Heidi and Spencer cover some current celebrity pop culture news (yes, that includes Taylor and Travis) before answering your burning relationship questions.
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“Love On The Spectrum” is a reality television show centered on how people with autism view, seek, and find love. It’s a fun, inspiring, and heartwarming series that we can all draw many lessons from.
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With the possible exceptions of trauma surgeons, firefighters, and garbage collectors, nearly everyone has at one point or another been plagued by the ambient sense that their job is pointless. This is true even within professions that we’d consider essential: If you know any nurses or teachers, you’ve heard about the hopelessness and boredom that snake their way through hospitals and schools. When you abstract work further and further, away from producing shoes and chairs and toward producing “shareholder value,” you are forced to confront one fundamental question, again and again: What the fuck are we doing here?
Last week, it became clear that Warner Bros. Discovery (a conglomerate formed when AT&T spun off Warner Media, itself the by-product of a 1990 merger between Time Inc. and Warner Communications that was designed to stave off a hostile takeover by Gulf+Western, which is now Paramount) planned to permanently shelve Coyote Vs. Acme, a live action–animation hybrid film that was completed sometime in 2022. Based on a New Yorker piece by Ian Frazier (published a month after the Time-Warner merger) that imagined Wile E. Coyote suing the Acme Co. over “defects in manufacture or improper cautionary labelling” of the various items he purchased to help capture the Road Runner, the film stars Will Forte and John Cena, is directed by Dave Green, and is written by Samy Burch, whose May December script is up for Best Original Screenplay at next month’s Oscars.
It is now overwhelmingly likely that no member of the public will ever be able to see Coyote Vs. Acme. In fact, The Wrap reports that after outcry from filmmakers and onlookers over initial reports about plans to shelf the film, which was budgeted around $70 million, Warner allowed it to be screened for interested parties. But Warner did not inform Netflix, Amazon, or Paramount—all of which are said to have made “handsome” offers—ahead of time that there would be no budging from its initial asking price, which was somewhere between $75 million and $80 million.
There is precedent for Warner, under CEO and president David Zaslav, canceling a filmed and nearly finished feature film. In 2022, the conglomerate shelved Batgirl and something called Scoob! Holiday Haunt, each of which was slated to go directly to the company’s paid streaming service, then known as HBO Max. (You imagine a team of men in suits: “Sir, the exclamation point actually goes in the middle.”) But while Coyote Vs. Acme is not the first property to be left flattened, as if by a falling anvil on the side of a highway, it’s the first one whose very premise is a tidy metaphor for the way the industry has become an impassable web of complementary and competing corporate interests that wraps itself around cultural objects until they are completely mummified. Put another way, Coyote Vs. Acme—if we’re to take the Frazier piece as its basis—is a movie that is about the very dynamic that killed it: capital’s use of the law not as an arena for fair adjudication but as a blunt instrument.
Created for Warner Bros. at the tail end of the 1940s by Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese, Wile E. Coyote has spent the past 75 years in perpetual chase of the Road Runner, a similarly silent desert dweller. Across what, in Frazier’s piece, Coyote’s attorney calls “Arizona and contiguous states,” the predator deploys an endless array of Acme-supplied gadgets and contraptions to catch his prey—always to no avail. While Bugs Bunny is the unquestioned star of Looney Tunes, Coyote is a constant victim of the cartoon physics the franchise made famous: He scurries off cliffs but falls into the chasm below when he looks down and sees that the ground is gone; he’s frozen, statue-like, by the quick-drying cement Road Runner speeds through like a hydroplaning car; he collides “with a roadside billboard so violently as to leave a hole in the shape of his full silhouette.”
What Frazier’s piece captures so shrewdly is the way legalese can make the ordinary sound absurd and the absurd sound downright justifiable:
Unsuspecting, the prey stopped near Mr. Coyote, well within range of the springs at full extension. Mr. Coyote gauged the distance with care and proceeded to pull the lanyard release. … At this point, Defendant’s product should have thrust Mr. Coyote forward and away from the boulder. Instead, for reasons yet unknown, the Acme Spring-Powered Shoes thrust the boulder away from Mr. Coyote. As the intended prey looked on unharmed, Mr. Coyote hung suspended in air. Then the twin springs recoiled, bringing Mr. Coyote to a violent feet-first collision with the boulder, the full weight of his head and forequarters falling upon his lower extremities.
The lawsuit, like the cartoon itself, endears Wile E. Coyote to us: We want him to catch the Road Runner; we don’t want him to suffer a “fracture of the left ear at the stem, causing the ear to dangle in the aftershock with a creaking noise.” But underlying the catalog of injuries to body and reputation that Coyote’s lawyer offers is the claim that it is a predator’s inalienable right to pursue its prey. So where Acme is a clot of half-obscured “directors, officers, shareholders, successors, and assigns,” the plaintiff is himself hoping to normalize his crimes; the case is a Russian nesting doll of predation. It calls to mind the arch-American myths of the careless coffee drinkers suing restaurants for handing them hot drinks.
The entertainment industry, like all others, replicates this logic on a larger scale. Most analysts figure Warner will score at least a $30 million tax break for shelving Coyote Vs. Acme rather than releasing it. This is, on its face, immoral and anticompetitive whether you find morality and business competition to be one and the same or directly opposed: How can it be better to flush $70 million down the drain than to try to recoup at least some of it?
And still, in the immediate sense, it’s almost certainly good business; the balance sheets will be cleaner this year. But it closes off any possibility that the film would be a hit—or adapted into a hit spinoff, or heavily merchandised, or simply good enough that it makes Warner more attractive to filmmakers who could bring it hits in the future. It’s shortsighted by the most craven measures and simply gross by any others. Yet tax law—and precisely nothing else—incentivizes the conglomerate to do something that, in a sane world or in a more competitive industry landscape, would alienate it to writers, directors, and stars.
Speaking of American myths, it doesn’t take too many contortions to see Wile E. Coyote as our Sisyphus: alone in the unpopulated West, starving but eager to abstract his animal instincts with consumer goods and cheap schemes. Coyote Vs. Acme is not some bizarre, divisive, or difficult passion project. It’s an all-ages comedy about the most recognizable characters a studio has ever created that has a hook (Who Framed Roger Rabbit meets Erin Brockovich or whatever) that could compel adults. But we have somehow arrived at a place where the production history of a Looney Tunes movie starring a former wrestler is now emblematic of art’s struggle against corporate greed.
In about 10 days, people—junior analysts, “institutional investors,” the wealthy and semiretired, senior analysts—will huddle around those arachnid conference call speakers or pace through airport gates on Airpods and listen to Warner Bros. Discovery’s fourth-quarter earnings call. It’s possible that the Coyote Vs. Acme debacle will be addressed simply due to the uproar it caused, but just as likely that the company will barrel ahead with what was likely the plan all along: to let it slip silently into the ether, a massive tax benefit “earned” by lighting years and tens of millions of dollars on fire. Zaslav will be rightly praised while those so inclined will sleep well knowing they can cash out whenever they please.
This is an extreme example, to be sure, yet still clarifies the precarity and seeming impermanence of art in the streaming era. To the extent that those streaming platforms have become the de facto media libraries for so many, individuals have ceded to rights holders and corporations control over their collections of movies and music, which can be shrunk or radically altered on the first of any given month. For decades, things have fallen out of print and become obscure, and axing something before its release, as Warner seems ready to do with Coyote Vs. Acme, is reminiscent of the way studios could control what was available in decades past. But today, Warner and its competitors are free to play this out over and over—able to yank things out of circulation at will. In the past, they never could have reached into your home and scooped up your DVD copy of The Spy Who Shagged Me.
I should correct something from earlier, when I said that Coyote never catches the Road Runner. This isn’t true—not exactly. In “Soup or Sonic,” a nine-minute segment in a 1980 special called, unfortunately, Bugs Bunny’s Bustin’ Out All Over, Coyote tries and fails to capture the bird using a pole vault that starts spinning like a propeller; a faulty rocket; a Frisbee fitted with a firecracker; a piece of “Acme Giant Flypaper” that captures, well, a giant fly; and a case of exploding tennis balls.
But in the short’s final two minutes, Coyote chases Road Runner through a series of pipes that turn each animal smaller as they pass from one end to the other. Discovering this, they pivot; running back the direction they came brings the Road Runner back to normal size, but leaves Coyote tiny. Nevertheless, he finally catches up. Wrapping his arms—just barely—around the Road Runner’s now giant ankle, Coyote licks his lips and pulls from his nonexistent pockets a bib, knife, and fork. But there’s nothing he can do: The thing he’s pursued forever is too immense, too threatening for him to bite, to cut, to finally eat. “OKAY, WISE GUYS, YOU ALWAYS WANTED ME TO CATCH HIM,” reads one sign Coyote holds up for the audience. The other: “NOW WHAT DO I DO?”
Paul Thompson is the senior editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, New York magazine, and GQ.
In his six decades of directing, Martin Scorsese has earned 10 Best Director Academy Award nominations and taken home the award once (for a little indie flick called The Departed). His films dominate every “best of all time” list—and some, like Goodfellas,have become a religion unto themselves. But despite the millions of people who have seen his films—including his most recent opus, Killers of the Flower Moon—Sunday marked his debut in a whole new genre, to one of his biggest audiences yet: the alien-filled Super Bowl commercial.
Titled “Hello Down There,” the 90-second short film for website builder Squarespace—which debuted midway through the second quarter of Sunday’s game—sees clueless young New Yorkers too distracted by cat videos to notice the UFOs casually gliding over them. The spot’s logline reads, “What does a highly advanced civilization have to do to get noticed around here?”
As it turns out, the answer lies in TikTok. Or, at least, for Scorsese, it has. As the epitome of advanced civilization—what else would you call the person who directed Raging Bull—Scorsese has recently been noticed by Gen Z in a whole new way, becoming the parasocial cinephile grandpa to thousands of chronically online youngsters.
