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In all of time and space, the Doctor has never met the Beatles. Until now. Doctor Who took the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) to EMI Recording Studios to see the Beatles record their first album but Maestro (Jinx Monsoon) has other plans for the band.
Maestro, who longs for a world without music, sets the seeds in the 20s to ruin what music means to everyone and so when the Doctor and Ruby get to EMI Recording Studios, the Beatles are singing songs that are decidedly not the ones we know from Please Please Me. It then becomes a quest to find the being who took music away from the world and stop them before the song of nuclear winter is all that exists.
Throughout the episode, the Doctor and Ruby are trying to push back against Maestro’s determination to take music from humanity but Ruby is the only one left with a “song in her heart” and it forces Maestro to focus on Ruby and the Doctor first and foremost. But they forget that the Beatles are there and, because Ruby and the Doctor reminded the fab four what music does really mean to them, the Beatles step up when we need them most.
There are moments in “The Devil’s Chord” that reminded us, as the audience, how important the Beatles are to people. Which is, honestly, what the movie Yesterday thought it was doing but got so convoluted that it became a mess instead. And so to see Doctor Who take on the power of the Beatles and nail it, I just felt that much angrier about Yesterday.
The movie Yesterday poised the question: What would happen to the world if there were no songs by the Beatles? Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) is the only man who remembers them (well, seemingly the only man) and he has to share those songs with the world because we are a better place when we have them to listen to.
It is a wonderful concept but the plot of Yesterday gets so murky and then tries to sell John Lennon as a great man who gets to lives a happy little life and it just made me mad. Mainly because I do think that we are a better society when we turn to the messaging in songs by the Beatles and share our love for them and Yesterday did not really sell that idea to me.
Doctor Who poised the question of the Beatles not making those songs and then, in the end, they saved the world themselves. Maestro was up against the wall with the Doctor trying to find the hidden chord to banish them. But when the Doctor gets it wrong, Maestro believes they’ve won and traps Ruby and the Doctor in instruments.
It takes John Lennon finding the chord and joining together with Paul McCartney to finish it, ending Maestro and effectively saving the world from the nuclear winter that Maestro promised. Watching the Beatles come together and save us, in the same way that Jack’s performance of the songs were doing, made me overly emotional about my love for the band.
And that’s what I wanted Yesterday to do for me but it got so lost in its own lore that it just made Jack the most important man on the planet and it was less about the power of these songs. (Himesh Patel is innocent, you were perfect babe.)
So thank you, Doctor Who. I wish my dad was still alive to see a Scottish Doctor joining forces with the Beatles to save us all.
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Rachel Leishman
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Leak the Ana de Armas cut.
Photo: Daniel Pockett/Getty Images
Over two years and thousands in legal fees later, we can all forget about the Yesterday lawsuit, much like every character in Yesterday forgot about the Beatles. The class-action lawsuit from two Ana de Armas fans mad she was cut out of the film despite being in the trailer was officially settled on April 12, according to Variety. The details of the settlement are unknown. Peter Rosza and Conor Woulfe initially sued Universal in 2022 after renting Yesterday for $3.99 on Amazon. They got an early win when a judge agreed with them that trailers are commercial speech, rather than art in their own right, and thus subject to false-advertising claims. Then, however, they needed to prove that a large group of people were falsely led to watch the movie because they wanted to see Ana de Armas, but when the movie is based on the Beatles, that’s a tough sell. The case was thrown out. Rosza and Woulfe were left with $126,705 in Universal’s legal fees. The famed Ana de Armas stan account, @ArmasUpdates, has yet to weigh in.
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Jason P. Frank
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“Anybody ever hear of Hannibal Lecter?” former President Donald Trump asked last night. “He was a nice fellow. But that’s what’s coming into our country right now.”
The leader of the Republican Party—and quite likely the 2024 GOP nominee—was on an extended rant about mental institutions, prisons, and, to use his phrase, “empty insane asylums.” Speaking to thousands of die-hard supporters at a rally in South Florida, Trump lamented that, under President Joe Biden, the United States has become “the dumping ground of the world.” That he had casually praised one of the most infamous psychopathic serial killers in cinema history was but an aside, brushed over and forgotten.
This was a dystopian, at times gothic speech. It droned on for nearly 90 minutes. Trump attacked the “liars and leeches” who have been “sucking the life and blood” out of the country. Those unnamed people were similar to, yet different from, the “rotten, corrupt, and tyrannical establishment” of Washington, D.C.—a place Trump famously despises, and to which he nonetheless longs to return.
