for another hour at least, a crowd of security and press formed across the street from the station. Half a dozen men dressed like mini-Trumps paced back and forth with purposeful expressions on their faces. At 5 p.m., Trump arrived by motorcade. He stepped out of his SUV holding two pizzas, which he raised in the air in the self-congratulatory manner of anyone arriving anywhere holding pizzas.
He is, it seems, newly appreciative of his freedom, even as he repeatedly violates a gag order on the understanding that further violations of the gag order could land him in jail. “The Constitution is more important than jail,” he said, after a recent warning from the judge.
In ads, he says, “They wanna take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom… They’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you and I just happen to be standing in their way, and I will never be moving.” Outside the court, he sometimes answers questions from reporters but always makes good on his lifetime commitment to the cameras, the object with which he maintains the most important relationship in his life.
At first I didn’t understand how he could be sleeping — or “closing his beautiful eyes,” as he says — through the events in court. Trump’s sleeplessness, revealed through at-all-hours social-media posts, was essential to his character. He bragged about needing only four hours a night.
I thought back on the beginning of the trial, when news of a self-immolation came just as court broke for lunch. At the park across the street, the air was hot and hazy with burning flesh, which I now know is not just a smell but a texture. Reporters scrambled for information, and the NYPD arrived for a press conference. Before it started, we were due back inside with the defendant. The manifesto made clear that the man chose to set himself on fire at the trial because of the concentration of cameras but that he was not protesting Trump or Trump’s prosecution. It was a good bet the press would care about his display, which aired live, in part, behind reporters on CNN. But he was wrong. He died later that night. We barely ever talked about it again. A man had set himself on fire, but it wasn’t about Trump so it didn’t matter.
After he lost in 2020 and before he was on trial in 2024, Trump worried about his relevance. He was very sensitive on the subject. “I’ve always been relevant,” he told me then. “Like, I’ve been in the mix.” Inside the courtroom, he never has to worry that our attention might drift away from him. Trump on trial is Trump at peace. Of course he can sleep easily.
The writer Justin Kuritzkes became obsessed with pro tennis after watching Naomi Osaka beat Serena Williams at the 2018 U.S. Open in an infamous match fraught with argument. As Williams pleaded her case to the umpire, Kuritzkes realized how cinematic the situation could be: how alone each player was, yet how linked to each other. He started watching tennis all the time, and when he ran out of big matches, he found smaller ones like the Challenger tournaments — low-budget events that could help someone qualify for the highest level of competition. Some of the players there may be among the top 300 in the world, but they’re fighting for prize money that won’t even cover their expenses. Kuritzkes knew the feeling. At the time, he was a well-regarded playwright who struggled to get anything produced. “Although the stands at a Challenger are mostly empty, the players’ emotions are just as if they were at the U.S. Open because they’re fighting for their lives. It’s the humiliation of being a gladiator and nobody’s even there to watch you die,” he says. “I connected with that deeply as a theater person. If you asked me if I know the 271st most successful theater actor in America, I probably do. And I guarantee you they’re broke.”
In 2021, he decided to channel his tennis fixation into a screenplay — and now that screenplay is Challengers, a Zendaya-led production full of enough unsatisfied desire and close-ups of sweaty, beautiful young men to confirm that Luca Guadagnino directed it. The film follows three tennis players who have spent their entire adult lives entangled in one another’s careers and beds: Zendaya plays Tashi Donaldson, a former prodigy who should have gone pro but couldn’t. Mike Faist is her husband, Art, a six-time Grand Slam winner whom Tashi both coaches and disdains. And then there’s Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), an all-id ex-friend and doubles partner to Art and ex-boyfriend to Tashi. When Patrick reencounters the couple at a Challenger in suburban New York, it throws all three of them into racket-smashing, early-onset midlife crisis.
