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  • ‘Invincible’ Knows How to Make an Exit

    ‘Invincible’ Knows How to Make an Exit

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    Invincible has always had a knack for delivering dramatic conclusions.

    In the pilot of the animated series, Mark Grayson (voiced by Steven Yeun) begins to develop superpowers, and with the guidance of his alien father, Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons), Earth’s greatest hero, Mark takes up the name Invincible and becomes a superhero in his own right. But what begins as a feel-good, familiar origin story for Invincible soon becomes a sinister introduction to who Omni-Man really is: Earth’s most fearsome villain. Just as the series premiere appears to be ending, Omni-Man ambushes the superhero team known as the Guardians of the Globe and brutally kills them all.

    In Invincible’s explosive first-season finale, Omni-Man shares his true motives with Mark: He’s been tasked by his homeworld Viltrum with conquering Earth and preparing its population to join the expanding Viltrum Empire. After Omni-Man fails to convince Mark to help his cause, the Viltrumite devastates Chicago and nearly kills Mark to demonstrate the futility of resistance. However, Omni-Man stops just short of ending his son’s life, and then he flees the planet without explanation.

    It isn’t until the final seconds of the third episode of Season 2 that Omni-Man and Mark are reunited, as Omni-Man manages to lure Mark to a distant planet under the pretense that it needs to be saved from a meteor shower. Omni-Man’s return paves the way for another shocking ending in Episode 4, “It’s Been a While,” a midseason finale that gives Mark his greatest test yet and reestablishes the looming threat of a Viltrumite invasion.

    Due to a number of factors, including the challenges of the show’s animation process and delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, more than two years elapsed between the end of Invincible’s first season in 2021 and the start of its second in early November. But the extended layoff hasn’t hurt the show: Through the first four episodes of the latest season, Invincible remains one of the best superhero programs on TV as it builds on the momentum of Omni-Man’s betrayal.

    Season 2 started with something of a misdirection, one that played with the audience’s expectation to receive some answers about what happened to Omni-Man and see the continuation of his conflict with Mark. The premiere opened with Mark fighting the Immortal (Ross Marquand), only to reveal that Omni-Man was back, as he teamed up with Invincible to kill the millenia-old superhero (again). But before long it became clear that this wasn’t the show’s main version of Earth at all. It was another universe entirely, a timeline in which Mark never stood up to his father but instead joined his efforts to prepare the world for the inevitable Viltrumite takeover.

    With the introduction of a dimension-hopping new character named Angstrom Levy (Sterling K. Brown), Invincible has become yet another superhero story to enter the multiverse. Between the two Spider-Verse films, The Flash, and Marvel Studios’ Multiverse Saga (along with non-superhero projects like Everything Everywhere All at Once), the concept of the multiverse has become a well-worn narrative device in recent years that’s grown more tiresome with every misfire. Much like The Boys and its spinoff series Gen V, Invincible emerged as a standout in the crowded superhero landscape because of the ways it subverted the familiar beats and tropes of a genre that has dominated Hollywood for more than a decade. Yet in its second season, the show’s embrace of the multiverse has threatened to propel the series into all-too-familiar territory.

    Fortunately, Invincible manages to maintain its novelty. While the multiverse is often used to transport heroes to parallel dimensions or bring alternate versions of the same hero together in one universe, Invincible introduces the concept by way of a villain’s origin story. Angstrom first appears in the universe that saw Mark team up with his father to conquer Earth; as he later explains, the two “heroes” team up to take over the planet in most dimensions. Angstrom’s mission starts off well intentioned: By bringing together all the versions of himself from across the multiverse, Angstrom can pool the knowledge and resources from each Earth and share the collective findings among them to solve all of their individual problems.

    But when Angstrom returns to the main Invincible universe and hires the Mauler Twins (Kevin Michael Richardson) to help him transfer the memories of every one of his multiversal counterparts into his mind, Mark intervenes as the volatile process is already underway. The Maulers’ machine is destroyed during the conflict, killing everyone at the scene save for Mark, one of the Maulers, and the superpowered Angstrom, whose brain mutates amid the massive download of newfound knowledge and memories. Rather than seeking to fix every world, Angstrom instead vows to get revenge on Invincible, and begins to travel between dimensions to gather intel on how to defeat him.

    After the Season 2 opener, this multiversal threat fades into the background as Mark and the so-called Global Defense Agency (GDA) write off the encounter as just another run-in with the Maulers. Angstrom’s plotline will surely resurface when Invincible returns for the second half of its latest season in early 2024, but its absence for much of the remainder of Part 1 leaves room for the series to grow in more interesting ways, grounded within its main timeline. Where Season 2 really thrives is in its narrowed focus on the show’s central characters and their adjustments to a world without a heroic Omni-Man.

    Omni-Man’s betrayal and departure have created a need for a new primary protector, and Mark slowly eases his way into the role. As he starts to work for Cecil (Walton Goggins) and the GDA, all of his choices are weighed against the guilt he harbors for his father’s actions. Even though Mark opposed Omni-Man and the world knows it, he still feels as if he needs to prove to everyone—and himself—that he isn’t going to turn into the world-conquering Viltrumite he was raised by (and raised to be). Meanwhile, Mark’s mother, Debbie (Sandra Oh), bears a different kind of guilt as she tries to reckon with why she never saw through her husband’s lies in nearly 20 years of marriage. She turns to alcohol as a coping mechanism and descends into a drunken depression as she grapples with the fact that she was never more than a “pet” to the man she knew as Nolan Grayson. Without any proper outlets to channel her grief or process how she could have been partners with someone capable of inflicting such cruel and senseless destruction, Debbie spirals and grasps for some semblance of control in her life.

    The character-driven nature of Invincible has always been one of the series’ strongest qualities, and the emotional beats involving Mark and Debbie work particularly well this season. Their struggles reflect lasting consequences from the first-season finale as their lives carry on, with Mark graduating high school and starting college, and Debbie navigating the transition into an empty nester on her own during her darkest hour. By delaying Omni-Man’s return until the end of the third episode, Invincible allows these characters to grow while also building up the anticipation of a potential rematch between Mark and the show’s most captivating antagonist.

    The midseason finale capitalizes on the groundwork laid throughout Part 1’s first three episodes to become the strongest installment of the season. Omni-Man reveals his new life as the emperor of Thraxa, a planet inhabited by insectoids who have a lifespan of only nine months, and he introduces Mark to his wife, Andressa (Rhea Seehorn), and their child. It’s a lot for Mark to process at once, and before he can even attempt to do so, Thraxa gets invaded by a trio of Viltrumites who have been hunting down Omni-Man for deserting his post back on Earth.

    “It’s Been a While” boasts some of Invincible’s trademark action mixture of stunning and grotesque violence as Mark and Omni-Man team up to defend the planet and Omni-Man’s new family. The duo defeat the Viltrumites, but the victory comes with steep costs: Mark is nearly killed, Omni-Man’s spine is snapped, and much of the Thraxan civilization is destroyed. Just as Omni-Man returns to the forefront of the story, he’s taken away in a Viltrumite ship to be brought back to his homeworld for execution. Yet even in Omni-Man’s limited screen time, Invincible shows how much he, too, has grown as a character. He killed thousands of civilians in Chicago in the first season simply to convey to Mark how little their brief lives mattered in the grand scheme of things, and here he defies his fellow Viltrumites to defend a planet of beings whose entire life cycles last less than a calendar year.

    Mark is spared by the Viltrumites so that he can return to Earth and supposedly assume his father’s role in preparing humanity for the Empire’s invasion, which sets up the second half of the eight-episode season. What with all of the other ongoing story lines in Invincible, including Angstrom’s multiversal revenge spree, the Coalition of Planets’ growing efforts to quell the Viltrum Empire in the far reaches of space, and Atom Eve’s (Gillian Jacobs) journey of self-discovery after giving up crime fighting, Season 2 can feel a little scattered as it divides its time among its moving parts. But the fourth episode reminds the audience what’s at stake by refocusing on the central conflict between Mark and Omni-Man, and the impending Viltrumite invasion, just as Invincible enters another hiatus.

    Amazon Prime Video has yet to announce exactly when the series will return next year, but the streaming service already renewed the show for a third season back in 2021, and the surprise release of a stand-alone Atom Eve prequel special in late July could be the first of many of its kind. With a growing cast of dynamic characters (and an absurd wealth of talent voicing them), the Invincible universe is expanding. And as long as the series continues to develop those characters so deftly amid the chaos of the multiverse around them, there may be no limit to the narrative heights Invincible can reach.

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    Daniel Chin

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  • The Rewatchables: ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’ | Peak Brangelina

    The Rewatchables: ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’ | Peak Brangelina

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    Bill Simmons is joined by Chris Ryan and Amanda Dobbins to rewatch the 2005 action-comedy ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith,’ starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie

    The Ringer’s Bill Simmons is joined by Chris Ryan and Amanda Dobbins to rewatch the 2005 action-comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith, starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

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    Bill Simmons

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  • The ‘Doctor Who’ Rewatch (Part 6): The 13th Doctor

    The ‘Doctor Who’ Rewatch (Part 6): The 13th Doctor

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    The Time Lord has come in the form of Jodie Whittaker, so Joanna and Mal are here to dive deep into the era of the 13th Doctor. They cover Seasons 11 through 13 of the beloved BBC series in Part 6 of their Doctor Who Viewing Guide (9:54). Then, they have some superlatives for all the Doctors they’ve covered as they look forward to David Tennant’s return (1:19:05).