This is, of course, the handiwork of Francesca Scorsese. The director’s 24-year-old daughter has followed in his footsteps as a video maven, but her medium isn’t film, it’s vertical video. And her muse isn’t Robert De Niro or Leonardo DiCaprio—it turns out, it’s her dad. Over the past year, Francesca has become his de facto PR rep for “the youth”: his ambassador and translator for a generation that doesn’t necessarily have John Huston’s first picture or Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel saga down rote.
Francesca first featured Scorsese in a TikTok in 2021, asking him to identify different female beauty items based on their photos. (Memorably, he mistook nipple pasties for earbuds.) Early reviews were overwhelmingly positive, with comments like “omg it’s Martin Scorsese from Shark Tale” and “This guy seems like he would make pretty decent movies idk why tho.” (Presumably, those were sarcastic—at least we hope.) Since then, Francesca has upped Scorsese’s screen time on her account, which now has over 200,000 followers and 4.8 million likes. Last summer, she went viral with a 30-second “trailer” of her dad, a compilation of short clips of the director playing with puppies, laughing with old pal Robert De Niro, and strutting around in a slick business suit, with the caption: “He’s a certified silly goose.”
Francesca’s content often taps into Scorsese’s storied career and encyclopedic film knowledge, from a video of him “auditioning” their schnauzer, Oscar (and lauding him as a revelatory talent), to another in which he power ranks popular movies. In her videos, Scorsese is no longer a famous director with dozens of canonical projects under his belt; he’s just a guy. More specifically, he’s an incredibly adorable old guy who loves father-daughter handshakes, twinning with his dog, and watching 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The revelation of Francesca’s videos is their ability to subvert our expectations of how a legendary filmmaker acts and participates in internet culture. For many Gen Zers, the name “Martin Scorsese” may evoke an edgy boyfriend’s Taxi Driver poster, an uncle’s old DVD collection, or a mental image of that short guy always standing next to Leonardo DiCaprio, but these are just vague associations. Sure, Scorsese is the genius behind Mean Streets and The Wolf of Wall Street, but this hardly counts for a zeitgeist-hungry generation that communicates chiefly through memes and irony.
There has to be something more—some kind of hook—and that’s exactly what Francesca has uncovered. With pitch-perfect humor and TikTok trend savvy, she has single-handedly shaped her dad into a memeable, shareable internet figure (the highest rung of Gen Z adoration).
The comments sections of her TikToks are laden with young users begging to be adopted into their family, referring to Scorsese as “grandpa” and praising his commitment to Dance Moms–inspired bits. As one TikTok user commented, “martin scorsese and francesca have figured out what the tiktok peeps want…and it is exactly this.”
If anything perfectly captures Gen Z’s newfound fondness for Marty (as the cool kids call him), it’s Francesca’s video introducing him to internet slang terms. Because Scorsese’s brain presumably functions solely in film quotes and box office stats, Francesca helps him out with context clues like “Watching a movie in 70 mm hits different” and “The King of Comedy was slept on.” There’s nothing like the look on Scorsese’s face when he registers the meaning of the latter, forlornly recalling how “people hated it when it came out. … It was the flop of the year.” (Viewers then gave shout-outs to The King of Comedy in the commentsto ease his spirits—perhaps another sign of how hipster film kids do, indeed, have fine taste.)
At the heart of claims that Francesca has done the Lord’s work—or, better yet, deserves an honorary Oscar—there’s a very genuine gratitude for the conversations her posts are creating. With Killers of the Flower Moon in its second theatrical run and up for 10 Oscars next month, Scorsese has been active on the press circuit and now has some internet virality to boot. While there’s no way to quantify the effect Francesca’s TikToks may have had on Killers’ box office performance, it’s difficult to imagine that her videos have not at least piqued the interest of a few otherwise indifferent Gen Zers. (Even if 30-second TikToks pale next to his 206-minute 1920s epic.)
In fact, when the film first hit theaters in October, fans were quick to sing her praises on Twitter and suggest she work her viral social media magic to promote the film. In reference to last year’s SAG strike, which prevented actors from promoting their projects, one tweet stated that “Francesca Scorsese emerged and is carrying killers of the flower moon promo on her back.” An exaggeration? Certainly. But an unfounded one? Absolutely not.
Francesca has always been candid about being a huge fan of her dad’s work—she’s partial to The Irishman and The Wolf of Wall Street—and it’s hard to not melt at the evident love and admiration behind every TikTok she “forces” him into. She’s strategic with her content, but never in a way that feels insincere or overly calculated. This is no clout-chasing ruse that will end with an eye roll. Rather, one gets the sense that Francesca is her dad’s biggest cheerleader.
Look no further than the fact that she seemingly recently convinced him to create a Letterboxd account, where he now shares curated film lists with his nearly 340,000 followers. This came after numerous commenters requested that she get Scorsese on the popular film review app. Even Letterboxd itself was in on the TikTok action, commenting from a verified company account, “Marty has taste,” on the video of him ranking films in a tournament bracket.
Francesca may be the queen bee of film TikTok, but her content speaks to something more than just having a dad with a cinema institute named after him. As the new hub of pop culture, TikTok has the growing power to widen Gen Z’s cinematic horizons. Look no further than Turner Classic Movies’ 800,000-plus followers, or the rise of the “Wes Anderson Challenge,” which saw new Anderson converts channeling his distinctive style in 30-second videos. The most exciting aspect of “filmtok” is, perhaps, that it exists at all, especially considering the platform. Here is a limitless exploration space for kids who may not be aspect ratio experts but will at least do a proper double take when Martin Scorsese inexplicably appears on their For You pages.
A single search of #filmtok yields a truly staggering range of content, from Nicolas Cage reaction memes to red-carpet interviews to a surely long-requested compilation of Disney actors who later played serial killers. The beauty of TikTok is that all these types of content coexist (semi) peacefully, letting users fall down rabbit holes of their choice or stumble across one of the world’s greatest filmmakers guessing what “sneaky link” means. (Spoiler alert: not personal peccadilloes.) Whether you seek genuine advice from a renowned screenwriter or simply discover a director while doom-scrolling, TikTok is the intergenerational playground for all kinds of film lore and know-how.
While it’s safe to say that Scorsese himself is not exactly a fan of TikTok, he certainly recognizes its value to younger generations on some level. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, the director swore that he really has no idea what’s happening when Francesca records him for “those things.” He did, however, acknowledge the wide acclaim of their “Oscar the Dog” audition video, noting that “the one we did with the dog, that was known.” And though he may shake his head disapprovingly while Francesca lip-synchs to the Kardashians, there’s always a glint in his eye, a sliver of awareness that says, “Hey, if the kids are into it, why not?” The man knows that an audience is an audience, on TikTok or anywhere else, and more importantly, he trusts his daughter to do a damn good job entertaining them.
With Marty’s Big Game debut in the rearview and the Oscars fast approaching, the father-daughter team has resumed its rightful place in the spotlight. In a teaser for the “Hello Down There” ad released by Squarespace last Monday, Francesca helps her dad transition from TikTok to the final frontier of media literacy: website building.
“Marty & Francesca Make a Website” plays like an extended cut of the duo’s TikToks, with the same delightful back-and-forth unique to a Baby Boomer learning anything technological. In the video, Francesca encourages her dad to make a website that shows his directorial vision of an “intergalactic plea for connection,” but this proves easier said than done. (“URL,” especially, becomes a term of immense confusion.)
However, by the end of the video, Francesca has, once again, helped her dad share his work with younger generations, this time with a font that, to Marty’s approving eye, expresses the “yearning” of his ad’s aliens. The spot ends with Scorsese telling Francesca that their website “slaps,” proving himself a star pupil of Gen Z lingo. “I really regret ever teaching you that,” Francesca replies, but her smile says just the opposite.
Holyn Thigpen is an arts and culture writer based in Atlanta. She holds an MA in English from Trinity College Dublin and spends her free time googling Nicolas Cage.
After four years away, True Detective returns for a new season with a sinistrous subtitle. We’re in Night Country now, and we’ll be following along each week to try to piece together, with the help of police chief Liz Danvers and detective Evangeline Navarro, who perpetrated those gruesome crimes in Ennis, Alaska. Read along for a breakdown of Episode 5.
Who Done It?
Throughout this season, Pete Prior has been a rare—perhaps the only—bit of purity and innocence in Ennis. He alone seems to have dodged the town’s darkness, projecting a sincerity and conventionality that are absent from any other character we’ve encountered. All he wants, it seems, is to be a good husband, a good dad, a good son, and—even as it increasingly conflicts with the other roles—a good cop. Ennis isn’t a place that fosters kindness, yet Pete has spent his life with a purehearted dedication to doing right by others. Indeed, we learned this week that Pete’s wife, Kayla, first fell for the former high school hockey star when he uncharacteristically blew a game—after which she learned that, without so much as a word about it to anyone, he’d done it to cheer up a player on the opposing team whose dad had just died.
This week, Pete’s innocence was finally shattered. All season long, he’s followed at chief of police Liz Danvers’s heels, palpably straining to learn from his professional hero. At long last, his questions about what caused the rift between Danvers and onetime protégée Evangeline Navarro led to the realization that she and Navarro murdered serial abuser William Wheeler years ago and covered it up. Wheeler was left-handed, Pete figures out, meaning that his right-handed fatal shot to the head couldn’t have been self-inflicted. Danvers might be a good detective, but she’s no hero.