His candidacy is rife with a foreboding sense of inevitability. Trump senses it; we all do. Those 91 charges across four separate indictments? Mere inconveniences. Palm trees swayed as the 45th president peered out at the masses from atop a giant stage erected near the end zone of Ted Hendricks Stadium in Hialeah. He ceremoniously accepted an endorsement from Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his former press secretary. He basked in stadium-size adulation and yet still seemed sort of pissed off. He wants the whole thing to be over already. Eleven miles away, in downtown Miami, Trump’s remaining rivals were fighting for relevance at the November GOP primary debate. “I was watching these guys, and they’re not watchable,” Trump said. His son Donald Jr. referred to the neighboring event as “the dog-catcher debate.”
Though not a single vote has been cast in this election, Trump’s 44-point lead and refusal to participate in debates has made a mockery of the primary. And though many try to be, no other Republican is quite like Trump. No other candidate has legions of fans who will bake in the Florida sun for hours before gates open. No one else can draw enough people to even hold a rally this size, let alone spawn a traveling rally-adjacent road show, with a pop-up midway of vendors hawking T-shirts and buttons and ball caps and doormats and Christmas ornaments. Voters don’t fan themselves with cardboard cutouts of Chris Christie’s head.
Multiple merchandise vendors told me that the shirts featuring Trump’s mug shot have become their best sellers. Some other tees bore slogans: Ultra MAGA, Ultra MAGA and Proud, CANCEL ME, Trump Rallies Matter, 4 Time Indictment Champ, Super Duper Ultra MAGA, Fuck Biden. “Thank you and have a MAGA day!” one vendor called out with glee. As attendees poured into the stadium, some of the pre-rally songs were a little too on the nose: “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” “Jailhouse Rock.” Kids darted up and down the aisles between the white folding chairs, popping out to the snack bar for ice cream and popcorn. The comedian Roseanne Barr, who a few years ago was forced out of her eponymous show’s reboot after posting a racist tweet, took the stage early and thanked the MAGA faithful for welcoming her in. “You saved my life,” she said. Feet rumbled on the metal bleachers. People danced and embraced. In the hours before the night’s headliner, this felt less like a political event and more like a revival.
I saw the GOP operative Roger Stone and his small entourage saunter past the food trucks to modest applause. Onstage, Trump complimented Stone’s political acumen. (Stone, who is sort of the Forrest Gump of modern American politics, has played a role in seemingly every major scandal from Watergate to January 6, not to mention the Brooks Brothers riot that helped deliver Florida to George W. Bush in the 2000 election.)
That afternoon, seeking air-conditioning at a nearby Wendy’s, I met Kurt Jantz, who told me he’s been to more than 100 Trump rallies. Jantz had driven down to Hialeah from his home in Tampa. His pickup truck is massive, raised, and wrapped in Trump iconography. (He has an image of Trump as Rambo with a bald eagle perched on one shoulder, surrounded by a tank, a helicopter, the Statue of Liberty, and the White House, plus a background of exploding fireworks. That’s only one side of the truck.) Jantz has found a niche as a pro-MAGA rapper—he performs under the name Forgiato Blow. Tattoos cover much of his body, including a 1776 on the left side of his face. He rolled up his basketball shorts to show me Trump’s face tattooed on his right thigh. “Trump’s a boss. Trump’s a businessman. Trump has the cars. Trump has the females. Trump’s getting the money. He’s a damn near walking rapper to the life of a rapper, right? I want a Mar-a-Lago.” Jantz said he’s met and spoken with Trump “numerous times,” as recently as a couple of months ago at a GOP fundraiser. Trump, he said, was aware of the work Jantz was doing to spread the president’s message, not only through his music. “I mean, that truck itself could change a lot of people’s ways,” he said.
Though people travel great distances to experience Trump in the flesh—I spoke with one supporter who had come down from Michigan—many attendees at last night’s event were local. Dalia Julia Gomez, 61, has lived in Hialeah for decades. She told me she fled Cuba in 1993 and supports Trump because she believes he loves “the American tradition.” Hialeah is more than 90 percent Hispanic and overwhelmingly Republican. Onstage last night, Trump warned that “Democrats are turning the United States into Communist Cuba.” People booed. Some hooted. He quickly followed up, seemingly unsure of what to say next: “And you know, because we have a lot of great Cubans here!”