    Hosts: Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson
    Associate Producer: Carlos Chiriboga
    Additional Production: Arjuna Ramgopal
    Social: Jomi Adeniran

    Subscribe: Spotify

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    Mallory Rubin

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  • ‘Napoleon’ and the Top Five “Great Men” Movies

    ‘Napoleon’ and the Top Five “Great Men” Movies

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    Sean, Amanda, and Chris explore the high highs of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon—in particular the battle scenes—while trying to sort through their feelings on why the movie doesn’t come together as a whole quite how they hoped it would (1:00). Then, they try to place Napoleon in the historical context of “great men” movies and share their top five in the genre (40:00).

    Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins
    Guest: Chris Ryan
    Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner

    Subscribe: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / Stitcher / RSS

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    Sean Fennessey

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  • OpenAI Tried to Fire Sam Altman. It Only Made Him More Powerful.

    OpenAI Tried to Fire Sam Altman. It Only Made Him More Powerful.

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    “The thing people forget about human babies,” mused Sam Altman, the entrepreneur whisperer turned artificial intelligence diviner, to The New Yorker’s Tad Friend in 2016, “is that they take years to learn anything interesting.” Tough but fair, although any babies reading this oughtn’t feel too embarrassed: Altman pointed out elsewhere in the piece, which was titled “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny,” that we grown-ups aren’t too quick on the uptake ourselves.

    “There are certain advantages to being a machine,” said Altman, the 38-year-old who—with the hectic exception of the past five-ish days; more on that in a moment!—has been the high-profile and highly influential CEO of OpenAI since 2019. His company recently flirted with an implied valuation of $80 billion; it is behind products like the smart image generator DALL-E and the beguiling large language model chatbot ChatGPT. “We humans are limited by our input-output rate—we learn only two bits a second, so a ton is lost,” Altman told Friend. “To a machine, we must seem like slowed-down whale songs.”

    It’s easy to imagine a tech leader like Altman sympathizing with the plight of such a bot. When you’re a guy who likes to operate not just on a different wavelength from most other mortals, but in a whole nother realm of consciousness—one in which the goal of achieving AGI, or “artificial general intelligence,” is considered possibly world saving or world ending, depending on who is doing the extrapolations—those brisk whirs of industry tend to resonate better than humanity’s low, musical moans.

    Why, just the other day—last Thursday, to be specific—Altman sat at a developer conference and described a recent experience that had left him positively vibrating with wonder. “On a personal note,” he told interviewer Laurene Powell Jobs and the rest of the APEC audience, “just in the last couple of weeks, I have gotten to be in the room when we sort of, like, push the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward.” I’ve heard people use this kind of language to describe, like, the glory of childbirth, but in Altman’s case, he was describing the arrival of a different little bundle—lines of code on a computer that could go on to change the world.

    And yet, even the sleekest, purringest, many-billion-dollar flywheel can get smoked by a dumb, sudden bird strike; even the deepest-dwelling whales can surface at random and upend a vessel. Why, just the other day—last Friday, to be specific—the OpenAI board of directors abruptly decided it would be prudent to fire its CEO into the sun. And so, without telling anyone, including its publicly traded partner and mega-investor Microsoft, it went ahead and did it, with a ruthlessness that might have pleased the machines if everything hadn’t turned out so aggressively, humanly awkward instead.

    It’s always jarring when a real story feels fake, when everyone is skeptical of buying what you’re telling. Sometimes, the very people most familiar with a story are the ones most moved to try to explain things via shared fiction.

    Even among the techno journos and cyber doomers and network statists and “See, corporate governance matters!” nerds who have been glued to the sudden goings-on and votings-out at OpenAI—even among those of us who are terminally online enough to have tuned in eagerly last Friday to a highly speculative and information-light Twitter Spaces event about Altman’s odd ousting cohosted by Martin Shkreli; ask me how I know—we couldn’t help but notice that the past five days have unfolded like something you’d find on TV.

    Like an episode of Succession! Like a whole season of Succession, I should say, with enough rapid twists and U-turns in the power struggle timeline to make GoJo seem slo-mo by comparison. On Wednesday morning, when I woke up to the news that we’d reached a finale and Altman was coming back to OpenAI as CEO, my rotted brain could only think about Tom Wambsgans saying to Kendall Roy: “I’ve seen you get fucked a lot, and I’ve never seen Logan get fucked once.” And when I learned that Altman’s return involved a board of directors shake-up that installed both former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and former jetsetting Harvard president and compulsive opiner Larry Summers (?!?) … I mostly thought about how ’ol “Lawrence of Absurdia” would have been quite the character on Silicon Valley. (“Larry sucks up, and he bullies down” has the makings of a Russ Hanneman motivational speech, you know?)

    But mostly, all this time, I’ve thought about Survivor: specifically, one of those humdingers where the tribal council has started but there are still 24 minutes left in the episode. Just consider that, between the close of the stock market’s trading hours at 4 p.m. Eastern time Friday and the opening of the stock market’s trading hours at 9:30 a.m. Monday, all of the following happened:

    • OpenAI’s board of directors—a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, which sits on the original nonprofit side of the organization but has absolute control over the newer for-profit side too, due to a once-idealistic, now-unusual corporate governance structure—announced that Altman was out. It informed him of this decision via Google Meet; it informed most of the rest of the world via a press release that cryptically described Altman as having been “not consistently candid in his communications with the board.”
    • Into this absence of information flowed many theories. The abruptness of the decision suggested the worst. On the Twitter Spaces event I joined, Shkreli posited that perhaps it had something to do with a recent New York magazine story titled “Sam Altman Is the Oppenheimer of Our Age,” in which Altman’s sister, Annie, spoke out about her estrangement from her brothers and followed up on past accounts of familial abuse. (The hosts of the Twitter Spaces event concluded that this explanation for Sam’s ouster seemed less likely once big names in Silicon Valley began speaking out with public statements of support for him.)
    • Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and a member of the board who was also blindsided by a vote of removal, bid adieu in protest.
    • Another theory behind the decision began to take hold around social media and hasn’t quieted since: that the board of directors had fired Altman out of some sense of moral duty because members felt or knew that he was being too cavalier, or maybe too commercial, with the technology’s rate of veil-lifting, frontier-pushing growth. Was this an attempt to keep OpenAI from breaking with its nonprofit origins and expanding its for-profit operations? Was it a way of slowing the company from iterating its way into the brave new world of actual AGI too soon? It’s not unusual for a board of directors to make decisions based on an organization’s mission or first principals or founding charter. But when that mission is related to the very future of mankind, the stakes are slightly raised.
    • Terms like “doomers” (used to describe fretful people who regard the potential of AGI with dread), “safetyists” (self-explanatory), and “decels” (people who think we should just sloooow down, man, before someone gets hurt) were all over my timeline, deployed with varying amounts of derision or respect.
    • An October tweet from board member Ilya Sutskever, who was said to have delivered the news to Altman, resurfaced and was widely analyzed for clues: “if you value intelligence above all other human qualities,” he had written, “you’re gonna have a bad time.”
    • Altman posted “I love you all” on Twitter; followers with big Swiftie energy pointed out that the first letters of each word spelled out ILYA.
    • Elon Musk, who cofounded and named OpenAI in 2015 and had served on the board for a time (along with Shivon Zilis, a former Yale hockey goalie who has worked at Tesla and Neuralink and who is also the mother of one of Musk’s sets of twins), stoked the existential crisis flames. He retweeted Sutskever’s quote; “I am very worried,” Musk added. “Ilya has a good moral compass and does not seek power. He would not take such drastic action unless he felt it was absolutely necessary.”
    • OpenAI’s chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, wrote an internal memo viewed by several media outlets that explained all the reasons that weren’t behind Altman’s firing: The move “was not made in response to malfeasance or anything related to our financial, business, safety, or security/privacy practices,” Lightcap wrote. “This was a breakdown in communication between Sam and the board.” About what, he did not say.
    • The Verge and other outlets reported that Altman was in talks to return to the company. Soon after, he posted a photo of himself wearing an OpenAI guest badge. Another AI employee posted a photo of Altman taking said selfie, as proof of life.
    • OpenAI made an announcement confirming that Altman would not be returning as CEO—because the company had made a new indefinite-term hire. A warm welcome to onetime Microsoft intern Emmett Shear: the former CEO of Twitch, a noted Harry Potter fan, and one hell of a reply guy. Shear, a self-described safetyist/doomer who also seemed not to know exactly why his predecessor had gotten got, vowed to launch an investigation immediately.
    • Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella released a scorcher of a corporate communication around midnight Pacific time Sunday, expressing optimism about the company’s many-billion-dollar investment in OpenAI and adding that, oh, by the way, he had decided to hire Altman and Brockman into Microsoft directly so they could start a new in-house artificial intelligence and also that, oh, by the way, Big Clippy would be happy to hire any of the hundreds of OpenAI employees who sought to follow their former leaders to the BigCo. This was bonkers stuff. (Also, something about the glint of “We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear” made my blood run cold.)
    • OpenAI employees loyal to Altman—including Mira Murati, who had ever so briefly been interim CEO—flooded Twitter with heart emoji and the line, “OpenAI is nothing without its people,” which sounds precisely like the kind of thing a scheming AI would say to butter us tenderhearted humans up. (I did see someone on Twitter joke that maybe if he joined in and tweeted the line too, he could slip right into a seven-figure job at Microsoft undetected.)
    • ILYA TWEETED THAT HE DEEPLY REGRETTED HIS PARTICIPATION IN THE BOARD’S ACTIONS AND WROTE THAT HE NEVER INTENDED TO HARM OPENAI. (?????) (!!!!!!!!)
    • SAM RETWEETED ILYA’S TWEET AND ADDED SOME HEART EMOJI.
    • As reported by Kara Swisher, a petition went around imploring the remaining board holdouts—one of whom included the CEO of Quora, because of course—to step down or face the mass resignation of what would eventually be something like 95 percent of OpenAI employees. ILYA SIGNED THE PETITION. (It’s unclear whether he was clad in a hot dog suit at the time.)