She’s not the only one. Pete has tried throughout the season to make the best of his difficult and sometimes abusive relationship with his father, Hank. Amid a mounting pile of evidence that Hank isn’t the well-meaning cop that he has pretended to be, Pete bursts into Danvers’s home at the episode’s climax to find that his dad is just as willing to brush the law aside for his own ends. On orders from Kate McKittrick—more on her in just a moment—Hank fatally shoots the former engineer Otis Heiss. Pete responds with his own irrevocable sin, shooting and killing his father. His days of looking for the good in people are over.
Before the shoot-out, Danvers comes close to throwing in the towel on the Tsalal Arctic Research Station case: McKittrick and Ted Connelly call her into the Silver Spring Mining offices to inform her that the scientists’ deaths have been ruled not a murder but a tragic accident resulting from a slab avalanche. (Holy Dyatlov Pass, Batman.) A conversation with Leah changes her mind when her daughter asks whether she knows how bad the pollution has gotten in the Indigenous villages around Ennis—does she have any idea how many stillbirths there have been? Danvers visits the Ennis cemetery, where tiny coffins sit waiting for the ground to thaw so that they can be buried—and then she decides to keep looking for answers.
Last week, Heiss told Danvers that still-missing Tsalal researcher Raymond Clark was “hiding in the night country.” This time around, Danvers finally learns that “the night country”—all together with me now, boys and girls: Night Country!—is a term for Ennis’s subterranean ice caves. And those spirals that keep turning up? They’re markers left by hunters to warn others about thin ice above the caves.
Night Country’s answers sure seem to be in those caves. Clark, so far as we know, is still down there. And we know that Annie Kowtok was murdered somewhere inside: The recovered video of her final moments shows her telling the camera, “I found it. It’s here.” Finally, we know that McKittrick and Silver Sky Mining really, really don’t want Danvers and Navarro going in. Next week, that’s just what they’ll do, but until then it’s time for one last look at the suspects.
1. Kate McKittrick and Silver Sky Mining
A hearty welcome to the top of the suspect list goes to local mogul and Silver Sky exec Kate McKittrick.
McKittrick’s power in Ennis has thrummed beneath the surface throughout the season in ways both large and small, from her ownership of the ice rink—the town’s de facto community center turned morgue—to the fact that she holds Leah’s fate in the balance after the teen graffitied “MURDERERS” on Silver Sky’s offices.
This week, we see her summon—summon!—Danvers to Silver Sky, where the chief is shocked to find Ted Connelly waiting. (Poor Connelly catching strays: “Connelly is a political animal,” McKittrick says later on. “He’s weak, and he’s fucking her.”) First, McKittrick dresses Danvers down for an early effort to get into the ice caves with Navarro “on Silver Sky property”; then, she and Connelly present the extraordinarily dubious news that Tsalal’s scientists perished in what Connelly dubs “a weather event.” McKittrick seems positively thrilled, giddily telling Danvers, “I know it’s a relief for all of us that there’s not some killer out there on the loose.” Nothing fishy here!
As Danvers notes, it’s awfully convenient. It’s also particularly suspicious given some new evidence that Pete dug up in the tax records of the multinational conglomerate that runs Silver Sky Mining: Turns out that the LLC behind Tsalal is a partner of Silver Sky, which funds the center at least in part as a greenwashing initiative. “That means the mine bankrolls Tsalal and then Tsalal pushes out bullshit pollution numbers for them,” Danvers says. Given what we know about the rampant pollution around Ennis and its devastating human toll, the revelation raises new questions about the mine’s, and McKittrick’s, possible involvement in what happened at Tsalal, to say nothing of the murder of Annie, who was a vocal anti-mine activist before her death.
There’s not a lot of ambiguity in what comes next. Danvers tells McKittrick that she has a lead on Clark courtesy of Heiss, whom she’s secretly stashed at The Lighthouse and whom McKittrick doubtless knows has extensive knowledge of the caves. McKittrick immediately arranges a sneaky meeting with Hank Prior, telling him that if he kills Heiss, she’ll have him named as the new chief of police in Danvers’s stead. “She’s looking for the location of the Kowtok murder,” McKittrick tells Hank. “She can’t find that cave.” At minimum, this means she has intimate knowledge of Annie’s murder and that, in her capacity at Silver Sky, she wants it hidden from the police.
What is McKittrick trying to cover up by offing Heiss: the truth about Annie’s death, what really happened at Tsalal, whatever it was that Annie found under the ice, or some combination of all three? There’s just no universe in which McKittrick isn’t involved in some—or all—of the murders (let alone the pollution poisoning Ennis).
2. … Ghosts?
Just kidding—kind of. Your mileage may vary on whether you view this season’s spooky spiritual accompaniments—the jump scares, the flashes of dead-eyed zombies, the mysterious caribou stampede off a cliff, Travis’s spirit’s season premiere dance party, the reappearing orange, and so on—as an enhancement to the story or a major mark against it. Anyone who’s read Agatha Christie knows that a mystery’s seemingly supernatural explanation will be punctured in short order by the very human truth beneath the caper at hand. This late in the season, it seems clear that we’re close to the kind of culprit or culprits who can be put in handcuffs—a conclusion that Danvers has hewed to throughout the investigation.
But there’s still something going on. Many different people in and around Ennis have witnessed seemingly inexplicable phenomena. Those caribou really did run off that cliff. And just last week, Navarro had her own otherworldly moment in the dredge, leaving her with an apparently ruptured eardrum (an incident that bizarrely did not come up this week at all).
It all has me thinking a lot about another show set in a remote, icy town, where—just as in Night Country—an A-list detective comes in to solve a ghastly crime. In Fortitude, which premiered back in 2015, it’s Stanley Tucci who finds himself wading through the snow in search of the truth in a troubled town. Without spoiling too much of that series, the investigation takes a sharp turn when it becomes clear that something—something neither human nor supernatural—is affecting the townsfolk with increasingly violent results.
In Night Country, we know that the mine is polluting water for a significant portion of the Ennis area. We also know that Tsalal was hunting deep in the ice for as-yet-unknown organisms in the name of scientific discovery. What if one or the other or both of these have led to mass poisoning- or infection-induced hallucinations—or worse? Something really did make all those scientists run out onto the ice partially clothed, after all, and the people of Ennis really are seeing things that seem to defy explanation.
What if there is an explanation, and all that sinister stuff that’s been haunting the town—and the series—can be explained as the neurological aftereffects of the shady business at the mine and Tsalal?
3. Raymond Clark
After an entire season of mentions in the Who Done It? column of Ringer recaps, Clark has plummeted down the list of suspects.
That’s not to say he’s not involved—he’s still the clearest link between his onetime flame Annie and the Tsalal deaths, and it is distinctly suspicious that Clark would be the sole survivor from the research center, even before considering that he’s been on the run for the show’s duration. And Clark specialized in paleomicrobiology during his nearly two decades working at Tsalal. If one of the center’s discoveries is behind the murd—er, tragic avalanche event—he’s likely the one who found it.
“He’s crazy as shit, man,” Heiss tells Danvers early in Episode 5. “Creepy motherfucker.”
But Clark increasingly seems like a fall guy. We know he loved Annie; if Silver Sky conspired to have her killed or cover it up (or both), surely he wouldn’t have been on board. If anything, he seems like another victim of the mine’s and/or research center’s collateral damage.
4. Hank Prior
So long, Hank.
Hank has graced the list of suspects in each of TheRinger’sweeklyrecaps this season for good reason. His bitterness that Danvers was named chief, a need for money to woo the con artist formerly known as Alina, an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, instability in his relationship with his son (and, before that, Hank’s now-ex-wife), his relentless, wiry anxiety—none of it paints a pretty picture for Hank.
This week, we learned that Hank had been on Silver Sky’s payroll and was involved in Annie’s murder—though he insists to Danvers shortly before Pete shoots him that he only moved her body out of the cave where she was killed and had nothing to do with the murder itself. I’m inclined to believe him: “I’m not a killer,” Prior tells McKittrick after she tells him to take out Heiss—seeming confirmation that he really wasn’t behind Annie’s murder, or any others that McKittrick is aware of.
At that point, anyway: It’s not long before he shoots Heiss. (Good for Heiss, I guess, that he got one last go-around with his beloved heroin, courtesy of Danvers, who squirrels him away from The Lighthouse in a joint intel-smack excursion. “Don’t leave a mess,” she instructs him as he slips into her bathroom. Standard police technique, am I right?) Prior Sr. is hardly heading into the great beyond with a clean conscience, but it at least doesn’t look like he harmed Annie or the Tsalal group.
Galaxy-Brained Theory of the Week
“She’s awake!” the various creeps and creepies of Ennis have told us repeatedly. While I’m tempted to write off the warning as mass delusion (see: ghosts), the fact that we keep hearing about this evidently fearsome “she”—whose awakening seems to have portended all the horror we’ve witnessed this season—seems significant.
I think we can rule out mortals for this particular role. Could she be the one-eyed polar bear—some protective, and perhaps freshly vengeful, spirit that has long lain dormant beneath Ennis? Speaking of beneath—well, I guess we’ll find out next week.
Vikram’s Alaska Corner
True Detective: Night Country takes place in the cold fringes of the Last Frontier, otherwise known as Alaska. (Never mind that the season was filmed in Iceland.) The Ringer’s own Vikram Patel is a former resident of the state who still spends his winters there. Each week, we’ll pose a question to Vikram about his second home as we look to learn more about the local geography and culture.
Claire: This week’s episode dealt with a whole lot of ice—most of it perilous. We see Rose Aguineau and Evangeline Navarro use an ax to hack a hole through thick ice so that Eve can scatter her sister’s ashes, only for her to wander a few steps too far and have the ice crack beneath her and nearly give way. And we finally learn what the “night country” refers to: a network of subterranean ice caves that we’re told are wildly dangerous and filled with jagged ice that cuts like glass (but that, teens being what they are, still draw out the kids to mess around and explore from time to time). Ice now feels less like a backdrop and more like a direct threat to the Night Country crew. While I recognize that Ennis’s anthill of spooky ice tunnels is probably not the norm, what can you tell me about living with the realities of ice in Alaska?