Trump won Florida in 2016 and 2020. His closest rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, has just been endorsed by Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, but has otherwise been struggling to connect with voters for months. Trump has already secured many key Florida endorsements, including from Senator Rick Scott. (Senator Marco Rubio has yet to endorse.)
The night was heavy on psychological projection. “We are here tonight to declare that Crooked Joe Biden’s banana republic ends on November 5, 2024,” Trump said. Later, he vowed to “start by exposing every last crime committed by Crooked Joe Biden. Because now that he indicted me, we’re allowed to look at him. But he did real bad things,” Trump said. “We will restore law and order to our communities. And I will direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every Marxist prosecutor in America for their illegal, racist, and reverse enforcement of the law on day one.”
He seemed to tiptoe around the idea of January 6, though he did not mention the day, specifically. Instead, he said: “We inherit the legacy of generations of American patriots who gave their blood, sweat, and tears to defend our country and defend our freedom.” Earlier in the day, I spoke with Todd Gerhart, who was selling Trump-shaped bottles of honey, with a portion of the profits going to January 6 defendants (Give the “Donald” a Squeeze: $20). Gerhart lives in Charleston, South Carolina, and is among the vendors who follow the Trump show around the country. He told me that Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, is a fan of his product, as is General Michael Flynn. He introduced me to a woman from Tennessee named Sarah McAbee, whose husband, Ronald, was convicted on five felony charges related to January 6 and is currently awaiting sentencing. She told me she’s able to speak with him by phone once a day. Yesterday she informed him she was going to the Trump rally. “It’s a one-day-at-a-time sort of thing,” she said.
About 100 yards away, people were lining up to meet Donald Trump Jr., who was scheduled to sign copies of his father’s photography book, Our Journey Together. Junior smiled and scribbled as his fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, snapped selfies with fans. Walking around yesterday afternoon, I heard a rumor: Not only had Trump already picked his next vice president, but there was no one it could conceivably be besides his loyal namesake, Don Jr.
A little while later, I saw Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, milling about. I asked him about this rumor explicitly. He gave me an inquisitive look. “President Trump’s not ready to announce his VP pick yet,” he said. “Can you even have someone from the same family? I know you can’t have two people from the same state. So that rules it out right there.”
Family remains a confounding part of the Trump story. His daughter Ivanka spent the day in Manhattan testifying in the case that could demolish what’s left of the family’s real-estate empire. Trump himself had taken the witness stand on Monday. The occasion seemed to still be weighing on him, and at the rally, yielded a microscopic moment of familial self-reflection. “Can you believe—my father and mother are looking down: ‘Son, how did that happen?’” (For this he did an impression of a parental voice.) He quickly pivoted. “‘We’re so proud of you, son,’” he said (in the voice again). It didn’t make much sense. He rambled his way to the end of the thought. “But every time I’m indicted, I consider it a great badge of honor, because I’m being indicted for you,” Trump told the crowd. “Thanks a lot, everybody.”
During my conversation with Miller, I asked him if the campaign had discussed the logistics—or practicalities—of Trump getting convicted and having to theoretically run the country from prison. “There’s nothing that the deep state can throw at us that we’re not going to be ready for,” he said. “We have a plane, we have a social-media following of over 100 million people. We have the greatest candidate that’s ever lived. There’s nothing they can do. Nothing is going to stop Donald Trump.”
What about something like a house arrest at Mar-a-Lago?
“Nothing is going to stop Donald Trump.”
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John Hendrickson
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This summer, I set out to write about Vivek Ramaswamy because I thought that his public-speaking skills set him apart from his GOP presidential rivals. Whereas most candidates were struggling to find their lane, Ramaswamy knew exactly what he was offering: a message that seemed to be libertarian at its core, paired with views that were consistent with more extreme corners of the right. Ramaswamy’s team agreed to participate in the profile.
Ramaswamy let me shadow him over the course of three days at the end of July. I visited his Ohio campaign headquarters and got a behind-the-scenes view of several of his media appearances. He brought me to his home and introduced me to his family. I flew aboard a private jet with him and rode on his campaign bus in Iowa.
Over the three days, Ramaswamy and I had regular conversations—sometimes in short bursts, other times in longer sit-down sessions. Last night, in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, he used the phrase free-flowing to describe our interactions. Our discussions were often challenging, but they were always respectful. With Ramaswamy’s permission, and in keeping with standard journalistic practice, I recorded all of our interviews.