    And that accounting of the weekend absurdity doesn’t include the most Silicon Valley detail of them all, the one so on the nose it seemed scripted, but only because it happened after the opening bell:

    • The CEO of a “smart mattress” company called Eight Sleep tapped into the mainframe and emerged with some data: Few people in San Francisco got a good night of sleep on Sunday. Maybe it’s because they’re being surveilled by their mattresses?

    The breakneck pace of updates continued once the workweek got under way: There were lots of reports about meetings, more OpenAI employees signing the petition; wives doing work; Salesforce’s Marc Benioff getting roasted; Shear trying and failing to learn why Altman got sacked in the first place; things of that nature. For a time, Altman existed in a sort of quantum state, employed (though not quite yet) by Microsoft and fired from (but still looming over) OpenAI. On Tuesday night, a New York Times story noted the deep rift between Altman and some of the members of the board—one of whom, Helen Toner, had criticized OpenAI in an academic paper she wrote and had also said that the company, and the mission, and humanity, could be better off without Altman.

    I fell asleep thinking this might last for a while, feeling sorry for tech reporters whose Thanksgiving might be ruined. And when I woke up, Sam was back.

    I know some readers might be thinking: What’s up with all the Sams? And you know what, they’re right to do so. Because there really are a number of similarities between Altman and another Sam of recent yore—Bankman-Fried—whose fraud trial I spent my October observing.

    Both have totally aptronymic last names, if you think hard about it, man. Bankman-Fried had a disagreement with a business partner named Tara Mac Aulay that led to a professional schism; Altman had a disagreement with a now-former board member named Tasha McCauley that led to Friday’s professional schism. (As a side note, McCauley married Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 2014, which I understandably have no parallel for, but it feels essential to mention.) Both had game-changing moments while on hikes just outside San Francisco: Bankman-Fried charmed Michael Lewis into writing a book, while Altman “relinquished the notion that human beings are singular” and began thinking more deeply about the power and might of simulating intelligence. (So, like, same, except exactly the opposite.) Bankman-Fried named his investment firm Alameda Research in an attempt to sound less crypto-y; Altman had an early entity he called Hydrazine, named after the compound used in rocket fuel.

    And both Sams ultimately became well-known and willing avatars for their respective nascent industries, always ready to don those little nude nub microphones they hand out at tech conference panels and opine about P values and the future of crypto or AI. They may not have written the code underlying their ventures, but they sure spoke the media’s lingua franca. (Wait, were they the personality hires?!) In their own ways, they cultivated press relationships: Bankman-Fried’s attention to his own narrative was so deliberate that the prosecution used it against him in court, while Altman’s rapport with some reporters may have helped him this weekend, as one opined.

    But the other quirky Samilarity is that both of their ascents had ties to effective altruism, the rationalist-adjacent worldview that seeks to define, quantify, and ultimately encourage the actions that can do the most good for all of humanity—both now and in the future. For Bankman-Fried, effective altruism was, at least nominally, an ethical framework that compelled him to seek greater and greater sums of money and encouraged him to take bigger and unwieldier financial swings. (He struck out.)

    Altman’s engagement with EA is murkier. On Twitter, a coalition of shitposters, venture capitalists, and chaos slurpers—whoa, everything really IS (a) securities fraud and (b) college football—have started half-jokingly calling themselves “effective accelerationists,” or “e/acc,” of late, a salvo against what they consider to be the gloomier-and-doomier EA types. Altman offers glimpses of futures that both EA believers and e/acc trolls want, and some in the latter group have interpreted his reverse-Grandpa Simpson as a sign that perhaps he shares their merrier approach to AI R&D. Whether he actually does is something I assume we’ll find out when our strawberry overlords come to town.

    While the Altman drama was in full flux, much of Silicon Valley hearkened back to its most notorious founder ousting of all time: that of Apple’s Steve Jobs, a farewell so famous that Uber’s Travis Kalanick later tried to turn the breakup into a verb. “If only twitter had been around during the john sculley / steve jobs conflict,” wrote Founders Fund principal Delian Asparouhov (recently described as “the man speed-running the new space race”). “History is so much more interesting when you watch it play out live on a timeline.”

    It wasn’t just the firing of Jobs that is relevant to Altman’s situation, though. It was the way his eventual return only enhanced his power and influence.

    Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs quotes him in 1983, two years before the split with Apple, when he recruited Sculley away from PepsiCo with this winning pitch: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” But in the real world, Jobs and Sculley clashed over the disappointing sales of, among other products, the Macintosh. An attempt by the Apple cofounder to appeal to the board of directors following a demotion led instead to his departure from the company. “I am but 30 and want still to contribute and achieve,” Jobs wrote in a parting letter to the company’s vice chairman.

    A little over a decade later, at the end of 1996, Apple was floundering, and Jobs was brought (and bought) back into the fold. At the time, I was a teenage employee of an online chat company with Apple roots that had Sculley as a board member and investor, as well as a huge Apple dweeb who handled the return of Jobs like a Marvel fan glimpsing a bygone fav in a mid-credits scene. When Apple debuted its “Think different” campaign in the fall of 1997, I downloaded a grainy QuickTime of the ad and watched it again and again.

    By then, the company was back on the rise. Earlier that summer, I had attended the Macworld expo in Boston, where Jobs went on stage and made a pivotal announcement about a big, stabilizing $150 million investment from … Microsoft. Jobs was but 42, and still had a whole lot to contribute and achieve; to doom and bless the world with. Or, as he might’ve put it, he had a few more one more things up his sleeve.

    Altman’s exile, depending on whether you calculate the end of it as his show of support from Microsoft or his return to OpenAI specifically, lasted roughly between one-twentieth and one-tenth of 1 percent as long as Jobs’s did. But it included a larger, undefined number of heart emoji tweets, that’s for sure. Like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn sneaking into their own funeral service, both Altman and Brockman got to observe an enormous amount of employee support for their leadership. Now, back atop the company, they get to figure out what to do with it, and how to ensure that all this goodwill doesn’t break bad.

    Since the will they or won’t they nature of this story has given way to (some?) clarity, this is the biggest focal point surrounding OpenAI’s future. In a pair of televised appearances Monday evening, Microsoft’s Nadella had amiably and CEO-ishly hedged about whether he thought Altman would wind up in-house at Microsoft or whether he’d be able to return to OpenAI. “I’m open to both options,” he said on CNBC. “One thing I will not do is stop innovating.” (He’s running!) Over the past few days, Microsoft served as an important backstop for OpenAI, a sort of employer-of-last-resort during what felt like the HR version of a bank run. In exchange for Nadella’s trouble, it stands to reason that OpenAI’s new board—which, at the moment, consists of just three people: Taylor, Summers, and the Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, who already had a seat—will have a much friendlier and likely more commercial relationship with the company who provides all that computing power in addition to capital. And Microsoft will ostensibly at some point want to push for a board seat of its own.

    There are two other parts of the 2016 New Yorker story that feel especially relevant today. The first is a quote from the venture capitalist Paul Graham, a longtime Altman colleague and advocate who once approvingly wrote that “software is eating the world” and had a track record of finding Altman to be formidable. “Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful,” Graham told Friend in the story. It echoed something that Graham wrote back in 2008, linking to a video of Altman presenting his Gossip Girl–approved app, Loopt, at an Apple developers conference while wearing two polo shirts with popped collars: “Sam Altman has it. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he’d be the king.”

    The second resonant part of that New Yorker story is an anecdote about a leading AI researcher from Google visiting Altman and Brockman. The researcher asks them—I mean really asks them—how they would define OpenAI’s goal. Brockman’s answer is classic Silicon Valley, and classic Silicon Valley. “Our goal right now … is to do the best thing there is to do,” he declares. “It’s a little vague.”

    What isn’t as vague is that, going forward, OpenAI is well and truly Altman’s baby—a baby that has a much scarier and expedient learning curve than our human ones do. These past few days have been filled with everyone talking over one another—investors, founders, and observers alike. But to the machines, it was all just background noise, some distant hum of human discord. Sometimes you eat the whale, and sometimes the whale eats you.