Vikram: I’ve had only one encounter with an ice cave. And after I tell you about it, I think you’ll understand why.
The glacier was huge—a thick, jagged layer of ice crawling over the mountain we had just hiked up. It looked still, but it was talking to us. We heard little cracking sounds in the distance, regular reminders that glaciers aren’t frozen in place, but rather a slow-moving river of ice.
As we got closer, the air became measurably cooler. It’s a remarkable effect, the kind of moment in nature that reminds you how helpless you are. This chunk of ice was changing the weather. It was powerful.
Once at the edge of the glacier, we scoped out what seemed to be a small opening under a brim of overhanging ice.
Courtesy of Dave McGee
After a few minutes, we got curious and squeezed through, into a cave about the size of a one-bedroom apartment, tucked under many tons of glacier ice. Inside, it was stunning; the blue was deep, the air even chillier. The inside of an ice cube. We had never done anything like this before.
Courtesy of Dave McGee
We spent the next 10 or 15 minutes inside our frozen hideaway and probably would have stayed much longer, but we had to head back soon—a friend was waiting for us on a nearby ridge. But as we made our way to the entrance of the ice cave, we heard a crack—this time, a little louder and a lot closer—just overhead. Oh shit. We walked faster. Then another crack, even louder. Run. The entrance to the cave was collapsing.
In my memory, the next few things happened almost instantaneously. We shot out the entrance. Me first, then Rob, then Dave. I tripped a few feet outside the entrance and fell to the ground. Rob, at full speed, passed by me. I looked over my shoulder and saw a chunk of glacier ice—probably two-thirds the size of a Subaru—falling from about 30 feet above Dave’s head as he lunged out of the mouth of the cave. I couldn’t tell whether he was clear of the ice or about to be crushed by it.
For a moment, I thought Dave was a goner.
Today, 17 years later, it’s still the scariest moment of my life. His too.
“I remember the feeling that things were falling behind me. I could feel the force of something hitting the ground just behind my feet. I’ve probably never moved as fast in my entire life, even though it was over wet rocks.”
Courtesy of Dave McGee
I called Dave recently to help confirm my memory. We hadn’t talked about that day at Raven Glacier in a long time. I told him I wanted to talk about True Detective: Night Country and how Episode 5 involves a network of ice caves. I tried to keep explaining the context, but he interrupted me. “Just hearing that—ice caves—makes my body shiver.”
We compared memories. Dave remembers seeing me fall and look back at him. I sure hope he can’t remember the look on my face.
“It was literally fractions of a second between life and death. Tons of ice falling right on top of me. Even if I had survived the initial blow, it would have been impossible to recover a body under there.”
After Dave scrambled away, the three of us came together. “We all looked around, at the ice, at each other. Someone said, ‘Holy shit.’”
I remember hugging—desperate hugging.
A few minutes later, we turned to leave. “We had a long, solemn walk down that hill, having a lot of thoughts about mortality.”
During that walk so many years ago, and again this week on the phone, we wondered aloud whether we had caused the collapse. “It had to be us, right? The odds seem too incredible that that piece of ice happened to fall right then. I mean, how many years does it take for a cavern like that to form? And then it collapsed … right then?”
The moment has stayed with Dave, who now lives in Chicago with his wife and their three children. “I think about it still, usually when I look at my kids’ faces. They wouldn’t exist if I had been a step slower—or if I had slipped on a wet rock. My wife would have had a different life. My kids wouldn’t be here.”
Dave doesn’t tell this story much anymore. But before he moved away from Alaska, it came up a lot. Especially with newcomers. “It obviously changed the way I look at glaciers, especially as a place of recreation. After that, I would tell anyone new to Alaska to stay away from them.
“But people ignored me. They went exploring still.” That’s the power of the ice.
Iconic True Detective Looks of the Week
Underneath the true crime mysteries at the forefront of each season, True Detective is admirably devoted to capturing the aesthetics that define each of its many eras. With that comes some pretty incredible costume and makeup work, which we’ll be highlighting throughout the season.
HBO
Right out of the gate, we have the woman in charge of cremating Julia Navarro—a somber duty that nevertheless seems to require some funk.
HBO
Could there be a clearer representation of Pete’s attempt and failure to hold on to the last shreds of his innocence than his decision to rock his old high school hockey sweater as Kayla is kicking him out of their home?
HBO
Leah doubles down on her activism against Silver Sky Mining, culminating in her arrest. “Coop! Book me, will you?” Has a teen ever said anything more metal?
HBO
It’s about time that we got a refresh of “heroin chic.”
Ben, Jessica Clemons, and Matt James discuss rumors about Xbox games appearing on PlayStation, Disney infiltrating Fortnite, and the Knuckles trailer. Then they share bite-sized reviews of Tekken 8 and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and Matt’s takeaway from a hands-on preview of Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth. Then Charles Holmes joins Ben and Jess to discuss Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and the future of live service and superhero games (28:16), before Ben and Jess give their impressions of Halo Season 2 (51:36).
Host: Ben Lindbergh Guests: Jessica Clemons, Matt James, and Charles Holmes Producer: Isaiah Blakely Additional Production Supervision: Arjuna Ramgopal
Callie Curry jumps in as guest host for today’s Morally Corrupt, and she begins our episode by chatting with Jodi about her recent experience seeing Ariana Madix sing and dance in Chicago on Broadway (1:27). Then, Callie and Jodi move on to recap Season 11, Episode 2 of Vanderpump Rules (16:49) and Season 13, Episode 15 of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (43:29). Finally, Callie is joined by Rachel Lindsay to break down Season 6, Episode 15 of The Real Housewives of Miami (1:02:29).
Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay kick off the show with some Super Bowl, and unfortunately, Taylor Swift talk (3:05) before reacting to an alleged video leak of Drake (26:56). Then, they dig into Mo’Nique’s appearance on Club Shay Shay (39:59), before welcoming writer-director Boaz Yakin to discuss his upcoming film, executive-produced by Van, Once Again (For the Very First Time) (55:23),
Hosts: Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay Guest: Boaz Yakin Producers: Donnie Beacham Jr. and Ashleigh Smith
Juliet is back with What’s Up Thursday, where she goes over what’s up in Bachelor Nation, on Bachelor Reddit, and in the broader world of reality TV—and, of course, her reading list! This week, Juliet discusses the Sydney and Maria drama, Joey confusing Gypsy Rose Blanchard for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and a few book recommendations. Then Juliet ends the episode with an interview in which Justine Kay and Natasha Scott-Reichel from 2 Black Girls, 1 Rose discuss this season so far on The Bachelor.
In honor of Black History Month, the Midnight Boys present the third (and final) “Black Heroes of Fandom” draft (08:12). Bringing the best of Black heroes across fandom and their hearts along with an honorary category to honor the passing of Carl Weathers.
Hosts: Charles Holmes, Van Lathan, Jomi Adeniran, and Steve Ahlman Senior Producer: Steve Ahlman Additional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopal Social: Jomi Adeniran
Bill Simmons is joined by Chris Ryan and Mallory Rubin live in Chicago to rewatch 1993 action-thriller ‘The Fugitive,’ with Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones
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To Tom Ewing’s knowledge, only two prominent musical artists have publicly used the phrase “imperial phase”: Neil Tennant and Taylor Swift.
Tennant, the taller half of British synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys, coined the term in his notes for a 2001 reissue of the group’s 1987 album, Actually. Ewing helped popularize it in a 2010 piece for Pitchfork. And Swift completed the trifecta last December, when she invoked the concept in an interview for the cover story that accompanied her selection as the first entertainer to be named Time’s Person of the Year. As the author of the piece, Sam Lansky, wrote: “She went full-throttle pop for 2014’s 1989, putting her on top of the world—‘an imperial phase,’ she calls it.”
Ewing, who writes about no. 1 songs, has become a kind of oracle of the imperial phase ever since he introduced the idea to anyone who couldn’t already quote the liner notes for Pet Shop Boys reissues. So it didn’t take long for him to be alerted to the fact that the world’s most imperial pop star had veered into his lane with a metatextual take on her career. “I got a message saying, ‘Oh my God, have you seen this?’” he says. “And I thought it was very funny.”
It was also potentially telling, as Ewing saw it, that Swift was the second pop star to employ the self-referential phrase. Swift’s fame is to Tennant’s as Tennant’s is (or was) to a subway busker’s, yet the two share a common quality. “Both Neil Tennant and Taylor Swift think very carefully about their careers, about their career moves, about the shape of their careers, and the ‘What did I do before? What am I going to do now?’” Ewing says. “There’s a real level of directional thinking, which obviously is balanced against instinct and all the other things that creators have. But both of them, they feel like the kind of stars who would think in those slightly helicopter-view terms.”
Those terms are where this term comes in handy, however vague it is. Tennant applied it to a roughly yearlong run of chart-topping singles from 1987-88, a period when Pet Shop Boys, he said, possessed “the secret of contemporary pop music” and “knew what was required.” When Ewing attempted to refine the definition further in 2010, he proposed three prerequisites: “command, permission, and self-definition.” In other words, being in the zone, creatively; generating “public interest, excitement, and goodwill” toward one’s work; and forever being associated with and judged against that work.
Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Ewing also intimated that imperial phases are inherently short-lived: They’re “accelerated moments in a career, times where intense scrutiny meets intense opportunity,” which makes them “a mix of world-conquering swagger and inevitable obsolescence.” According to Tennant, Pet Shop Boys’ phase ended in September ’88, when “Domino Dancing,” whose Latin sound represented a departure for the group, debuted at no. 9 on the U.K. charts—a relatively chilly reception to the lead single from their (on the whole, pretty popular) third album, Introspective.