During our final interview aboard his campaign bus, I brought up one of his more explosive claims—a suggestion that we don’t know “the truth” about January 6. I asked him: What is the truth about January 6 that you’re referring to? His answer went down a curious path, invoking the investigation into the 9/11 terrorist attacks, among other topics. At one point, he said this to me: “I think it is legitimate to say, How many police, how many federal agents were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers? Like, I think we want—maybe the answer is zero, probably is zero for all I know, right?”
Yesterday, after The Atlantic published my story and his comments about 9/11 and January 6 drew attention, Ramaswamy told Semafor that the quote we published wasn’t “exactly what I said.” Last night, asked by CNN’s Collins about the same quote, Ramaswamy said, “I’m telling you the quote is wrong, actually.”
The quote is correct.
Here is the unedited audio and a transcript of our exchange about 9/11 and January 6.
John Hendrickson: When you talk about all the things, We can handle the truth about X, you know, and you list off a bunch of stuff—one of them that you said last night is: We can handle the truth about January 6. What is the truth about January 6 that you’re referring to?
Vivek Ramaswamy: I don’t know, but we can handle it. Whatever it is, we can handle it. Government agents. How many government agents were in the field? Right?
Hendrickson: You mean like entrapment?
Ramaswamy: Yeah. Absolutely. Why can the government not be transparent about something that we’re using? Terrorists, or the kind of tactics used to fight terrorists. If we find that there are hundreds of our own in the ranks on the day that they were, that they were—I mean, look …
Hendrickson: Well, there’s a difference between entrapment and a difference between a law-enforcement agent identifying—
Ramaswamy: I think it is legitimate to say, How many police, how many federal agents were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers? Like, I think we want—maybe the answer is zero, probably is zero for all I know, right? I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero. But if we’re doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9/11, we have a 9/11 commission, absolutely that should be an answer the public knows the answer to.
Well, if we’re doing a January 6 commission, absolutely, those should be questions that we should get to the bottom of. And there can’t be hush-hush, separate, it shouldn’t be outside the commission, leaked to some media personality the hours of footage. No, this is transparent. These are the doors that were open. Here are the people that opened the doors, to whom? Here are the people who were armed. Here are the people who were unarmed. What percentage of the people who were armed were federal law-enforcement officers? I think it was probably high, actually. Right? There’s very little evidence of people being arrested for being armed that day. Most of the people who were armed, I assume the federal officers who were out there were armed. And so, I don’t know the answers. We deserve to know the answers, right?
We did a Jan. 6 commission. There are certain questions you can ask. We did a 9/11 commission, and if there are federal agents on the plane we deserve to know. And if we’re doing a Jan. 6 commission and there are federal officers in the field, we deserve to know. Just tell us the truth. Tell us what happened.
And it’s not just that, right? I think it’s also the reflective, the reflection on the truth about the underlying motivations of people. What were the sources of the frustration? Right? Is it really just, Donald Trump riled them up in an eight-week period? Or are these people who have been lied to and suppressed for a longer period of time? I think it’s clearly the latter, right? And I think that the failure to recognize the whole truth—we want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That’s, that’s really, when I say we deserve—and I don’t think we’ve gotten it on any of those questions. On the Jeffrey Epstein client list, on unidentified flying objects, on January 6, on vaccine—on COVID-19 vaccine—on the origin of the pandemic, which we now know, by the way, systematic efforts by people who had no idea what the origin was to shoot down the origin. And I remember this at the time there were people in sort of the, uh, like, in the sort of the greater Harvard/MIT space, the Broad Institute and otherwise, who were sort of talking about, Well, there’s a decent chance it could have, but we should be careful about talking about this or It could undermine, erosion of trust in science. There’s no such thing as a noble lie. That’s my view. The noble lie is nonexistent. No lie is noble.
Hendrickson: I think it’s interesting to compare and contrast 9/11 and January 6.
Ramaswamy: Oh, yeah. I don’t think they belong in the same conversation. I’m only bringing it up because it was … I am not making the comparison. I think it’s a ridiculous comparison—
Hendrickson: I’m not comparing—
Ramaswamy: But I’m saying that I brought it up only because it was invoked as a basis for the Jan. 6 commission.
Hendrickson: Of course. What I’m saying, though, is that I think Democrats and Republicans would agree that 9/11 is a day that’s like Pearl Harbor day, where there are good guys and bad guys and America was attacked. I mean, I think that’s very clear—
Ramaswamy: I mean, I would take the truth about 9/11. I mean, I am not questioning what we—this is not something I’m staking anything out on. But I want the truth about 9/11.