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    Katie Baker

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  • Emerald Fennell and Barry Keoghan Break Down Those … Suggestive Scenes in ‘Saltburn’

    Emerald Fennell and Barry Keoghan Break Down Those … Suggestive Scenes in ‘Saltburn’

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    Saltburn has the slick intrigue of a Gothic thriller and the icy wit of a comedy of manners. The eponymous estate at which bookish University of Oxford loner Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) works to ingratiate himself is a museum of decadence, its splendor concealing a depravity that only the wealthy can disregard. But the movie’s target isn’t straightforward. Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), the bewitching classmate who invites Oliver home with him for a rambling summer, starts out as a token of desire but becomes a heedless lodestar. Felix inherited his savior complex from his mother, Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), a wannabe do-gooder with a vampy cruel streak. She’s married to a daffy lord (played by Richard E. Grant) whose lack of self-awareness rivals her own. As for Oliver, he spends his days at Saltburn currying favor among the Cattons, only to enact extravagant subterfuge.

    Emerald Fennell, the writer and director of Saltburn, calls it a “vampire movie.” Oliver is the ultimate bloodsucker in question, yet his drive remains a sympathetic one. He wants what everyone wants: to belong. When Felix embraces Oliver, who talks of drug-addicted parents and a life without spoils, Oliver quickly leeches on to the most popular guy at school. Can you blame him? Grandeur is an aphrodisiac.

    “It’s the same as constructing any love story. I mean, it is a love story,” Fennell tells The Ringer. “Can you completely believe why these two people would come together?”

    Part of the seduction scheme that eventually leads Oliver to acquire Saltburn involves sex—the sex he witnesses, the sex he wants, the sex he initiates. If he has something to gain beyond corporeal pleasure, nothing is off-limits. That includes semen-streaked bathwater, menstrual blood, and grave fucking. With the movie hitting theaters, Fennell and Keoghan walked The Ringer through Saltburn’s three outré sex scenes, the ones meant to shock and titillate in near-equal measure.

    The Bathwater

    For the movie’s first kink to land, Fennell had to plant a few crucial seeds. Casting the right Felix was the first. Keoghan is well-known for playing shifty oddballs like Oliver (see: The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Green Knight, The Banshees of Inisherin), but Feilx is all about surface-level élan. Fennell needed an actor with a magnetism that leaps off the screen, someone so striking his mere presence can melt hearts—not unlike Bo Burnham in Promising Young Woman, her 2020 directorial debut. Felix, whom Fennell compares to Brideshead Revisited aristocrat Sebastian Flyte, doesn’t have a whole lot to offer beyond beauty, charm, and money.

    Fennell was pleased to discover that Elordi, the Euphoria and Priscilla heartthrob, shared her take on the character. “Felix does something shitty in every scene,” Fennell says. “He’s casually misogynistic, he’s fickle, he’s snobbish. I was always saying to Jacob, ‘He’s not a good kisser. He’s not good in bed. He’s never had to be.’ When Jacob came in to audition, he [played Felix as] kind of a dope. The thing that’s important is that so much of what makes him interesting is Oliver looking at him.”

    Oliver certainly can’t stop looking, first through a dormitory window where he watches Felix holding court amid a tribe of admirers. Felix’s poise screams privilege, which immediately beguiles Oliver. When he watches through another window at night while Felix has sex with a young woman, it’s blissfully unclear whether Oliver would rather swap places with Felix or the girl. (For whatever it’s worth, Fennell says Oliver is “absolutely bisexual.”) By the time he enters Saltburn’s imperial gates, he’s completely enthralled, only seldom betraying his underlying desperation. After growing acquainted with the family and their ostentatious house, which Fennell and cinematographer Linus Sandgren (La La Land) sought to shoot “like a fetish object,” he spies Felix masturbating during a bath.

    The camera, mirroring Oliver’s eyes, lingers on Felix’s long torso and aroused face. But it’s what follows this voyeurism that’s most erotic. When Felix leaves the bathroom, Oliver slinks into the tub and guzzles the last of the ejaculate water as it drains, as if he’s harvesting Felix’s fluids and social status at once.

    “The moment where he rubs his face along the plughole and wants to be in it, it’s sort of like, ‘I want to feel it, I want it to be part of me, I want it to change me,’” Keoghan says. “It’s a total obsession. He’s confused and lost. I don’t think he knows what he’s actually chasing.”

    Keoghan says he channeled some combination of fox and snake while descending into the tub, and the sound team blended his slurp with the effects of raw octopus sliding against oil. Oliver’s animalistic excess was one of the first images Fennell thought of while brainstorming Saltburn. “It’s the impulse,” she says. “The moment he does that, it imbues him with this kind of wicked power. It also just felt, to me, so profoundly true of vulnerability, desire, and class envy: All of us can only ever really hope to lick the bottom of a bathtub. So there’s something pathetic, funny, incredibly sexy, and incredibly real.”

    The Garden

    As the summer continues and his stature among the Cattons swells, Oliver starts to see everyone as a potential dupe. If he can embed himself in the fabric of Saltburn, maybe he’ll never have to leave. He gives Felix’s catty American cousin (Archie Madekwe) a hand job as a sort of vengeful come-on after the cousin embarrasses Oliver at a dinner party. He even flirts with Elspeth, attempting to appeal to her affinity for waifs. She sees him as a sapling to protect, so Oliver then directs his persuasions to Felix’s troubled sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver), seizing on her fragility. As a self-conscious idler with an eating disorder, she’s anxious to find esteem within a family where Felix is the star.

    Aware that she’s uncomfortable in her own body, Oliver uses lusting after Venetia as his ace card. Late one night, when he spots her stalking the garden, Oliver pounces. He treats her like a delicious talisman, fingering her on the fog-soaked lawn and smearing her menstrual blood across both of their faces. This act of demented flattery confirms Oliver’s mounting sense of power. Look at how far I’ll go for you.

    “So much of the dom-sub thing is about taking care of the person,” Fennell says. “We see him giving people what they want, and that’s just being a good acolyte. What turns him on … is having control of the situation.”

    Keoghan takes that sentiment a step further. “He’s abusing her, and he’s a master manipulator,” he says. “He wants to see how far he can take it: ‘I own you. You’re going to do what I say.’ He knows he wouldn’t get away with that with Felix.”

    The Grave

    Oliver’s quest to become an honorary Catton falls apart when Felix arranges to take him home to visit his parents on his birthday. Discovering that Oliver is nowhere near as Dickensian as he’s led on, Felix sours on his summer guest, sending Oliver into a spiral. If he can’t worm his way into Saltburn by feigning victimhood, he’ll go for the second-best option: killing the Cattons one by one and taking the whole thing for himself. Anything to avoid feeling once again like an outcast.

    After poisoning Felix’s champagne during a blowout party, Oliver enacts a final act of longing: He leaves the funeral to return to the cemetery, pulls down his pants, and fucks the dude’s gravesite. For Fennell, the gesture is more about grief than sex—a visceral version of Heathcliff digging up Catherine’s body at the end of Wuthering Heights. It’s his last chance to touch Felix. Oliver can never have him back, and although he tells himself he wasn’t in love, the intensity of his sobs suggests otherwise.

    Initially, Fennell imagined Keoghan rubbing his face in the grave and fondling the dirt, blending the bathtub scene and the garden scene into one showstopping desecration. But upon discussing it with the actor, they decided to be less coy. “I wanted to see what the next step was,” Keoghan says of Oliver’s farewell to Felix. “It wasn’t to get a wow factor. It was quite sad, because he’s lost at that moment.” Keoghan requested a closed set, meaning only essential people like Fennell and Sandgren were present. Shot from behind, he did the deed in one take, hoping to avoid the “sheer embarrassment” of needing to repeat it.

    With the Catton clan eventually gone, Oliver is alone at Saltburn, having convinced Elspeth to will the property to him. He can dance naked through the house’s halls all he wants, but Oliver’s victory is hollow. After the movie fades to black, he’ll be left without companionship or a clear purpose. What was it all for? “I’ve always believed that what he wanted was very simple, which was just to be there with [the Cattons],” Fennell says. “The framing narrative makes it seem like he was always in pursuit of this specific end goal, but what he’s most interested in, even if he doesn’t know it himself, is the game of power. That’s why he’s interested in Felix from the beginning. It’s not just that he’s beautiful. It’s that he’s in the middle … That’s what Oliver’s preoccupation is: with being special. And aren’t we all preoccupied with being special?”

    Matthew Jacobs is an Austin-based entertainment journalist who covers film and television. His work can be found at Vulture, Vanity Fair, The Hollywood Reporter, HuffPost, and beyond. Follow him on X @majacobs.

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  • A Backyard Wedding Complete With ShuShu/Tong, Antique Plates, and DIY Details

    A Backyard Wedding Complete With ShuShu/Tong, Antique Plates, and DIY Details

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    Welcome to Who What Wear Weddings, the destination for style-minded weddings. Expect insightful tips straight from the newlyweds, shoppable elements, and plenty of must-save imagery as we share the nuptials of our favorite fashion people getting married. For upcoming features, share your submissions here.