If Tennant—himself a former music journalist during a pre-imperial, early-’80s stint as an editor of Smash Hits—hadn’t supplied such a seductive designation, some other expression would suffice. We could call one of these fleeting, incandescent streaks “owning the moment,” as Ewing did elsewhere in his seminal piece. We could call it “being on a roll.” We could even call it “Reaganing,” if we were Jack Donaghy. It’s more than a mere creative and/or commercial peak, though it often overlaps with one; it’s the point when a pop star seemingly can’t make a misstep. Cyndi Lauper was sensational; Madonna was imperial.
Last year, Swift was the world’s most-streamed artist on Spotify, and five of the top 10 albums in the U.S. (including two rerecordings of old albums) were hers. This Sunday, Swift swallowed the Grammys, becoming the first artist to win Album of the Year four times and announcing her next album, The Tortured Poets Department—available April 19, preorder now—during her acceptance speech for Best Pop Vocal Album (just as she announced Midnights during her acceptance speech for Video of the Year at the 2022 VMAs). Next Sunday, her boyfriend will be in the Super Bowl, with Swift presumably looking on—which, in a sign of her status, is seen as a windfallfortheNFL. In between, she’ll play four shows at the Tokyo Dome on the Eras Tour, which has broken revenue records both live and in theaters (and threatened to topple the ticketing cartel).
By all appearances, she’s in love and beloved, except by right-wingers who say she’s a psyop. Even those conspiracy theories are, in some sense, a testament to Swift’s ever-increasing sway: You have to be pretty popular and powerful for people to posit that the country’s preeminent entertainment (professional football) could be rigged in your favor or that your endorsement could decide the presidential election. Swift has gone imperial before, but never quite like this.
The appeal of the imperial phase is its potential to impose precision on the nebulous arena of artistic achievement. It’s a rubric that makes it possible to apply sports-style analysis to art—to delineate dynasties in the absence of objective indicators such as winning percentages and championships. Yet even in sports, dynasty definitions are divisive and squishy, and half the fun of discussing imperial phases is trying to pinpoint when they start and stop. We can have this debate about Taylor, too. (Though even Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless can’t muster a contrarianTaylortake.) Shockingly, Swift’s publicist did not respond to my request for clarification about how Swift defines the “imperial phase” and how she views her “eras” in relation to it. Thus, it falls to us to classify the success of the inescapable star.
However we slice it, Swift is unique. The difficulty lies in determining the exact way in which her supremacy is unprecedented. So why consider just one way? With assistance from Ewing and other Swift whisperers, let’s examine three possible interpretations of Taylor’s career through the lens of the imperial phase: that she’s had the most imperial phases ever; that she’s had the longest imperial phase ever; and that she’s simply transcended the idea of the imperial phase, rendering the notion obsolete.
The Most Imperial Phases
Last October, Billboard published a staff ranking of the 500 best pop songs that have made the Hot 100 since its genesis in 1958. “Anti-Hero,” the lead single from Taylor’s 10th album, 2022’s Midnights, placed 364th. Billboard called it “the undeniable four-quadrant pop detonation to blast off Taylor Swift’s third and somehow-biggest-yet imperial phase.”
Three imperial phases! That’s one for each Cleon clone on Foundation that Demerzel calls “Empire.” It’s one foreachNapoleon named Emperor of the French. It’s one for each incarnation of Swift in the “Anti-Hero” video!
That “Anti-Hero” blurb was written by Billboard deputy editor Andrew Unterberger, who explains his thinking via email: “Not scientific, obviously, but I’d generally say her two prior imperial phases were the Fearless era (2008–2009) and the 1989 era (late 2014–early 2016)—two absolutely monster blockbuster albums with myriad hit singles, award wins, and plenty of extracurricular stuff both on and off-record. (And two extremely defined and distinct periods where it generally seemed like she was everywhere and could basically do no wrong.)”
Swift was the bestselling album artist of 2008, and Fearless, which made Swift the youngest artist ever to win a Grammy for Album of the Year, was the bestselling album of 2009. On the other hand, none of the singles from Fearless went to no. 1 (even though the album did), and critics weren’t overwhelmed.
There’s no disputing Taylor’s contention that the 1989 boom was an imperial phase. As for what’s happening now, Ewing says, “It’s huge and fits the definition of an imperial phase, except for the fact that she’s already had her imperial phase.” Just to play devil’s advocate, Ewing notes, “What she’s doing now, so much of it is about looking back and career overview. The Rolling Stones don’t go into a new imperial phase every time they do a massive, arena, ‘This is all our hits’ [tour]. … So it can’t just be ‘OK, it’s making an unbelievable amount of money.’” As Ewing acknowledges, though, it’s not just that: It’s Midnights, it’s the concert film that’s “more like an artistically arranged retrospective,” and it’s the “astonishing marketing coup” of turning the traditionally “slightly desperate,” post-imperial tactic of rerecording classic albums into a means of empowerment. (Which helped inspire other artists to do the same.) Heck, if eliciting “public interest, excitement, and goodwill” is a key component, then maybe meet-cutes and kisses with Travis Kelce count too.
Thus, if we accept Unterberger’s version of events—and does a Fearless-era imperial phase seem like such a stretch?—Swift may already be in uncharted territory. Very few of the artists in the ultra-selective imperial-phase club have had a second one, let alone an imperial trilogy. Ewing argues that even though the Beatles never ceased to be popular, they had two separate imperial phases—the mop-top, British Invasion, “yeah, yeah, yeah” imperial phase and the bearded, druggy, studio-only imperial phase, each of which received itsown greatest hits compilation. David Bowie had two, Ewing adds, sandwiching the critically acclaimed but less mainstream Berlin Trilogy. “If you could locate three distinct ones,” Ewing says, “then, yeah—three distinct ones, I think, would be unique.”
Madonna may be the closest competitor. “If you think of the ’87, ’88 period as a dip, then she has one, and then she comes back with Like a Prayer and has another one,” Ewing says. “And then does she have a third one with Ray of Light and Music? That’s a possibility. … But I don’t think that she monopolized world attention to the extent that she did in the Like a Virgin and Blond Ambition eras.” Admittedly, one could say the same about Fearless-era Taylor; her ascendance since then—in contrast to other imperialists of the late 2000s or early 2010s, like Katy Perry or Lady Gaga—may make her earlier period appear more imperial in retrospect. (It probably says something about the evolving perception of Swift that the review scores for Taylor’s Version albums are so much higher than the originals’ corresponding scores.)
If we count the Fearless phase and give Madonna credit for the maximum imaginable number, we would have a tie. Unless … well, let me get my auctioneer on. Two Taylor imperial phases, three Taylor imperial phases. Do I hear four?
Sold, to Stereogum’s Tom Breihan—a different Tom who writes about no. 1 songs.“The ‘eras’ are basically all imperial phases,” Breihan contends. For him, the country-inflected early albums “would be anybody else’s career peak, … a gigantic imperial phase.” Then there’s the pure-pop phase, starting with Red or 1989 (when Swift called her pop metamorphosis “official”). “And then,” he continues, “Folklore is this quarantine record that has to even outperform her expectations, I would expect. That thing was so big.”
Put it all together, and Breihan sees the present Taylor imperial phase “as the beginning of a fourth, with Folklore as its own little thing. … This seems like the most imperial of the imperial phases, but there’s been so many.”
Of course, if Swift has arguably crammed more than two imperial phases into a recording career that spans less than 20 years, she can’t have had any very long lulls. Essentially, Swift’s case in this category comes down to whether her late-2000s breakout qualifies as imperial—and, maybe more importantly, whether she ever actually lost enough steam after entering her first imperial phase that she had to build back up to the imperial level again. If you aren’t sold on the latter, then have I ever got the theory for you!
The Longest Imperial Phase
For critic David Cooper Moore, the primary problem with the “most imperial phases” position is that it presupposes that Taylor’s reign was ever interrupted. In the fourth installment of a recent six-part Substack series on Swift, Moore argues, “By November of 2008 it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Taylor Swift.” In Moore’s mind, the poppier trappings that helped Fearless become a crossover hit didn’t usher in a series of ups and relative downs; they were the start of “what looks to be a 20-year unabated imperial phase.”
Moore elaborates via email: “My main claim in the Taylor Swift series is that we’ve been living in Taylor Swift’s 2008 for about 15 years. I think you can debate when it was obvious Taylor was at the top of the pop star heap, but I think it’s hard to argue she was very far from the top after Fearless was released, and it’s indisputable by Red.” Like Moore, both Breihan and Ewing argue (persuasively) that Red was at least as big as the records that preceded it, which makes the idea of a Fearless-only imperial phase that wasn’t repeated until 1989 seem slightly more tenuous. As Breihan puts it, “Any metric that you can look at, she’s been so far beyond everybody for so long. … Taylor Swift’s biggest flop would be almost anybody else’s biggest hit.”
Moore continues: “The other big claim that I make is that her 15 years have been remarkably steady. Most Taylor Swift drama plays out as a sort of kayfabe, which makes it easy to forget that she’s never really had major competition—she’s never been ‘dethroned.’”
In the Time piece, Swift implies that her 1989 imperial phase ended amid the backlash to her spike in popularity, her spat with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, her 2016-17 hiatus, and the less rapturous critical response to her Joe Alwyn–era records, Reputation and Lover. (Lover was better regarded than Reputation but didn’t produce any no. 1 singles—until the unparalleled impact of Swift’s latest peak catapulted the 4-year-old “Cruel Summer” to the top of the charts last October.) “The most interesting question of Taylor’s career, critically, is: What do you make of Reputation?” Ewing says. “Because if you’re saying she’s in a perpetual imperial phase, or if you’re saying she’s had two, Reputation feels like, … ‘OK, I am enormous, I can’t get any bigger at the moment, so I need to take the pressure off myself a bit.’”
