Back in 2012, Aaron Sorkin created a TV show called The Newsroom. Set behind the scenes at a fictional cable news network, the HBO drama followed a band of producers and correspondents led by blowhard anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) as they covered real-life news events from the recent past, like the death of Osama bin Laden and the Deepwater Horizon spill. He used actual news, “because it was just going to take us too far away from reality,” Sorkin said in 2012.

The show was divisive, and journalists mostly hated it. Many of The Newsroom’s detractors felt that Sorkin, with the convenient benefit of hindsight, was lecturing actual reporters on how they should have done their job. It was canceled in 2015, before Sorkin got to offer his take on Trump’s rise to power (or the media’s role in it).

Nearly a decade and a half later, another ambitious TV drama is attempting to tackle the news in something close to real time — but doing so in a way that’s both more dramatically compelling and politically astute.

The Pitt, which wrapped its second season on HBO Max Thursday, is set in the perpetually overcrowded emergency department at the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, a teaching hospital with a fitting nickname: “The Pitt.” Attending physician Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, a grizzled veteran played by Noah Wyle, oversees a band of sharp-tongued residents and medical students.

Created by R. Scott Gemmill, the series is a clever hybrid of E.R. (on which Wyle starred for over a decade) and 24: each season follows the staff and patients at the Pitt over a single 12-hour shift (that inevitably runs into overtime), with each episode dramatizing a single hour in the life of the emergency room. The show’s real-time structure drives home the relentless, grueling nature of emergency medicine. Patients come and go constantly, and are not always heard from again. Often, they die.

The show blends an old-fashioned broadcast format (i.e., longer seasons with less downtime) and the edgier sensibility of a streaming series (including lots of bloody viscera, coarse language, and the occasional closeup of an engorged penis). This unique mix has enabled it to become that rarest of things in the fractured cultural landscape of 2026 — an Emmy-winning critical darling that is also a broad-based hit.

But what is perhaps most remarkable about The Pitt is how viscerally it captures what’s ailing the country right now — both literally (measles, addiction) and figuratively (racism, income inequality). The series uses an underfunded emergency room as a microcosm for American society writ large, exploring how vast cultural and political forces affect the wellbeing of ordinary people and the medical professionals who care for them. It’s no accident that The Pitt is set not in Chicago, LA, or New York, but in a famously scrappy post-industrial city in a pivotal swing state.

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Season 1 dramatized issues like vaccine hesitancy, abortion restrictions, and post-COVID burnout in the medical profession. Season 2 has leaned even further into the topical commentary, with seemingly ripped-from-the-headlines stories about ICE, sexual assault, Medicaid, and more.

For The Pitt’s creative team, the goal has always been authenticity, not didacticism. “The fastest way to get people to turn the channel is if they feel like we’re preaching to them or we’re being dogmatic,” Wyle said last year. (The actor is also a writer and executive producer on the series.) “What we wanted was accuracy and realism. We wanted to just be presentational with what emergency rooms look like.”

The Pitt was originally envisioned as a spinoff of E.R., following an older, possibly wiser version of John Carter, the character Wyle played in the beloved NBC drama. When that idea hit a legal snag, Wyle and company overhauled the premise, imagining a timely series that would grapple with the enormous strain on medical professionals in the wake of COVID.

Dr. Robby offers the starkest example of this psychological trauma. In Season 1, which takes place five years to the day after he made the agonizing decision to remove his COVID-afflicted mentor from life support, Robby experiences a panic attack. Over the course of Season 2, his mental health deteriorates even further. In the finale, a nearly suicidal Robby breaks down in tears while swaddling an abandoned infant. But Robby is not alone in his despair: Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa), The Pitt’s straight-talking charge nurse, briefly leaves the job after getting brutally assaulted by an angry patient.

This season is set in the near future on July 4, 2026 — an ideal backdrop for contemplating our national malaise. Numerous patients show up at the hospital in star-spangled attire or Revolutionary garb, lending to the overall impression/reality that America and its people are not well. While no one utters the president’s name, they don’t have to. This season paints a vivid portrait of the destruction and chaos wrought by the Trump administration and the MAHA movement.

One of the most discussed storylines involves ICE agents who show up at PTMC with an injured detainee, causing staff and patients to flee in panic, and a nurse is taken into custody. Robby eventually confronts the masked agents. “Patients come in here for help because they’re either sick or injured,” he says. “Documented or undocumented, they have a right to emergency care.” (Another immigration-related subplot concerns a young woman forced to drop out of college to care for her little brother because their parents have been deported to Haiti.)