    “As soon as I saw Brad, I was in love,” shares Hannah Anderson as she reminisces on the beginning of her relationship with her now husband, Bradley Mackeson. A group road trip to Joshua Tree prompted the couple’s initial meeting in addition to a little scheming from mutual friends and a shared career in music. “I lived in Texas at the time,” recalls Anderson. “Our mutual friend Tyler kept telling me about Brad and all the cool work that Brad was doing. We’re all musicians, so that was our common thread. Tyler, Brad, a few friends, and I took a road trip to Joshua Tree. Brad only had one seat in his truck, so of course, I jumped into the seat as fast as I could. On the three-hour road trip, there was never a moment of awkward silence. We flowed.” After a couple of months of visits between Texas and L.A., moving in together, and a proposal, the rest is history. 

    Mackeson proposed six years later near a natural spring on Makalawena Beach on the Big Island of Hawaii. “It was an impromptu proposal with some cute little rings I had found at a vintage shop in Hilo a few days earlier,” shares Mackeson. “I kept the rings on my person knowing a time would present itself, which it did!” Although the couple had been together for quite some time, Mackeson recalls that the two of them hadn’t extensively discussed the idea of getting engaged, “so there was some real suspense there.” Anderson adds, “I think we both went into shock, and after I said yes, we just stood there holding hands and shaking.”

    The two decided to get married in Mackeson’s parents’ backyard in Troutdale, Oregon—a property that backs up to the gorgeous river where the ceremony was held. The day was filled with the true personality of the couple, hands-on support from their community, and tons of creative details that really set this wedding apart. Scroll down to read more about the day from the perspective of both the bride and groom, including the antique plates, outfit details, and more.

    “The night before, we had an intimate rehearsal dinner with just immediate family and whoever was in the ceremony.”  

    “We did a walk-through of the ceremony, and then Brad’s parents provided dinner for us.” 

    “I wore a Hill House dress, and my shoes were from Hereu. I wanted to keep it really simple and easy! [My friend] Anica gifted me the bow at my bridal shower, so I thought that would be fun to wear for the rehearsal. [She] also helped me coordinate the day of the wedding [and] threw a beautiful bridal shower for me the week prior to the wedding for the L.A. girls. It was perfect! One of her best friends, Alana Jones-Mann, made a vintage-style wedding cake that said ‘Mrs. Mackeson’ on it. I wept when I saw it.”

    WWW Weddings tip: “Go with the flow!”



    “I got ready with a few of my girlfriends. We didn’t have a bridal party or groomsmen, but I at least wanted the experience of getting ready with my girls! My friends Caileigh, Carly, Emma, and Anica all helped me prep tablescapes and décor and then stayed to get ready with me. It was so much fun!” 

    “I wore a vintage yellow slip dress that I thrifted. It was so chic and delicate! Unplanned, a few of the other girls wore vintage slips too! It was meant to be.”

    “I wanted the beauty to feel kind of ’60s mod but didn’t want to feel like I was in a costume. I did my own makeup and hair and felt really good. I felt the most me I have ever felt.” 

    WWW Weddings tip: “There is a lot of pressure when it comes to planning your wedding. Choose your battles! Find things that you’re willing to be more relaxed with, and find the things that are the most important to you and stick with them. For me, that was my dress and my guest list!”

    “Being that the wedding was going to be outside, I wanted something shorter. I have been obsessed with ShuShu/Tong for a while and started scouring the internet for a white piece from them and ended up finding this piece on Ssense. As soon as I saw it, I knew it was the one.”

    “Since the dress was cropped, I almost went with an extra-long veil until I saw this cropped veil on Etsy and loved it.” 

    “My outfit came together so perfectly—it was meant to be. I had tried on more traditional gowns, but they didn’t feel like me.”

    “The shoes I got online at Pêche. The floral, the jacquard—what more could you need? I paired the shoe with a sheer white knee-high sock. I made my earrings! My pearl mini purse is vintage. I thrifted it in Palm Beach the week after my Miami bachelorette trip this summer.”

    “How we dress and our fashion choices are a form of nonverbal communication to the exterior world,” says Mackeson as he shares the details of his look. “It’s a way we can subtly communicate our values to others. As an artist and person, I’m especially inspired by the people and art of the mid-’60s the early ’70s. Peace, love, freedom, and open-mindedness. I also love the sophistication and clean lines of late ’50s and ’60s mod.”

    “Another defining aspect of my person is a resilient ‘never say die’ independent attitude and gusto, so I knew I wanted to get a little Western grit in the mix. I’m all about peace and love, but I still want people to take me seriously. You know what I mean? A distinguished gentleman who likes his LSD and isn’t afraid to rough it when he has to.

    “With that in mind, I went to work browsing used vintage suits on Etsy and eBay. I knew I wanted something a little big for me so I could tailor it to my needs. After much searching, I ran across an ivory ’90s zoot suit that had a mod vibe to it! After taking a considerable amount of length off the jacket (if you’ve seen a zoot suit, you know what I’m talking about), I had the tailor add a subtle flare to the pants. Not enough to be the focal, but enough to let you know. I also knew this would pair well with my boots and link the Western aspects of the look.”

    “My favorite part of the look, other than the snakeskin boots, is the vintage Western ribbon tie. I found both the ribbon tie and boots on Etsy. In 2020, my wife and I founded our record label SlickPony Records as a place to release our music. The tie has a hand-stitched mirrored image of two horses. For me, this represents the duality of our feminine and masculine energy coming together and joining in union.” 



    “Our venue was Brad’s parents’ backyard. They live on a river, and it felt like the perfect setting.” 

    “Brad’s parents, Dean and Shireen, did a lot of work to prepare the property. Shireen planted this wonderland garden that bloomed perfectly for the wedding.”

    “We had gone between doing a Joshua Tree wedding (where we first connected) to a Hawaii wedding (where we got engaged) and ended up landing on the river.”

    Hannah and Brad at the venue.

    “Because we didn’t use a venue, we had to source everything from tables to kitchen gear for our chef to tables and chairs. Brad’s mom sourced all of our vintage dishware from estate sales, Facebook Marketplace, and thrift shops.”

    WWW Weddings tip: “I didn’t hire a planner for my wedding and think it would’ve actually been amazing to have a third-party mediator for details, seating, etc. Tensions may get high during planning, so whatever you can do to alleviate those tensions I highly recommend.”

    WWW Weddings tip (from the groom): “Weddings can be very overwhelming—not only for you but also your parents and family. At some points, it may not even feel worth it. My advice to you is that it is worth it. Once the ceremony starts, it’s all love. Stay present and enjoy the beautiful moment with your loved ones.”

    “Although we both grew up in religious families, we aren’t religious in any way now. We have done things quite differently from our families, and in planning the wedding, my friend Emma sent me this quote from Bert Hellinger called ‘The Black Sheep.’ When I read it, I wept. Brad and I both agreed this would be the theme of our wedding, which is why we put the black sheep illustration on the invitation.

    “‘The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system. They repair, pick up, and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil. Its madness is water that nourishes. Its stubbornness is new air. Its passion is fire that reignites the light of the heart of the ancestors.’”

    “Jonpaul, who officiated, also wanted to photograph throughout the night. He asked if he could shoot photos during the ceremony. It was so sweet and playful.”

    The couple celebrating post-ceremony. 

    “My nephews were the ring bearers, and I had three flower girls. The boys wore matching baby-blue plaid vests and trousers with little patent black-and-white schoolboy oxford shoes. The girls wore white puffy dresses with knee-high navy socks that I embroidered baby-blue flowers on.”

    The bride’s and groom’s families. 

    “The overall vision was an end-of-summer garden party. I knew the garden and outdoor scenery would really make the night, so apart from that, I didn’t want to have too much additional décor.” 

    “Everyone got an embroidered napkin for dinner. This was the take-home keepsake from the evening. I spent weeks and weeks embroidering these! Thankfully, a friend let me borrow her embroidery machine so I didn’t have to do each one by hand.”

    “I made paper flowers and paper-mache vases to put throughout the dinner tables. I realized at the last minute that I didn’t buy sign holders for the table numbers, so we propped up the numbers with river rocks. It ended up being a nice natural touch.”

    “I hand-painted the entry sign and the seating chart with watercolor.”

    “I also made this paper-mache angel that I hung at the entrance. He was the guardian angel of the night.”

    WWW Weddings tip: “Remember why you’re doing this when it gets stressful! There’s a lot to plan, so many details, so many things to juggle. Just remember that this is about you and your partner and about sharing the love you have for each other with the most important people in your life. So special!” 

    “For us, this whole wedding felt like a time and opportunity to showcase everything we are about—love, creativity, and community.”

    “For our first dance, we danced to ‘Out the Blue’ by John Lennon. Our dog, Rufio, danced with us the entire time!”

    “[Something] that was really important for us was a family-style meal. Our friend Natalia Pereira of Woodspoon came to cook for us. We created a makeshift kitchen in Brad’s dad’s barn for her. My friends, Julie and Lori, and a couple of Natalia’s friends all rallied to make it possible for us. We had salmon, lamb, seasonal vegetables, Natalia’s signature potato salad, rice and beans with crispy pork, Asian pear salad, yucca fries, and more. It was phenomenal.”

    “For our cake, we had a GF chocolate cake with a whipped coconut cream icing and loaded with seasonal, local fruits. I made the cake! We got all of the produce from Burns Farm in Troutdale. They grow some produce and work with local farmers to supply other meat and produce. It’s the cutest place ever.”