This is what Moore is driving at with his kayfabe comparison: Can an imperial phase end if the star in question doesn’t dim that much and is never outshined? Even if the star feels like they’ve lost some luster? As Defector’s Kelsey McKinney noted, even Lansky had his doubts about the comeback narrative, though he held them in until after the interview. Here’s how he expressed his reservations in Time:
Swift has told me a story about redemption, about rising and falling only to rise again—a hero’s journey. I do not say to her, in our conversation, that it did not always look that way from the outside—that, for example, when Reputation’s lead single “Look What You Made Me Do” reached No. 1 on the charts, or when the album sold 1.3 million albums in the first week, second only to 1989, she did not look like someone whose career had died. She looked like a superstar who was mining her personal experience as successfully as ever.
As post-imperial drop-offs go, that’s not exactly “Domino Dancing.” As Ewing recalls, “There was definitely a slight critical falloff when [Reputation] came out. And then there were also people who were like, ‘No, this is just as good.’” Reputation poses a quandary for imperial-phase scholars, he says, because “it’s very common for stars to release [a] ‘This is my stepping back’ album, [but] it’s less common for it to be, ‘This is my stepping back, but I’m still going to be the most famous pop star in the world.’”
This question is important for our purposes, because if Reputation wasn’t the, um, endgame of the post-1989 phase, then Taylor almost indisputably holds the record for the longest continuous imperial phase. (Provided a cameo in Cats doesn’t disqualify her; that debacle clearlywasn’tTaylor’sfault.)This is all somewhat subjective, but the most prolonged phase to date, Ewing believes, would be about seven years: the Beatles from Beatlemania to breakup; or Prince from, say, 1999 to Batman (also seven years). If we give Michael Jackson Off the Wall to Bad (despite the five-year gap between Thriller and Bad) or stretch Madonna’s imperial phase from Like a Virgin through the lead-up to Erotica, we could push the previous record to eight years.
Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images
If Swift gets credit for Fearless through the present, then she’s almost doubled the lengths of those legendary runs, even as she’s pivoted from country to pop to the “folklorian woods” of the lockdown albums to the more electronic elements of Midnights. “She’s obviously matured as a songwriter and tried different things,” Ewing says. “She shows a different enough facet each time that it never becomes stale, which is one of the risks of a very long imperial phase. She’s very Prince in that [way], … where every new album was very recognizably Prince being Prince, but each of them was also playing with a different stylistic palette.” Whatever twists and turns she takes along the way, personally or sonically, Ewing says, “the narrative always ends at, ‘And she’s done it again. She’s back on top.’” (As if she ever left.)
Even if we start the clock at 1989, Swift’s imperial phase (or is it an imperial era?) is coming up on a decade, which would still take the title—unless Reputation resetthe clock. So, was Swift’s sixth album a streak stopper or a streak extender? Call it what you want.
There’s one other way we could go with this, though. You say the most imperial phases, I say the longest imperial phase. Let’s call the whole thing off.
Overthrowing the Imperial Phase
The matter of Taylor Swift’s claim to imperial-phase fame defies easy answers. But maybe, as Chief Danvers would say, we’re just not asking the right questions. Maybe what we should be asking is: Does the concept of an imperial phase still apply to Taylor Swift in 2024? Or, for that matter, to popular music more broadly?
When Ewing codified Tennant’s term in 2010, one hallmark, he wrote, was that “the phase always ends.” If it doesn’t end, it’s no longer a phase—it’s just an empire. And if we can conceive of an indefinite tenure at the top, it’s a sign of a serious phase shift (so to speak). As Swift sang in part of a line from a previously unreleased track on the rerecorded Red: “It’s not just a phase I’m in.”
Maybe, then, we should era-adjust the imperial phase to account for changing economic and cultural conditions, as we do with sports stats (anddynasties) that were compiled in wildly different scoring and competitive environments. Which takes us to the Ewing Theory (no, not that one): The era of the imperial phase is over.
“When I originally wrote about imperial phases,” Ewing says, “it was very much working from an assumption that pop audiences work in the same way they worked when Neil Tennant coined the phrase; i.e., they’re inherently transient. They are deeply interested in something and then move on to something else. … It feels to me what Taylor is doing—and is the best at doing out of a bunch of people who attempt it—is cultivating an audience that is invested in her to the extent that they don’t move on, and she keeps that attention perpetually.”
As it turns out, this is basically the Breihan and/or Moore Theory as well. Both see Swift as being, in Breihan’s words, “ridiculously global-level famous for about 15 years now,” but both also see it as somewhat oxymoronic to describe that sort of sustained dominance as a phase. “I think Taylor Swift has done something different from maintaining an imperial phase or having multiple imperial phases,” Moore says. “I think she’s essentially risen above the (American/Western) pop music landscape that made an imperial phase possible. She’s just putting out Taylor Swift records, and there’s no one next in line.”
A few factors have created the conditions that promote permanent pop stardom. In earlier eras, Ewing notes, most pop fans followed music through the mass media, which had “built-in novelty-seeking incentives.” (The fact that physical albums were one-time purchases that didn’t generate revenue each time they were played also made it more important for record companies to serve up something new.) In the social internet age, consumers can get info on artists straight from the source, which fosters intense attachment to fan favorites.
“Fandom is not a new phenomenon,” Breihan says. “People identifying with a famous person is not a new phenomenon. But when people kind of construct online identities around fandom, that strikes me as being relatively new.” Swift, he adds, has “really engaged with and stoked” those stans.
Which may be another reason to retire Tennant’s phrase. “The imperial phase posits that stars are ‘cashing in’ their broad success for something weirder, more personal, etc.,” Moore says. “By spending this capital, it ultimately comes back to bite you. … It’s not clear to me that Taylor Swift has ever had to ‘spend’ anything of her credibility or reputation to do whatever she wants. And whatever Taylor Swift wants always seems to be exactly what her audience wants.”
Photo by Fernando Leon/TAS23/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management
And, perhaps, what it will always want. Because in modern music, Ewing says, “Once you have a level of fan attention and engagement, it’s now very hard to lose it.” If they let you into the imperial lounge, youbelongforlife. As a result, Breihan says, “A lot of the people who in previous eras would’ve faded away are still huge,” while “the age of one-hit wonders seems to be mostly over.” It’s like Tony tellsChristopher in The Sopranos Season 1, when the younger mobster pleads to be a made man: “The books are closed. They’re not accepting any new members, OK?” (Imperioli phase—is that anything?)
All of that said: If, as the trailer for Alex Garland’s Civil War contends, ‘all empires fall,’ then how might Taylor’s?
On one level, it can’t, barring some Lizzo-like blow to her, er, reputation. If she never released another song, she could sell out stadiums as long as she lived, à la Billy Joel (who, to be fair, did just release a song). “She’s become a franchise,” Ewing says. “Her fandom is something more similar [to] Star Wars or Marvel—stronger, at the moment, because obviously those brands have put out too much substandard product, and they’re now paying the penalty. But as long as she puts out stuff that is good enough, or just re-puts out the old stuff, it’s difficult to imagine people stopping being a Taylor Swift fan.”
Eight years after her latest album, Rihanna remains an A-lister, and Swift herself has hit a new high-water mark for fame almost a year and a half after releasing her last new, original song (though even her newly unearthed leftovers can climb to no. 1). If anything, it’s safer not to release something: At this level of stardom, you can only decline, and the overexposure pitfall is real. Swift’s ubiquity has built up to the point that she inspires passive publicity, whether she wants to or not. Even when she isn’t onstage or in the studio, she makes headlines because of the stories surrounding her, such as the “Gaylor” wars, “main character”–type tweets, or, more dismayingly, a stir surrounding AI-generated graphicdeepfakes.
It’s probably easier to not know Swift’s music in the 2020sthan it was to not know the tune to every track on Thriller in the ’80s, when musical tastes and listening habits weren’t so siloed. But Swift’s celebrity is almost omnipresent, andsome people are pretty tired of Taylor updates. Granted, they may mostly be people who were non-Swifties to start, like Larry David and dudes who can’t stand seeing Swift on their screens for roughly 0.4percent of a football broadcast. But even Richie Jerimovich, a man who blasts “Love Story” in the car, can reach a point of too much Taylor.
Swift is savvy enough to know when she’s less wanted. As her 2015 tour wound down, she admitted, “I think people might need a break from me.” A rumored announcement of a Reputation remake (which Swift appeared to tease before the real reveal of an all-new album) seemed like it might give her another chance to lie low for a while. “Just as Reputation was the curtain on her original imperial phase, Reputation (Taylor’s Version) might be a very knowing, ‘OK, I’m stepping away from it again,’” Ewing speculated before the Grammys. And then, on Sunday, Swift started the countdown to her next inevitable blockbuster, which will surely extend her stay on center stage for many more months.
But even if Swift never willingly withdraws from the spotlight, the passage of time could pose a threat. You can be a pop icon at virtually any age, based on career accomplishments. But broadly and historically speaking, pop stardom—in terms of active, vital contributions to the zeitgeist and the perception that a performer is still doing their best work—has been the province of the young. Can the 34-year-old Swift keep reaching new listeners and retain her intergenerational hold on the culture in the decades to come? (Pet Shop Boys are still releasing records, but “Domino Dancing” ended their imperial phase when Tennant was as old as Taylor is now.) What if Kelce is her soulmate, they settle down, and she no longer writes songs or fuels tabloid stories about losing or looking for love? Can she conquer music’s aging curve like she’s conquered its charts?
“I don’t think it’s impossible at all, because I don’t think anything that she’s doing with her music requires a youth’s perspective,” Ewing says. “And I think she’s primed her audience, partly with the Eras Tour, to say, ‘This is my journey from girlhood to young womanhood to maturity.’ And the implication in that is, ‘And the journey is going to keep on going.’”