The prescient ICE storyline was filmed shortly before the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis. “We had been asking ourselves a lot of questions about how realistic this is, or not. And then, by the time we shot it, we’re like, ‘Oh, my God, yeah, okay.’ So we were pretty mild,” executive producer John Wells recently told Deadline.

HBO executives were reportedly concerned about the storyline and whether it was “balanced” and edits were made. Even though Wyle said “the negotiation was being driven by political reasons,” he was ultimately happy with the “more restrained” version of the story viewers saw.

ICE is hardly the only malevolent force in the world of The Pitt. Another pivotal arc this season followed an uninsured diabetic man who has been rationing his insulin. He falls into the “coverage gap,” making too much to qualify for Medicaid but unable to afford private health insurance. Panicked about incurring a massive amount of medical debt, he flees the hospital before completing his treatment — only to turn up at the hospital again, in much worse shape, a few hours later.

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Another prevalent theme is the widespread mistrust of the medical establishment. Already exhausted and demoralized, the doctors and nurses of The Pitt often have to care for people who are openly hostile to their profession. There are strident anti-vaxxers suing the very doctors who saved their child’s life. There’s a self-proclaimed health nut with liver failure caused by an overdose of turmeric supplements. And there’s even a pregnant woman with life-threatening preeclampsia who is determined to have a wild birth.

Worst of all, no one with political power is doing anything to bolster the public’s faith in the medical profession; quite the opposite. While discussing the turmeric case with a colleague, second-year resident Trinity Santos (Isa Briones) says the woman should have checked with her doctor about a safe dosage, or consulted a reputable source, like the CDC website.

“Oh wait, I forgot,” she says sarcastically. “It’s now a medical toxic waste site.”

If only she were wrong.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

Last month, Amy Goodman hopped on a last-minute flight from Mexico City to Los Angeles to attend the Academy Awards in support of Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Arnaud, an Oscar-nominated short documentary about a former colleague who was killed in Ukraine. She showed up at the Dolby Theatre in casual attire, and immediately caught the attention of a sharply-dressed man in a three-piece suit.

“He yells to me across the room, ‘You are brave!’” Goodman recalled recently. “And I said, ‘Oh, thank you. Do you know Democracy Now?’ And he said, ‘What’s Democracy Now? I’m talking about what you’re wearing.’”

“Within an hour,” she says, “ I hightailed it out of there in my high-tops.”

Goodman is not usually the type to hightail it out of anywhere, no matter how hostile the terrain. The host and executive producer of Democracy Now! has spent the last three decades asking tough questions of those in power, from oil executives in Nigeria to chronically evasive White House officials. Her fearless work as a journalist is now the focus of Steal This Story, Please!, a documentary currently in select theaters.

Directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal (whose credits include such essential documentaries as Trouble the Water and The Janes), Steal This Story, Please! weaves together highlights from Goodman’s career, including her on-the-ground coverage of a massacre by the Indonesian military in East Timor in 1991 and her legendary grilling of Bill Clinton on election day in 2000.

Released at a moment of unprecedented media consolidation, the film shows just how prescient Goodman was when she launched Democracy Now! in 1996, pioneering a model of independent journalism that many others have since emulated. The program receives no corporate or government funding, currently airs on 1,500 public TV and radio channels worldwide, and just marked its 30th anniversary. (The Boss even showed up to celebrate.)

Steal This Story, Please! also looks at the life experiences that shaped Goodman, particularly her upbringing in a politically engaged Jewish family that thrived on debate (they argued with each other through letters printed in her brother’s homemade newspaper). Goodman says Judaism taught her that “the way you deal with the world is with intense curiosity and not being afraid to stand by your principles.”

After college, Goodman dreamed of becoming a producer on The Phil Donahue Show. Instead, she landed at WBAI, the progressive New York radio station, where she carved out an essential beat covering the people and places too often neglected by corporate media.

Goodman, Lessin, and Deal recently spoke to The Contrarian about making this documentary and its timely message about the importance of independent media.

The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How did this project originate?

Deal: Our friend Karen Ranucci, who had worked with Democracy Now! years ago, proposed the idea to us. For us, it was a no-brainer. The only question we had was will Amy, who is so outward-facing, allow us to make it about her? But Amy said yes, and we’re super grateful that she did, because this film gave us something meaningful and purposeful to be doing in a really difficult time in our history.

Amy, you’re used to telling other people’s stories. Was it hard for you to be the subject of someone else’s story and cede that control?

Goodman: I am very private, but I really thought it was worth the price, because the message was about the importance of independent media. Carl and Tia are masters, both as archivists and as artisans of the craft of directing. I just thought it was too important to pass up this chance.