    “The main vision I had for the reception was the dance party of the century, and I think we pulled that off.”

    Guests dancing at the reception. 

    “I kept the same look on through the night—I just removed my veil and added my little grill. I had it custom-made for a video earlier this year and always love wearing it for parties! Brad’s mom had given me this antique floral crown that I had revamped and added gingham bows to, but I forgot to put it on!”

    “Me and a few of the ladies ended the night with an icy river dip.”

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    Lauren Eggertsen

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  • Could This Be the Beginning of NeNe’s Triumphant Return?! Plus, ‘Miami,’ ‘Potomac,’ and ‘Southern Charm.’

    Could This Be the Beginning of NeNe’s Triumphant Return?! Plus, ‘Miami,’ ‘Potomac,’ and ‘Southern Charm.’

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    Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images

    Chelsea and Zack discuss Larsa’s loose lips and dive into the snooze fest of ‘The Real Housewives of Potomac’ Season 8, Episode 3

    Chelsea and Zack kick off today’s Morally Corrupt with a discussion of the Bravo news of the week and a dissection of potential clues that may hint at the return of a fan favorite (1:47). Then, Chelsea and Zack turn to The Real Housewives of Miami Season 6, Episode 3 and Larsa’s loose lips (10:23) before diving into the snooze fest of The Real Housewives of Potomac Season 8, Episode 3 (28:54). Finally, Chelsea and Zack end the pod with a chat about Southern Charm Season 9, Episode 10 (38:47).

    Host: Chelsea Stark-Jones
    Guest: Zack Peter
    Producer: Devon Manze
    Theme Song: Devon Renaldo

    Subscribe: Spotify

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    Chelsea Stark-Jones

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  • ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’ With Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Amanda Dobbins

    ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’ With Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Amanda Dobbins

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    After five to six years of podcasting, The Ringer’s Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Amanda Dobbins head to podcast therapy to reignite their stagnating love of podcasts. To keep the spark alive in “Wait, This Movie Made HOW Much Money?” Month, they rewatch the 2005 action-comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith, starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

    Producer: Craig Horlbeck

    Subscribe: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / Stitcher / RSS

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    Bill Simmons

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  • PolitiFact – Banned books in Florida schools: How accurate is a list Pink shared?

    PolitiFact – Banned books in Florida schools: How accurate is a list Pink shared?

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    The singer Pink is calling attention to book bans and taking aim at Florida.

    Pink announced she planned to give away 2,000 books during her mid-November Sunshine State performances in response to book challenges.

    “The following are some titles of books that have been banned from schools in Florida…. Lmk which book is pornography….” Pink wrote in a Nov. 13 X post. “To Kill A Mockingbird, The Hate (U) Give, Forrest Gump, A Catcher In The Rye, The Hill We Climb, Girls Who Code, Atlas Shrugged, 1984, The Kite Runner, The Bluest Eye, A Wrinkle In Time, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Fault In Our Stars, etc etc.”

    The post was tagged with a community note that included a USA Today fact-check about a different list of banned books. Pink’s X post also drew ire from some conservatives.

    Pink announced Nov. 13 she was partnering with PEN America, a group that opposes and tracks book bans, to distribute copies of four banned books during her Nov. 14 and Nov. 15 shows in Miami and Sunrise.

    Different organizations define “bans” differently, but we zeroed in on Pink’s 13-title list to determine how accessible these books really are in Florida’s public schools. We found that although many of the books Pink listed had been temporarily or permanently removed or restricted from shelves in some Florida schools, using PEN America’s most liberal definition of a “ban,” this happened in 17 school districts out of 67 in the state.

    The state Department of Education and Collier County, meanwhile, reported removals in four districts. Collier County, which removed 313 books, more than any district in the state, released its list in November after the state’s September report.

    None of the books were banned statewide.

    After receiving feedback to her post, Pink wrote more about her list on X, clarifying that some of the books were banned in one or more Florida school districts.

    What’s happening in Florida?

    Florida lawmakers in 2022 passed H.B. 1467, which made it easier for parents to find out about and object to books in public schools. Another law, H.B. 1069, took effect July 1 and clarified how school districts should respond to book objections and the steps they should take when removing texts from classrooms and library shelves. 

    A September Florida Department of Education report shows 20 of Florida’s 67 school districts and the statewide public Florida Virtual School removed 298 books in the 2022-23 school year. Some of those books were banned in multiple districts. Overall, school district officials received 1,218 objections about books.

    The American Library Association defines a “ban” as the removal of a book based on a person or group’s objection. It distinguishes a ban from a “challenge,” which it categorizes as any push to remove or restrict materials. 

    PEN America has a broader definition of what constitutes a “ban.” The organization records a book ban whenever access to a previously available book is removed or restricted — temporarily or permanently — because of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by lawmakers or other governmental officials. Books that are removed temporarily may not make it back to shelves for months. That’s a ban, PEN America said. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in May said no books had been banned in Florida, a statement we rated False.

    PEN America said 40% of school book bans nationwide happened in Florida school districts in the 2022-23 school year. Many of the objections were for books containing sexual or LGBTQ+ content and came from a small group of parents, some affiliated with conservative groups, such as Moms for Liberty, a Tampa Bay Times analysis found.

    Suzanne Trimel, a PEN America spokesperson, said “there are 814 unique book titles that have been banned in Florida schools since 2021.”

    Pink, who partnered with PEN, didn’t respond to a request for comment through her record label.

    Florida school reports reflect some removals

    The state’s report shows four books on Pink’s list were removed from some Florida school districts in the 2022-23 school year. After the state report was published, Collier County in November updated its website to show 313 books were removed from all grade levels to comply with state law. Collier’s count included three other titles that appear on Pink’s list. The district said some books may be reinstated after an additional review.

    None of the books were banned statewide. Here are the books from Pink’s list that were removed, according to the state and Collier County:

    • “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini, which described sexual violence involving minors, was removed in Clay, Martin and Collier counties.

    • “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, which also described sexual violence involving children, were removed in Clay and Martin counties. 

    • “The Hate U Give,” a young adult novel by Angie Thomas about racial profiling and a teenager coming of age, was removed in Martin and Collier counties.

    • “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” was removed in Indian River County schools. The text version of Frank’s book was not banned. The graphic illustrated adaptation contains references to Frank’s sexuality and description of her genitals, which prompted challenges. Both of the references are taken from the published text versions of her diary.

    • “Forrest Gump,” Winston Groom’s novel of a mentally challenged man that became a hit 1994 movie starring Tom Hanks, was removed in Collier County because of an explicit sex scene and descriptions of nudity.

    • “Atlas Shrugged,” Ayn Rand’s novel about individualism, was removed in Collier County.

    • “Many Waters,” the fourth novel in Madeleine L’Engle’s quintet that began with “A Wrinkle in Time,” was removed in Collier County.

    Jennifer DeShazo, a Martin County School District spokesperson, confirmed the three books the state report identified as removed in that district are not in circulation there. She said students may bring personal copies to school.

    None of the six other books that Pink cited was on the state or Collier County’s list of removals.

    PEN America’s definition of ‘ban’ puts the number of removed books higher

    PEN America, meanwhile, puts the total number of Florida school districts where those titles were removed or restricted at 17. By its count, “The Kite Runner” was removed from schools in 10 districts; “Bluest Eye,” 12; “The Hate U Give,” 11; and “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation,” four. 

    But by PEN America’s standards of what constitutes a “ban,” three other titles qualify, based on its index of school book bans and a press release about Collier County’s removals:

    • “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee’s 1960 novel that contains racial slurs, was temporarily pulled from Palm Beach County schools for review in July 2022. The book was returned to classrooms with “instructional statements” on how to use the book in the classroom, PEN said.

    • “The Hill We Climb,” Amanda Gorman’s poem that was read at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, was banned in Miami-Dade County, PEN America said. PolitiFact reported in May that the book, which had been available to all students, was moved to eighth grade shelves at one school’s library and wasn’t banned countywide. 

    • “The Fault in Our Stars,” John Green’s young adult novel about a romance between two cancer-stricken teenagers, was pulled pending an investigation in Clay County. 

    A Florida Department of Education spokesperson did not respond to questions about whether the other books Pink listed had been temporarily removed.

    “We’re used to ill-informed attacks from California’s liberal elites, and sadly, this is another example,” said Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr., in a statement the spokesperson provided to PolitiFact. He said “several of the books on her list are actually required reading in Florida.” 

    Three books Pink cited — “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “1984” and Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl” — are listed in the department’s guide to Florida’s English Language Arts educational standards as examples of books “by authors whose works comprise a rich literary tradition, a tradition with which all students should become familiar.”

    We did not find “A Catcher in the Rye,” “1984” or “Girls Who Code” on lists from the state, Collier County or PEN America. 

    Our ruling

    Pink claimed in an X post that 13 books “have been banned from schools in Florida.”

    Different groups define book bans differently, and no single book she cited was banned statewide. We don’t see any records of Florida schools removing three of the titles Pink listed.

    Our review found that seven of the books have been removed from at least one Florida school district’s shelves, according to state and Collier County reports. Using PEN America’s broader definition of a book ban, which includes temporary holds, three more books could be said to have been banned. That means seven to 10 of the 13 books Pink cited could be considered banned.