There’s also every indication that listeners will want to go with her. Instead of aging out of the audience, Ewing says, “People are now pop music fans for life. And that then means, because we’re an aging population generally, that the slice of attention given to music that is mainly or exclusively listened to by young people just shrinks and shrinks and shrinks.” In that respect, pop stars could age like actors and politicians, as the few who broke through before the monoculture cratered serve as headliners for longer and longer (for better or worse). Maybe that’s already happening: The Beatles broke up before they were 30 (though their success persisted solo) and Elvis had to make a comeback at 33, but Drake and Beyoncé are about as big as ever at 37 and 42, respectively.
Swift will soon run out of old albums to rerecord, and her current tour wraps at the end of the year, so she needs a new era to enter. “She’s probably got the next five moves plotted out already,” Breihan told me, and now we know one of them: the 16-track Tortured Poets Department. (Plus a bonus track called “The Manuscript,” to highlight the literary theme and sell lots of vinyl.) And after that? Maybe she’ll make movies or really write a book or start a label or be a brand and a business tycoon—the millennial Dolly Parton. Maybe she’ll just keep cranking out hits. “All I wanna do is keep doing this,” she proclaimed on Sunday, lining up her next award while grasping the last one.
At some point, Ewing says, “There will undoubtedly be a step down. … What I can see is, in 10 years or so, the people who like Taylor Swift being not as big a force in media and in terms of what gets covered, … and she moves into a phase where she is just a huge star and everyone knows who she is, but the extent to which she owns the culture has receded a bit, in the way that it did for Madonna.”
For a worst-case scenario, that doesn’t sound so bad. It beats the first verse of “Castles Crumbling,” a previously unreleased track on Speak Now (Taylor’s Version):
Once I had an empire in a golden age I was held up so high, I used to be great They used to cheer when they saw my face Now, I fear I have fallen from grace
That’s the sentiment of someone who’s mourning the end of an imperial phase. Which, for the foreseeable future, doesn’t seem like something Swift has to fear.
After four years away, True Detective returns for a new season with a sinistrous subtitle. We’re in Night Country now, and we’ll be following along each week to try to piece together, with the help of police chief Liz Danvers and detective Evangeline Navarro, who perpetrated those gruesome crimes in Ennis, Alaska. Read along for a breakdown of Episode 4.
Who Done It?
If endless darkness in the Arctic Circle didn’t sound isolating enough, try spending that time alone on Christmas. Episode 4 of True Detective: Night Country sees pretty much every resident of Ennis spending the holiday solo or reckoning with some form of personal turmoil—but it wouldn’t be True Detective without festering psychological trauma and existential dread, would it? But hey, it’s still Christmas—sit down, relax, and let your favorite Warner Bros. Discovery crime drama promote your favorite Warner Bros. Discovery Christmas movie.
Screenshots via HBO
Episode 4 presents some significant progress in the Tsalal murder case. Last episode, Liz Danvers and Co. discovered a chilling video of Annie Kowtok that she took of herself just before her death. It shows Annie in an ice cave with unidentified bones embedded in the wall, which leads the crew to deduce that Annie’s body was moved from that location into town to make some sort of statement to the locals.
Meanwhile, when tasked with tracking down anyone who had suffered similar injuries to the Tsalal scientists, Pete discovers the record of Otis Heiss, a seemingly crucial piece of the Night Country puzzle. After surviving the injuries—which included burned corneas and self-inflicted bites, with no reported cause—Heiss went off the grid. (He’s traceable only through his police record of disorderly conduct.) When Danvers and Evangeline Navarro seek out Ennis High School teacher Adam Bryce for assistance in locating the cave Annie was likely killed in, he suggests tracking down whoever mapped out the dangerous tunnels. A quick Google search reveals none other than Heiss as the man responsible.
This episode also has no shortage of flirtations with the spirit realm—which probably shouldn’t even be described as flirtations anymore. We just flat out saw multiple Conjuring-ass ghosts. Night Country has been very clear about the possibility of the supernatural at play; True Detective Season 1 never went far beyond merely hinting at it. I still don’t believe the killer will end up being a wholly supernatural force, but visions of the dead have been shown so frequently and assuredly by multiple characters that the existence of the paranormal doesn’t seem to be just speculation at this point.
Heartbreakingly, these visions lead to the death of Julia, Eve’s tormented sister whose persistent encounters with the dead drove her to walk into the freezing ocean. In Episode 3, we discovered that Eve and Julia’s mother was also driven mad by hearing voices, and she eventually left home and was murdered by someone who was never found. With her sister now gone too, Eve fears she’s next in line to be targeted by these specters, though it wouldn’t be her first brush with the supernatural. Episode 3 showed us that Danvers and Navarro’s last case involved a man named William Wheeler who abused and killed his girlfriend—it’s suggested that either Danvers or Navarro killed him upon arriving at the crime scene and covered it up by falsely reporting his death as a suicide. Episode 4 reveals that Navarro saw the dead girlfriend’s ghost in the room before one of the cops likely pulled the trigger on Wheeler.
The episode culminates with the spotting of a man wearing Annie’s pink jacket—the same one Raymond Clark was seen wearing in a Tsalal video—near the town dredges. Navarro and Danvers go to scope it out and basically find themselves in a game of Silent Hill. They quickly locate the mysterious figure, and Danvers chases him up the ladders of a dredge, only to discover the man is actually Heiss rather than Clark. So where is Clark? “He went back down to hide,” Heiss says. “He’s hiding in the night country. We’re all in the night country now.” Hey, that’s the name of the show! As Danvers races after Heiss, Navarro starts hearing voices calling her name and follows a trail of footsteps to an ominous Christmas tree. There, she stumbles upon an apparition resembling Julia—Eve’s haunted by another woman she couldn’t save. Danvers comes down to find Eve in a catatonic state with blood dripping from her ear (akin to the ruptured eardrums the scientists suffered, perhaps?) after the encounter.
Oh yeah, this episode also treated us to more oranges and one-eyed polar bears, plus Billie Eilish songs. Are we any closer to solving the Tsalal mystery? Let’s round up the suspects.
1. Raymond Clark
The Nikola Jokic of murder suspects, our boy Raymond remains atop the list. His whereabouts are still unknown (unless “hiding in the night country” counts as a location), but that Danvers found Heiss in the state he was in, in the same Annie jacket that was last seen on Clark, indicates that something went down there. Speaking of “down there,” what exactly did Heiss mean by saying Clark “went down” to hide? Last week in this column, my colleague Ben Lindbergh introduced the Inuit goddess of the sea and ruler of the Adlivun underworld, Sedna, as a potential suspect. It doesn’t get much more “down” than the underworld, and “night country” seems like an apt description of a frozen wasteland where souls are imprisoned. Could Clark be posing as, or possessed by, Sedna?
Clark has been built up to be such a prime suspect over the course of these four episodes that it seems almost too obvious for him to be the sole perpetrator. But the mounting evidence shows he is clearly involved in the murders somehow. That he’s been missing for so long also seems to be foreshadowing a big showdown for when Danvers and Navarro do eventually track him down.
2. Oliver Tagaq
Even though Tagaq wasn’t seen in this episode, he was still key in an important scene. As Danvers obsessively rewatches the Annie Kowtok video, she notices that it ends with the lights getting cut in the same way they do at the end of the Raymond Clark Tsalal video. Danvers surmises that there was some sort of power outage at the end of both videos, but Annie’s video was evidently taken in an ice cave—how could there have been power in there in the first place? Danvers remembers that Tagaq was an equipment engineer at Tsalal and would likely have access to the lab’s emergency generators. She sends Eve and Pete back to Tagaq’s place to investigate and, what do you know, he’s vanished. Tagaq left right after Danvers and Navarro confronted him in the previous episode, according to the others at his camp. Eve and Pete find a spiral symbol drawn on the ground and carved into a stone, and when they ask Oliver’s former neighbors if they know what the symbol is, they don’t answer—their dogs start barking, and they kind of just … stare menacingly.
My hunch is that Tagaq is a red herring who’s just very distrusting of authority. (Understandably so, after how the Indigenous population has been treated.) But he obviously knows something, and his connection to the spirals can’t be meaningless.
3. Kate McKittrick
Even if Kate didn’t actually murder the Tsalal scientists with her own two hands, she’s still evil as hell and guilty of something. Actually, we already know she’s complicit in polluting Ennis’s water supply as an executive of the Silver Sky mining company, which Annie had been protesting against before her death. Plus, we know Kate is close with Hank from their interaction at the ice rink in Episode 2, and he’s the one who hid Annie’s case files and failed to report some key evidence in her investigation.
In Episode 4, we see a brief scene with Kate after Danvers’s daughter, Leah, was caught vandalizing the mining offices, spray-painting the word “MURDERERS” across the front door (badass!). If Leah becomes a target next, that would further heighten my suspicion that Kate is involved somehow, but even if not, Kate seems very unhappy with the reputation of her company. Unhappy enough to commit murder? I’m not sure. She does have a potential motive for killing Annie, but theorizing why she would kill the Tsalal scientists is just conjecture—maybe they discovered something in their research that would be detrimental to Silver Sky if made public? And since Night Country takes so much inspiration from Season 1, Kate could ultimately serve as a Billy Lee Tuttle figure in a web of corruption.
4. Sedna
Not to copy Ben’s homework from last week, but the supernatural is still a huge possibility in unlocking the Tsalal mystery, and Sedna is still the best explanation. And Heiss’s description of Clark’s location wasn’t the only clue we got in this episode that could lead to Sedna.
Listen to the way Eve describes her family’s relationship with spirits to Danvers: “It’s a curse,” she says. “Something calls us, and we follow.” It’s been said that Sedna can imprison the souls of the living, and Julia’s death was due to walking into the ocean, which happens to be Sedna’s domain. As Julia marched in, it did seem as though she was being led somewhere—could it have been Sedna calling to her?