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John Hendrickson
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Yesterday, an hour and a half into the marathon hearings about whether colleges can use race as a factor in admissions decisions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson began to rub her temples as she looked down at her notes.
“We’re entertaining a rule where some people can say what they want about who they are and have that valued in a system,” she said. “And I’m worried that that creates an inequity in the system with respect to being able to express our identity.” Black and Latino applicants would be limited if they can’t express their race in the selection process, she said. She almost laughed with exasperation. “Is that a crazy worry or is that something I should be thinking about and concerned about?”
In previous arguments this term, Jackson was a forceful voice on issues of racial discrimination and the intent of the constitutional amendments designed to protect against it. For many in favor of race-conscious admissions, she has been a welcome presence on the Court, asking, in a way, the question at the center of the cases: Have less than 50 years of affirmative action put enough of a dent in the inequality fostered over more than two centuries of racial discrimination in higher education to merit eliminating the practice?
For roughly five hours, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in cases of Students for Fair Admissions, a coalition of unnamed Asian American students brought together by the conservative legal strategist Edward Blum, against the University of North Carolina and Harvard. If the cases are successful and the justices side with SFFA—which a majority of the justices seemed quite open to in their questioning yesterday—the decision would overturn the precedent established in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978, which has been upheld for more than 40 years. Because of her previous tenure on Harvard’s Board of Overseers, Jackson recused herself from the Harvard case and sat for only the UNC case. But she did not waste the time she had.
Although relatively few colleges are selective enough to have reason to consider race in admitting students, there is significant evidence about what happens at those schools when such programs go away. Michigan and California, for example, saw precipitous declines in Black enrollment at their flagship campuses after those states banned the practice. (By SFFA’s own estimates, described during oral argument, Black enrollment at Harvard would fall from 14 to 10 percent without affirmative action.) In some ways, that’s the backdrop to Jackson’s questions. She was driving toward a fundamental statement about what the programs are for: Race-conscious admissions are designed to help students get into college, not to exclude students as a result of their existence.
Jackson’s point is well worn. In 1978, during the oral arguments in the Bakke case, Justice Thurgood Marshall identified it. In an exchange where he prodded Reynold Colvin, who argued for the plaintiff, Allan Bakke, Marshall pointed out, “You’re arguing about keeping somebody out and the other side is arguing about getting somebody in.” Colvin agreed. “So, it depends on which way you look at it, doesn’t it?”
Once again, Colvin agreed. “It depends on which way you look at the problem,” Colvin said.
Marshall’s voice changed. “It does?” he said, with a rise in inflection.
“The problem—” Colvin began to say before Marshall cut him off.
“It does?” Marshall said, frustrating Colvin. “You’re talking about your client’s rights; don’t these underprivileged people have rights too?”
Yesterday, Jackson was less direct, but no less potent, in an exchange with Patrick Strawbridge, the lawyer for SFFA. She offered a hypothetical to emphasize her point. There are two applicants who would like their family backgrounds recognized. One writes that their family has been in North Carolina since before the Civil War, and that if they were admitted to the university, they would be a fifth-generation student there. The other student is also a North Carolinian whose family has been in the state since before the Civil War—but their ancestors were enslaved and, because of years of systemic discrimination, were not allowed to attend the university. But now that they have the opportunity, they would like to attend. “As I understand your no-race-conscious-admissions rule, these two applicants would have a dramatically different opportunity to tell their family stories and to have them count.” Both applicants were qualified, Jackson offered, but the first applicant’s qualifications could be recognized in the process, whereas “the second one wouldn’t be able to [get credit for those qualifications] because his story is in many ways bound up with his race and the race of his ancestors.”
Strawbridge thought for a moment, then offered that UNC does not have to give a legacy benefit to the first applicant if it doesn’t want to. This is true, but it was not Jackson’s point: “No, but you said it was okay if they gave a legacy benefit.” Race, she said, would be the only thing that couldn’t be considered under that program. And that would disadvantage the Black student who, in a similar set of circumstances, wants “the fact that he has been in North Carolina for generations through his family” considered.
In a day filled with questions about the meaning of “true diversity” or the educational benefits of diversity, Jackson’s questions cut through the muck. Some students had historically been denied access to some of the nation’s most well-resourced institutions of higher education—feeder campuses for prominent roles throughout society–because of their race. If SFFA wins, that fact will be one of the only things a university cannot consider in its admissions process, as though that history never happened—as though the system is fair enough already.
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Adam Harris
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