    But Pink’s post could give the impression that these books were fully banned from all Florida schools. In reality, these books were removed from schools in four of the state’s 67 districts by the state’s count, 17 districts by PEN’s count. Pink later clarified that some of the books were banned in one or more Florida school districts.

    The original statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate Pink’s claim Mostly False.

    PolitiFact Staff Writers Amy Sherman and Samantha Putterman contributed to this report.

    RELATED: Ron DeSantis said that not ‘a single book’ was banned in Florida. Districts have removed dozens. 

    RELATED: Amanda Gorman poem moved to middle school shelves in one library, not banned in Miami-Dade County 

    RELATED: Texas teacher fired for assigning illustrated adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary, not the diary itself 

    RELATED: Viral list of ‘banned’ books in Florida is satire 

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  • ‘Scott Pilgrim Takes Off’ Instant Reactions

    ‘Scott Pilgrim Takes Off’ Instant Reactions

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    Jess, Jomi, and Steve are back to conquer the ghosts of their failed relationships and celebrate the latest in Scott Pilgrim lore, the Netflix animated series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. Along the way, the Mint Edition discuss their first time watching Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, how the animated show differs from its predecessors, and their favorite characters of the series.

    Hosts: Jessica Clemons, Jomi Adeniran, and Steve Ahlman
    Producer: Jonathan Kermah
    Additional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopal

    Subscribe: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

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    Jessica Clemons

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  • Jack Barlow Spotted in Irvine! Plus ‘Salt Lake City,’ ‘Beverly Hills,’ and ‘Potomac.’

    Jack Barlow Spotted in Irvine! Plus ‘Salt Lake City,’ ‘Beverly Hills,’ and ‘Potomac.’

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    Rachel Lindsay and Jodi Walker begin today’s Morally Corrupt with a breakdown of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City Season 4, Episode 10 (00:53), before recapping The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Season 13, Episode 4 (33:07). Then Callie Curry joins to chat about The Real Housewives of Potomac Season 8, Episode 2 (56:58).

    Host: Rachel Lindsay
    Guests: Jodi Walker and Callie Curry
    Producers: Devon Manze
    Theme Song: Devon Renaldo

    Subscribe: Spotify

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    Rachel Lindsay

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  • ‘The Curse’ Episode 2 Recap

    ‘The Curse’ Episode 2 Recap

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    Sean is joined by Joanna Robinson to break down the second episode of The Curse. They discuss the surprisingly sparse use of comedy, the voyeuristic filmmaking style, and how the slowed pacing of the series heightens the discomfort in each scene. Along the way, they unpack how the show reveals Asher and Whitney’s ulterior motives as well as their strange relationship dynamic. Later, they react to Benny Safdie’s performance and his character’s arc so far.

    Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Joanna Robinson
    Producer: Kai Grady

    Subscribe: Spotify

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    Sean Fennessey

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  • ‘Loki’ Season 2 and UWCL Roundup!

    ‘Loki’ Season 2 and UWCL Roundup!

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    Ian is joined by Musa Okwonga and Ryan Hunn to chat about the return of the Women’s Champions League, which saw great wins for Ajax, Lyon and Barcelona and two very controversial decisions during Real Madrid’s 2-2 draw with Chelsea (04:59). Then, following last week’s Loki Season 2 finale, they dive into a long discussion about one of Ian’s favourite TV shows (12:32), the highs, the lows, the lessons and much more!

    Host: Ian Wright
    Guests: Musa Okwonga and Ryan Hunn
    Producers: Ryan Hunn, Roscoe Bowman and Jonathan Fisher

    Subscribe: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / Stitcher / RSS

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    Ian Wright

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  • Will the Real ‘Scott Pilgrim’ Please Stand Up?

    Will the Real ‘Scott Pilgrim’ Please Stand Up?

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    Were we to outline the millennial canon—a collection of works that illuminate the generation’s character—then surely Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim would rank rather prominently. Scott Pilgrim is the story of a dweeby Canadian bassist who meet-cutes his mysterious American dream girl, Ramona Flowers, only to discover that in order to date Ramona, he must first defeat her “seven evil exes” in a series of boss fights across the mean streets and concert halls of Toronto.

    These graphic novels, serialized in six volumes, released from 2004 through 2010, were a new sort of coming-of-age saga—a cute but also quite moody comic about love and video games and rock music. While O’Malley was still writing Scott Pilgrim, Edgar Wright directed a largely faithful live-action film adaptation, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, starring Michael Cera and Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Scott and Ramona, respectively, alongside a weirdly stacked cast of once and future stars: Chris Evans, Aubrey Plaza, Anna Kendrick, Brie Larson, Kieran Culkin. Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World was a box office flop in its opening weekend but then a weirdly resilient cultural object in the following decade, spawning so many GIFs on Peak Tumblr as the movie matured into a nerdy cult classic. Now, the acclaimed anime studio Science Saru, in conjunction with Netflix, has reimagined the comic as an eight-episode series, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. O’Malley wrote this new series with BenDavid Grabinski, and he also made a point to recruit all of the actors from Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World for the voice cast of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off; Edgar Wright also returns as an executive producer.

    But Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, rather unlike Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, is a smorgasbord of creative liberties. O’Malley was still writing the comic while Wright’s live-action adaptation was in postproduction, and he’s recently talked about how the performances in Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World gave him a new perspective and new ideas for several characters—possibilities he now gets to pursue in the anime.

    Scott Pilgrim Takes Off was billed as an adaptation but turns out to be a meta sort-of sequel or reboot. This is the story of Scott Pilgrim in fact losing that first fight with Ramona’s first boyfriend, Matthew Patel, at Club Rockit. In this version, Scott seemingly dies in battle before Ramona discovers that Scott hasn’t been killed, but rather kidnapped. Now, Ramona must confront her own exes and solve the mystery of Scott’s disappearance.

    Accordingly, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off features a lot less Scott and a lot more Ramona, especially, but also everyone else in revised capacities. The League of Ramona’s Evil Exes is in disarray, as early on Matthew leads a coup against the group’s founder and the final boss of the original series, Gideon Graves. The other exes, absent any reason or opportunity to battle Scott, instead spend much of the series catching up with Ramona. Scott’s band, Sex Bob-Omb, is suddenly without a bassist, until drummer Kim Pine recruits Scott’s first girlfriend and Sex Bob-Omb’s no. 1 fan, Knives Chau. (Knives is surely the most improved characterization in Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, compared to her role in Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, as Ellen Wong really leans into the new format and voices the character with yandere gusto.) As a reboot, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off gets to preserve these characters in adolescence but otherwise give them new glimpses and alternative arcs. The original premise is certainly more compelling for Scott’s intense and singular determination—beat the exes, win the girl—but Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is a refreshingly loose and playful take on these character dynamics.

    The very fact of Scott Pilgrim enjoying a 2020s revival isn’t so surprising, given the unkillable nature of IP these days. And the revival coming in the form of a somewhat subversive reboot also isn’t so surprising, given the meta humor of the original comic. But why anime? And why would O’Malley and Grabinski go through the trouble of reuniting the actors from the live-action adaptation for the voice cast? The answer, in both cases, is nostalgia. Scott Pilgrim and O’Malley’s other works are chock-full of homages to video games, anime, and manga; in fact, Scott Pilgrim is in large part distinguished in balancing its more novelistic aspects with good ol’ fashioned superhero action.

    Anime, if anything, ends up feeling like an inevitable format for Scott Pilgrim, even if the production is something of a fluke: this sort of crossover is pretty rare, and if Netflix didn’t have this particular relationship with Science Saru, then I can’t imagine this particular anime would’ve been made some other way. Which is doubly fortunate, really, as these days I can’t imagine many other studios tackling Scott Pilgrim as capably as Science Saru, a studio renowned for its saucy and surreal depictions of young adulthood.

    Scott Pilgrim is in many ways a nostalgic tour of its author’s formative influences, e.g., Scott wears an Astro Boy tee, and he’s constantly talking about Sonic the Hedgehog. This explains the conspicuous effort to hire the old cast for the new series. Wright’s cast may not have been a part of O’Malley’s original vision for Scott Pilgrim, but the cast has, with the passage of time, added a new layer of nostalgia—not for Wright’s live-action adaptation per se, but for the whole cultural peak of Scott Pilgrim in 2010. O’Malley says he was prepared to produce a version of this anime with an original voice cast, in the event that he couldn’t get each and every one of the notable actors from Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World to return for Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. I’m sure his backup plan would’ve worked out well enough, but the returning cast really does bolster the series and create the illusion that not much has changed since the release of O’Malley’s final volume and Wright’s adaptation of the comic.

    As I was watching an advance screener of the anime, I encountered some online speculation that its release might mark the beginning of a whole new era of Scott Pilgrim content from O’Malley—a Scott Pilgrim Cinematic Universe, even. It was an interesting thought, but also one that, if anything, underscored the limitations of these characters. Scott Pilgrim is such a distinctly adolescent saga, and it’s hard to imagine Scott and Ramona maturing into their 20s, out of their bombastic courtship and into a real relationship or, alternatively, to imagine Scott moving on from Ramona Flowers and wooing some other girl in some later phase of his life. Scott Pilgrim is these characters in this particular time in their lives.