The prevalence of these visions makes it seem like the paranormal will play a part in solving this mystery in a way that it didn’t in past seasons of True Detective. I still believe a human will ultimately be found responsible for the murders, but there were simply too many ghosts in this episode to ignore.
5. Hank Prior
I almost feel bad including Prior here because my guy had a horrendous outing in Episode 4. He was supposed to finally meet his Russian fiancée, Alina, at the airport, but, alas, she never showed. Well, he might have seen her briefly get off the plane, make eye contact with him, and get right back on, which is an
extreme case of getting curved. But in all likelihood, Alina is probably just some dude with an internet connection catfishing Prior into sending him money. Still, Prior does a terrible job of pretending to brush off the whole situation to his son, saying that Alina’s cell service is probably just out (a classic rationale for victims of ghosting). As we see Prior sulk in front of a bottle of champagne and a rose-petal-adorned bedspread intended for a romantic night with Alina, we know he’s pretty heartbroken.
But that we get such a sympathetic portrayal of Hank in this episode doesn’t necessarily absolve him of culpability in the murders. He obviously tried to cover something up with Annie’s case, and he’s overall been a pretty big asshole to Danvers, Navarro, and his own son. But the Alina situation shows how naive Hank is, and that probably makes him a pretty terrible cop. With the Annie case, it seems possible that Hank is doing the bidding for some powerful person—maybe Kate?—while being kind of oblivious, or even willfully ignorant, about the severity of these cases. Which, again … really shoddy stuff for a cop to do. But it probably means he’s not the one committing the murders himself.
6. Captain Connelly
Let me cook for a second. The thing that raised my eyebrows this week was the way Captain Connelly responded when Danvers asked if he’d seen the Annie Kowtok video she’d sent him: a short nod and then, “You keep that on a need-to-know basis.” Yes, he’s a police captain who probably doesn’t want evidence leaking to the public, but it just struck me as a bizarre reaction to the uncovering of a crucial and traumatic clue in a years-old murder case. Plus, he’s been trying to wrangle control of the Tsalal case ever since it opened.
Danvers has made a lot of comments about how Connelly wants to look good for his future mayoral campaign (which Connelly himself has never really responded to), and that might be true—and that could certainly include ensuring that any skeletons in his closet never come out. Prior is, in all probability, compromised by his connections to Silver Sky one way or another, so why couldn’t Connelly be too? True Detective Season 1’s Errol Childress murders had connections all the way up to the Louisiana governor. A powerful and ambitious man like Connelly could easily get his hands dirty, too.
Galaxy-Brained Theory of the Week
Now let me really cook for a second. There have been multiple visions of a of one-eyed polar bear throughout Night Country so far (which have been presented in a sort of dreamlike manner but could be a real sighting in an Alaskan town). Both Navarro and Danvers have experienced these visions in the same way: by almost crashing into the bear in Episodes 1 and 4, respectively. A plush one-eyed polar bear that once belonged to Danvers’s son, Holden, has been a recurring image as well. It almost reminds me of another polar bear sighting …
Look, I realize it’s probably a different experience running into a polar bear in the Alaskan tundra than it is on a deserted island. But the polar bear sightings on Lost, surprisingly enough, actually had an explanation: They were brought to the island by the DHARMA Initiative for studies in electromagnetic research. So those polar bears had to come from somewhere. Who’s to say that the DHARMA Initiative never had a study-abroad program at the Tsalal research station specializing in polar bear recruitment? I don’t know, man, I’ll just take any opportunity I can to bring up Lost again. What a program.
Vikram’s Alaska Corner
True Detective: Night Country takes place in the cold fringes of the Last Frontier, otherwise known as Alaska. (Never mind that the season was filmed in Iceland.) The Ringer’s own Vikram Patel is a former resident of the state who still spends his winters there. Each week, we’ll pose a question to Vikram about his second home as we look to learn more about the local geography and culture.
Julianna: I have to be honest with you, Vikram—I’m four episodes into True Detective: Night Country and my California mind is still unable to comprehend just how cold Alaska is. I’ve lived in the Golden State my entire life and am currently typing this from Los Angeles, where it’s a lovely 73 degrees in January, and I still saw jackets and beanies outside. I could count the number of times I’ve seen snow in my life on one hand, and at least a couple of those times I’ve foolishly worn jeans and sneakers that quickly got sopping wet.
So my question is: How do you adapt to extreme cold? Do you ever get used to it? What are the wardrobe essentials for an Alaskan winter? Is an Andy Reid frozen mustache a common sighting? I realize that was multiple questions, but this is truly a world that boggles my mind.
Vikram: Like you, Julianna, I am from California. When I first moved to Alaska, I hadn’t had much exposure to cold weather, and it showed. The first winter I spent in Anchorage, my “coat” was a thin corduroy jacket, and I mostly wore a lot of sweatshirts and jeans. As many locals warned me, cotton kills. But I was too stubborn to buy myself a puffy jacket or the stretchy technical clothing that my friends wore to exercise in the cold. I was neither warm nor fashionable.
Fortunately, despite my inadequate wardrobe, my body did adjust. Exposure to cold weather activates something in our bodies called “brown fat,” which helps keep our bodies warmer, a sort of internal layer of long underwear. I noticed this effect most when I would visit my family in Los Angeles during the winter; they wore sweaters and jackets all day, while I could wear shorts and T-shirts without a shiver. It felt like a superpower.
But there’s a limit to what our bodies can withstand.
The coldest temperature I have ever been in is negative 35 degrees Fahrenheit, near Fairbanks, Alaska. It was a whole different kind of cold than I had grown accustomed to in Anchorage, where the temperature rarely drops below zero. The layer of ice covering the road in Fairbanks was a few inches thick but not as slippery as warmer ice (the thin layer of melting water on the surface of the ice is what makes your car slide around on the road). Taking a deep breath at negative 35 is an adventure—air that cold tends to cause an instant coughing fit. We visited some hot springs on that trip; I remember dunking my head in the water, coming up for air, and feeling my hair freeze in seconds. Extreme cold can be delightful.
But does Ennis get that cold? It’s hard to say—there isn’t a weather almanac to consult for fictional Alaskan villages. But we can make an educated guess. Night Country creator Issa López described Ennis as a “fictionalized amalgam of northern villages Kotzebue, Utqiagvik, and Nome.” These villages are further north than Fairbanks, but they are located on the water, which can help keep temperatures relatively mild—the brown fat of meteorology.
Stuck in weather-estimating hell, I reached out to Brian Brettschneider, Alaska’s leading climatologist. Brian told me that Ennis is likely “not as cold as Fairbanks, but notably colder than Anchorage. Nome, Kotzebue, and Utqiagvik are also quite windy places and are in the tundra,” where, he reminded me, trees cannot grow. Brian also sent me this handy dynamic temperature map. By my estimation, Ennis likely sees temps as low as negative 15 or negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit in the depths of winter. In a word: brrrrr!
If you are planning to visit a northern Alaska community next winter, here are some items you will want to bring along, courtesy of my Real Alaskan Advisory Committee (Tara, Emily, Zach, and Barry):
A wool hat that covers your ears
A thick neck gaiter that you can pull up to protect your face
Heavyweight thermal underwear—this is your second skin
Mittens (not gloves!), preferably with a long gauntlet—covering your wrist and lower forearm—to keep the warmth in and the snow out
A down parka, ideally 600 fill or above, that goes down to at least your thighs and has a proper fur ruff (synthetics don’t cut it when snow is blowing sideways)
Wool socks
Bunny boots, which are cartoonish snow-white boots that keep your feet warm by trapping air and leaving room for thick socks—if you can’t find any, a pair of Bogs or Muck boots (cold-weather boots all seem to have exceptional names) will also do
Hand and foot warmers to tuck into your mittens and boots—get the foot warmers with adhesives, or you’ll end up with a crumpled mass far away from your toes
Julianna, now that you’re prepared, I hope you’ll decide to visit Alaska in the winter sometime. I can’t guarantee you’ll see anything supernatural, but a snowy, dark Alaskan winter is magical all the same. The juice is worth the squeeze, even if it’s a little bit frozen.
Iconic True Detective Looks of the Week
Underneath the true crime mysteries at the forefront of each season, True Detective is admirably devoted to capturing the aesthetics that define each of its many eras. With that comes some pretty incredible costume and makeup work, which we’ll be highlighting throughout the season.
Rose Aguineau’s little Christmas party (and dress!) looked lovely. She seems like a great hang. Other than the fact that she has to deal with, as she says, “all the fuckin’ dead.”
Bro put on his best turtleneck and brought along a well-dressed stuffed animal only to leave the airport alone thinking he got stood up on sight. It’s so sad it almost makes me forget he’s a terrible person.
You ever look so good you cause a stranger to spiral into an abyss of loneliness and heartbreak?
The Gods are among us as Joanna and Mal return to dive deep into the season finale of Percy Jackson and the Olympians (08:10). They take an extended look at the season’s final episode and break down all of the significant story elements of the show (15:41). Later, they talk about book spoilers to see what may happen next in a potential Season 2 (02:03:42).
Hosts: Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson Senior Producer: Steve Ahlman Additional Production: Arjuna Ramgopal Social: Jomi Adeniran
Finally reunited after a brief hiatus, Rachel Lindsay and Jodi Walker kick off today’s Morally Corrupt by recapping Tom Sandoval and Tom Schwartz’s chaotic Viall Files episode (1:58), before diving into the Season 11 premiere of Vanderpump Rules (10:39). Then, Rachel and Jodi break down Season 13, Episode 14 of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (33:24). Finally, Rachel is joined by Callie Curry to chat about Season 6, Episode 14 of The Real Housewives of Miami (50:01).
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