Challengers is Zendaya’s first big-screen leading role, and she plays Tashi full of withholding and coiled, frustrated ambition; her idea of a pep talk before a match is telling her husband to “decimate that little bitch.” This is also Kuritzkes’s first screenplay. Now 33, he spent his 20s writing comic and disturbing plays that were supported by prestigious residencies and fellowships but rarely produced for the stage. Hollywood has been a lot faster to welcome him: After Challengers, he’s got another film with Guadagnino, an adaptation of the William S. Burroughs book Queer. Next, he’s adapting Don Winslow’s mob novel City on Fire with Austin Butler set to star. This would all seem more unprecedented if his wife hadn’t just done something similar: Kuritzkes is married to Celine Song, the former playwright whose own debut film, Past Lives, was nominated for two Oscars.
Even if most of the people who saw Past Lives didn’t know Kuritzkes’s name, Song’s press tour gave him a kind of secondhand, not-quite-accurate fame: The film is about a New York playwright who reengages with a childhood crush from South Korea and begins to question her marriage to her white husband. In interviews, Song talked at length about how her film was inspired by her own life. Now Kuritzkes has written a ménage à trois of his own. Like Past Lives, it hinges on a young woman who is forced to confront the romantic road not taken. Unlike Song, he’s not willing to discuss that theme. “Challengers is an intensely personal film to me — in ways that I’m not interested in talking about,” he says.
He dismisses the films’ similarities. “Love triangles are one of the most basic plots in cinema,” he says. “Even in a relationship between two people, there’s always a sort of imagined third presence.” I ask what that third presence might be. “Well, for a lot of people, it’s, like, Jesus,” he jokes. “Or it’s their conception of themselves, or their parents, or their friends. But in a love triangle, that third presence is not imagined.” Either way, he says, the parallels between his life and Past Lives or Challengers don’t matter: “Once it gets transformed into a work of art, the connection between that and the real thing is irrelevant. That’s just fuel that you’re using to propel a vehicle.”
Justin Kuritzkes on the set of Challengers. Photo: Niko Tavernise/Niko Tavernise
Kuritzkes and I meet at the Fort Greene Park tennis courts in early April, settling down on a cold bench to watch the amateurs hit. To the left, four middle-aged white men play competent doubles. To the right, two young people struggle just to get the ball over the net. Suddenly, a horde of 14-year-olds stream onto the courts, running and yelling as they gather for what’s either an after-school tennis camp or an ad hoc hazing. When Kuritzkes was around that age, he had already quit his tennis lessons. “I could tell exactly how bad I was. I would have moments where it clicked and then wouldn’t be able to replicate it. That drove me crazy because I was like, Well, why can’t I just do that every time?” he says. “I decided I was as good as I was ever going to get and it wasn’t good enough. So I was done.”
Kuritzkes grew up in L.A., the son of a real-estate-lawyer mother and gastroenterologist father, and went to the prep school Harvard-Westlake, where he graduated one year behind Lily Collins and three years ahead of Ben Platt and Beanie Feldstein. The school had a student playwriting festival, and Kuritzkes became a regular participant, writing 10-to-15-minute plays. “The immediacy of theater was intoxicating,” he says. “You can just write something, get two chairs, and have actors do it and the audience will suspend their disbelief.” When he went off to Brown, “I already knew I was a playwright,” he says. In between working on his thesis, he started making character-study videos on his laptop, warping his face using the built-in effects of Photo Booth. In his most-watched video, “Potion Seller,” he plays a knight who keeps begging a merchant for potions.
He met Song the summer after he graduated, in 2012, during a fellowship in Montauk. Song fictionalized this first encounter in Past Lives in a woozy scene where protagonist Nora (Greta Lee) flirts with future husband Arthur (John Magaro) under the fairy lights at a dreamlike residency. Nora departs on a long definition of the Korean concept of in-yun — “It means providence, or fate” — before circling back to say it’s just “something Koreans say to seduce someone.”
Song has said they connected over their work, so I ask Kuritzkes, half-joking, how long it took before he showed her his YouTube videos. He stiffens. “I’m so thrilled and happy to talk about Celine in virtually every context, but I would never want to speak for her in the context of an interview,” he says. Too much in-yun has been spilled already. I point out that Song has spoken freely about their lives together. “I wouldn’t want anybody to confuse the character and me because it erases the work that she and her actor did, or it pollutes it,” he says. I ask if he thinks people do confuse him with the character. “I don’t know,” he replies, looking me straight in the eye. “Do you?”