    Indeed, in Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, Scott and Ramona both confront much older versions of themselves. Older Scott is still rocking out in a ridiculous band, Older Ramona is still turning her hair purple and pink, but they’re both clearly the worse for wear, and they’re both still reeling from the later, harder work of trying—and for a period, failing—to build a life together. But O’Malley will only go so far in subverting the canonical love story of Scott Pilgrim and Ramona Flowers. It all ends with a kiss, and while O’Malley’s comic and Wright’s movie are both invaluable artifacts of the Tumblr Era, the anime makes for a fantastic epilogue.

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    Justin Charity

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  • ‘House of Villains’ Episode 6 With Corinne

    ‘House of Villains’ Episode 6 With Corinne

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    Corinne Olympios takes over the Death, Taxes, and Bananas podcast and turns the tables on Johnny. They talk all about what made Corinne a villain on The Bachelor, what it was like filming together on House of Villains, and then they address the elephant in the room: Are they dating?

    Host: Corinne Olympios
    Guest: Johnny Bananas
    Producer: Sasha Ashall
    Engineer: Christian Porello

    Subscribe: Spotify

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    Johnny Bananas

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  • The Death of Bellator, Tom Aspinall’s P4P Rankings Debut, and Why Jon Jones Vs. Francis Ngannou Might Still Happen!

    The Death of Bellator, Tom Aspinall’s P4P Rankings Debut, and Why Jon Jones Vs. Francis Ngannou Might Still Happen!

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    Still buzzing from last weekend’s UFC 295, Ariel, Chuck, and Petesy have a lot to get into on today’s show. First, the guys discuss this weekend’s final Bellator card and why the energy (or lack thereof) surrounding Bellator 301 is symbolic of the promotion’s entire existence. Then, the guys break down their latest pound-for-pound rankings before taking Discord questions about Alex Pereira’s legendary run, Ian Garry’s beef with Team Renegade, how the Saudis could convince Dana White to make the fight of the century, and more. Plus, a classic game of Buy or Sell.

    To enter into our lovely Discord community, click this link.

    TOPICS:

    • Intro (00:00)
    • The end of Bellator (03:07)
    • Why Bellator doesn’t invoke the same nostalgia Strikeforce does (08:49)
    • Saturday’s Paul Craig vs. Brendan Allen card at The Apex (21:02)
    • Ariel’s conundrum with getting Tom Aspinall into his November pound-for-pound rankings (24:19)
    • UFC fighters we feel most emotionally connected to (37:38)
    • How the Saudis could get Dana White to make Jon Jones vs. Francis Ngannou (57:30)
    • Buy or Sell (01:05:09)

    Hosts: Ariel Helwani, Petesy Carroll, and Chuck Mindenhall
    Producer: Troy Farkas

    Subscribe: Spotify

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    Ariel Helwani

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  • The Rewatchables: ‘An Officer and a Gentleman’ | Gere’s Best Film?

    The Rewatchables: ‘An Officer and a Gentleman’ | Gere’s Best Film?

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    The Ringer’s Bill Simmons is joined by Chris Ryan and Sean Fennessey to rewatch the 1982 romantic drama An Officer and a Gentleman, starring Richard Gere, Debra Winger, and Louis Gossett Jr.

    Subscribe: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / Stitcher / RSS

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    Bill Simmons

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  • 15 Ways To Bring Hygge to Your Classroom This Winter

    15 Ways To Bring Hygge to Your Classroom This Winter

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    Have you ever nestled deep into your softest blanket while cradling a steaming mug of something delicious and wondered, “What is this warm and fuzzy feeling that I’m having right now?”

    Well, friends, that feeling has a name. It’s hygge!

    Hygge is a Danish word (pronounced “hoo-ga”) that doesn’t have a direct translation in English, but think “cozy vibes,” “warm atmosphere,” and “feeling content.” 

    Beyond the cozy aesthetics of soft blankets, ample cushions, and candlelight, hygge is really about creating an environment that nurtures well-being, connection, and warmth. With everything going on in the world, I think we could all use a dose of that right now.

    So let’s snuggle into this delightful Danish concept and uncover simple ways to bring it into your classroom.

    15 Ways To Bring Hygge to Your Classroom

    Embracing the spirit of hygge is all about simplicity, warmth, and connection. Here are some activities and low-cost ways to infuse that cozy sense of hygge into a school setting.

    1. Host a cozy sock and slipper day.

    @LifeWithaTint via Etsy

    Encourage everyone to wear their warmest, quirkiest socks and slippers. It’s a fun, lighthearted way to add a touch of comfort to the school day. A cozy-sock exchange for teachers is also a fun community-building activity.

    Buy it: Fuzzy heart socks at Etsy

    2. Stream soft music and nature scenes.

    Source: @jwadsworth8 via YouTube

    Play soft music in the background when students are working independently or reading. Classical music or instrumental winter songs can set a cozy mood. My students love December by George Winston.

    We adore @SoothingRelaxation, which features music composed by Peder B. Helland. His videos mix beautiful nature scenes with relaxing music. Try turning the lights down after recess and playing Raining Woods. It doesn’t matter how squirrelly they were when they came in, within a few minutes your class will transform into a blissful temple of learning.

    3. Meditate.

    Amazon

    Begin or end the day with a few minutes of mindfulness or meditation. This can be done through an app or in person through a teacher-read script or book. Guided sessions focusing on gratitude can be especially fitting for the holiday season.

    Buy it: Whoosh! book at Amazon

    4. Decorate with lights.

    Africa Studio via Shutterstock

    Replace bright fluorescent bulbs with softer, warmer ones. If replacing isn’t an option, consider lampshades or draping light cloths over fixtures to diffuse the light. Better yet, bring in fairy lights or a salt lamp. Try the viral trend of hanging floating candles from the ceiling. Some sets even come with a magic wand to turn them on and off. Check out TikTok’s @everydayadventurers for a quick tutorial on how to make your own for a fraction of the cost.

    Buy it: Himalayan rock lamp at Amazon

    5. Go on a nature walk.

    Steffy McCourt

    Embrace the winter beauty by taking students on short nature walks around the school grounds. Create a display area for collected and curated natural items.

    6. Bring nature inside.

    Pressmaster via Shutterstock

    Together with your students, gather pine cones, twigs, or fallen branches. Arrange them in vases or as table centerpieces in the classroom library or entryway. They add a touch of nature and can be found for free!

    7. Make a paper quilt.

    Steffy McCourt

    Create a paper “quilt” on a wall. Each class member designs a “square” with their idea of coziness. Together, it represents the warmth of the classroom community.

    8. Play board games.

    SeventyFour via Shutterstock

    Set up a space where students can play board games or work on puzzles. Encourage teamwork and shared problem-solving. My students’ current favorites are What Do You Meme: Family Edition and Herd Mentality.

    9. Serve up some hot chocolate.

    Irina Wilhauk via Shutterstock

    Using donated or pooled resources, set up a simple hot chocolate station with a Crock Pot of warm cocoa. Bring in mugs from home to make it feel personal. This would make the perfect treat after a nature walk.

    10. Cook or bake something together.

    Steffy McCourt

    If facilities allow, bake a simple recipe together or make DIY no-bake treats. My students had a blast making and tasting bread pudding while we were reading A Christmas Carol. Sharing in the creation and enjoyment of food is a quintessential hygge activity. Bring in families for a pizza-and-movie night or a cookie-decorating party.

    11. Create a comfort station.

    Jne Valokuvaus via Shutterstock

    Set up a comfort station with coloring books, colored pencils, weighted blankets, electric candles, and soft cushions in a corner of the classroom for students to relax and recharge.

    12. Make snowflakes or knit a scarf.

    @zhukovvvlad via Shutterstock

    Provide materials (scrap paper, old magazines, yarn) for students to craft together. Making friendship bracelets, paper snowflakes, or simple knitting projects can be therapeutic and community-building.

    13. Write notes by hand.

    @itsme_devid via Shutterstock

    Set aside a time and space for students to write notes of appreciation or encouragement to classmates, staff, and family.

    14. Share stories.

    Steffy McCourt

    Designate a time each day or week for shared storytelling. Whether it’s reading aloud from a beloved book or students sharing their own tales, gathering around a story fosters connection.

    15. Grow a compliment chain.

    @udra11 via Shutterstock

    Start a paper chain where each link contains a compliment or word of gratitude. Watch as the chain grows throughout the winter.

    While trends come and go, we’re crossing our fingers (and toes) that hygge is here to stay. Who can argue against having a little more kindness and coziness in our classrooms and our lives?

    For more articles like this, be sure to subscribe to our newsletters.

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    Steffy McCourt

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  • Friendsgiving

    Friendsgiving

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    Erika and Steven explore their own relationship with the relatively new concept of Friendsgiving, how it’s portrayed in pop culture, and the friendship dynamics involved.

    If you want to tell us about your Friendsgiving traditions, email us at whataboutyourfriendspod@gmail.com.

    Hosts: Erika Ramirez and Steven Othello
    Producer: Sasha Ashall
    Theme Music: Devon Renaldo

    Subscribe: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / Stitcher

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    Erika Ramirez

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