In Past Lives, the husband is a gentle presence who recedes into the background. In real life, Kuritzkes comes off as preternaturally self-assured. “He has had that from a very young age,” says theater director Danya Taymor. “It’s not arrogance. He just believes in himself.” Shortly after Kuritzkes and Song started dating, “Potion Seller” went so viral that The New Yorker eventually published a parody of it; the video now has over 11 million views. The couple married in 2016, the same year Kuritzkes’s play The Sensuality Party — his thesis from Brown, a series of interlocking monologues from college kids who have an orgy that turns nonconsensual — was produced Off Broadway with Taymor directing. When Kuritzkes and another friend, the director Knud Adams, wanted to stage Kuritzkes’s play Asshole, they built the set themselves and rehearsed in their respective apartments. The play is about a doctor who oversees the force-feeding of prisoners at a government black site and is obsessed with his own asshole. Kuritzkes had written it in 2014 after reading about the force-feeding of Guantánamo prisoners on hunger strike. “The fact that everybody could go about our normal lives after hearing about it really freaked me out,” he says. “I started to think, Well, what would really repulse somebody? It would be a guy playing with his own asshole and smelling his own shit.” The production, at the Brooklyn theater Jack, was a surprise hit. As Adams remembers, “We sold out all our shows. But then it’s not hard to sell out Jack — there are 40 seats.”
Writing Challengers was an exercise in following desire. Deep in the grips of tennis mania, Kuritzkes had begun to wonder what could make watching the game even more interesting. “If I knew exactly what was at stake on an emotional level beyond the court for the people playing and the people watching, that would be just eating a plate of chocolate truffles to me.” His agent sent the script to the producers, Amy Pascal and Rachel O’Connor, who got it to Zendaya, who loved it. The actress wanted both to star and to co-produce. “One of the things I remember saying to Zendaya when we first met was that the cultural space that Zendaya occupies in the world is the space that the character Tashi was supposed to occupy — that was the life she was supposed to have,” says Kuritzkes. “I think she really connected with that ambition and that pain.” The producers and Zendaya who got Guadagnino onboard.
With Challengers, Kuritzkes became part of a machine: He was working with Guadagnino and the film’s tennis consultant, the coach and commentator Brad Gilbert, on the many gameplay scenes, which were choreographed like fights. Each one had to be shot with both body doubles and the actors, and only Faist came in with tennis experience. “During breaks, we would sometimes pick up racquets and play. I have really funny videos on my phone of Luca,” says Kuritzkes, smiling. “It was so adorable. He just couldn’t hit the ball to save his life.”
Kuritzkes says that he always imagined a charge between Art and Patrick — “There is eroticism present in every intimate friendship, especially one between two guys who have spent their lives in locker rooms and dorm rooms and on the court together” — and that Guadagnino’s interpretation pushed it further. Mostly, though, the boys are each other’s foils, with Patrick always willing to play the heel. In Guadagnino’s hands, this inevitably bends erotic. When the two first become infatuated with Tashi, Art says earnestly that she’s “a remarkable young woman.” Patrick replies, “I know. She’s a pillar of the community.” He lowers to a whisper: “I’d let her fuck me with a racquet.” Kuritzkes says that although none of the characters is based on a real player, it was important for Tashi to be a Black woman. “The story of American tennis is Black women for the past however many decades,” he says. “I also knew that I didn’t want to not specify the races of the characters. That always feels to me like you’re avoiding something. Her being a Black woman informs a lot about how she navigates her situation and how she navigates her relationship with these guys.” The Zendaya line making the rounds in the film’s trailer — “I’m taking such good care of my little white boys” — sounds affectionate only on paper.
When Kuritzkes was a kid, he felt bad that so many of the films he loved, like Jules et Jim and Y Tu Mamá También, were about love triangles; he felt guilty getting so much pleasure from watching a scenario in which someone was being wronged, rejected, or hurt. Now he believes movies are exactly the right place for it. “Part of the joy of watching it is thinking, At least my life isn’t as messed up as that, or, My life is as messed up as that, and thank God I’m not alone,” he says. “What’s good for art is the opposite of what’s good for life.”
One of the works of art in Moss’s book is a Timesfront page from May 2020, which saw the paper memorialize nearly 100,000 COVID deaths by filling A1 with the names of 1,000 people who’d lost their lives to the virus. Moss had wanted to include a public memorial in the book—he’d thought of Maya Lin and the Vietnam Memorial—and then this cover happened. “And I thought, Well, this is the Vietnam Memorial, except it’s in the pages of a newspaper that I used to work in, where something like this was, I mean, really inconceivable,” says Moss. It was “a little atypical for the book, but I was interested in it anyway,” he adds. In his interview for the book, Dean Baquet, then the paper’s executive editor, rewards Moss’s instincts. “I actually thought that page was trying to portray a feeling. Nobody was going to read it name by name. It was like a Rothko,” he tells Moss. “And the longer you look at a Rothko, the sadder you get.”
Moss’s pages, too, evoke a feeling—the frenzy of the creative process—and provide a tinge of nostalgia. With the book’s layers of small type, arrows directing you through graphics, and annotations and dialogue in footnotes, the reading experience is not unlike the one you’d have with New York in the Moss era. (In fact, one of the designers of this book, Luke Hayman, previously worked as the magazine’s design director.) “Very early on in my career, I developed an interest, which I’m not sure that all editors have,” says Moss, “to continue to use a magazine as a canvas to try new things. I was always interested in new story forms—always. [It] just kind of was a fetish, almost.” This book, says Moss, made use of some of those magazine tools. “A reader comes to a book with different sets of expectations, but can we push it?” asks Moss. “If I had done it as straight text, I think the book would be much less interesting, but also it would not feel as much an expression of me.”
Courtesy of Penguin Press.
When I recently met Moss at a downtown restaurant not far from New York’s old office, it had been five years, almost to the day, since he’d stepped down from the magazine. Under his leadership, New York didn’t just navigate the transition from city weekly to digital publisher; it thrived in it, launching a number of online verticals—The Cut, Vulture, The Strategist, Grub Street, Intelligencer—that function as stand-alone properties, with some also serving as sections in the print magazine (which, since 2014, has published every other week). Moss, like the magazine he edited for 15 years, is obsessive and curious, with a twinkle in one eye and knowing skepticism in the other.
“I had gotten older,” Moss, now 66, says after I ask why he left New York. “There was more and more that the editors were bringing me that I didn’t relate to, didn’t understand, because they came out of the experience of a younger generation of staff members, which would translate to a younger generation of readers,” he adds. “The only way I know how to edit a magazine is by editing for myself.” And he was sick of the responsibilities that came with being a boss, particularly the one requiring him to spend a lot of time on business strategy. “I was still doing journalism, but I wasn’t doing it enough,” he says. A bicycle accident in 2017 also put things into perspective. “For the first time, I imagined myself being fragile, perishable. So I felt I had another chapter, but not that many more,” he explains.
Does he miss New York? “I miss the people generally. I miss specific people specifically. I miss the ‘let’s put on a show’ aspect of it,” says Moss. He doesn’t miss the news cycle much, though, and has enjoyed being “liberated from the gerbil world,” as he puts it. Still, his brain remains in editor mode. “It forms everything into stories and almost everything into narrative. And so I don’t turn that off,” he says. “And I’m glad I can—he never listens to me, but I can just write a little note to [New York editor in chief] David Haskell and say, ‘Hey, have you thought of this?’” He’s also been consulting for other journalism operations, including The Washington Post’s Opinions section. (Editorial page editor David Shipley is his friend and former colleague.) “I’m kind of like a constant, relatively well-informed focus group,” Moss says of his role.
Otherwise, he’s been enjoying his free time. “I go to museums. I go to movies. I hang out with my friends. I go to painting classes,” Moss says. “My quixotic painting thing is really a big part of my life. I don’t want to pretend otherwise, even though I am embarrassed.” (So much so that he has yet to share his work publicly.)
I ask him if he’s found the answer he set out for. “I’ve gotten one part of the answer, which is that the work of art is the work…. It’s the most banal observation, but that it’s not about the thing you make; it’s about the making. It took me three years to figure out that that was actually true,” he says. “And let me tell you, it has changed my life.”