Lessin: Like any documentary participant, Amy was definitely hesitant. Even when she said yes, I think she was still taking a leap of faith, as anyone would, especially someone who knows how to edit and understands that we’re compressing 30 years into 90 minutes. We had final cut, which probably was very hard for Amy, because she is in control of her program from soup to nuts. But she was really gracious and very generous not only with her time, but also with her incredible stash of field tapes and film footage.

It strikes me that revisiting some of this might also have been difficult for you, Amy, particularly the massacre in East Timor in 1991, where you were beaten and witnessed the death of hundreds of people.

Goodman: I live with that every day. East Timor is one of the great genocides of the late 20th century. A third of the population of East Timor was killed by the Indonesian military — armed, trained, and financed by the United States. I survived that particular massacre where more than 270 Timorese were killed — November 12, 1991. In the United States, [East Timor] is hardly known, and yet we’re connected to them through the barrel of a gun. The only way to deal with it is to keep reporting on it and to keep challenging those in power who are making it possible.

You launched Democracy Now! 30 years ago, just after the Telecommunications Act had just been passed and there was a lot of concern about media consolidation. Did you ever expect it could get this bad?

Goodman: We’ve been talking about the corporate media and the danger of corporations running newsrooms for decades. There was always resistance. I’ll never forget Charlie Rose saying, “What do you mean, independent media? What’s that supposed to mean?”

Now those very people who back then were saying, “What are you talking about?” are the ones who are feeling so much pain, and they, too, are sounding the alarm. We can’t sound it loud enough. Independent media is essential to the functioning of a democratic society.

I’ll give one example just from the last few weeks. It looks pretty clear that the US hit this girls’ school in southern Iran, and more than 170 people were killed, the vast majority of them school girls. We had a Washington Post reporter [on the show] who had done an analysis of this whole thing, except that she wasn’t a Washington Post reporter anymore. A week or two before, she had been laid off. Jeff Bezos, the billionaire tech bro who founded Amazon, takes over The Washington Post. They adopt the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” and he cuts a third of the newsroom, [including] almost the entire Middle East Division, and the US attacks Iran.

Lessin: That was the very same week they put the Melania doc in theaters. Who paid for the Melania doc? Amazon. It was an obscene price tag — $40 million for the film, much of which went into the pockets of the Trumps. So not only was it a bad movie, essentially a commercial about Melania Trump and her fashion sense, but it was basically a bribe to the Trump administration. I think that says it all, yeah, this is where they’re putting their money.

Carl and Tia, media consolidation has also made this a difficult moment for documentary filmmakers. I wonder what challenges you have faced getting your films made and seen?

Deal: It’s never been easy for independent storytellers in the US. Even when we did have public broadcasting money, there wasn’t a lot there. We knew at the outset of this film that we were going to have to do this on our own. We’ve developed and grown a grassroots campaign to support the release of this film. Our campaign right now is all about getting the film seen and trying to maximize its impact. We’re using the theatrical release to organize fundraisers in a lot of the major markets for these [television and radio] stations that are suffering right now.

Lessin: Just a small handful of corporations determine what gets made and what gets distributed. They also determine on what terms, and what they’re paying for these films. As Directors Guild members, we’re seeing the steady erosion of money for our craft. It’s affecting the entire creative community, not just people like us who make these political documentaries.

Goodman: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was so important for well over half a century. As the media was becoming hyper-commercialized, it was the activists who said that we need to have a nonprofit public space to ensure quality programming. So the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was established. Now the Trump administration has eviscerated it. We’re no longer talking about CPB. We’re talking about CBP: Customs and Border Protection. Rural stations and Native American stations [are] going to feel the brunt of this. Many are going to close right at a time when we need local media to show what’s happening in our communities. It is a serious crisis.

I was really struck by one of the core themes of the film, which is the influence of Amy’s Jewish upbringing on her work.

Goodman: It’s just who I am. My grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi. My great-grandfather on my father’s side was a Hasidic rabbi. As I say in the film, my whole life was infused with those stories — the family members who survived and the family members who didn’t. It was inculcated in me: never again, for anyone, anywhere. I was always amazed, going to Hebrew school, why would people who weren’t Jewish stand up for us, hide kids in barns, put people in their attics, risk their lives to protect Jews? I was so struck by that. That [idea] of “never again, for anyone, anywhere” infuses everything that I do. I thank my parents for teaching me that.

Lessin: I didn’t know Amy’s background before I got to know her through this film. It helped me find a connection with her, because my grandparents were also Eastern European immigrants. My mother was born in Poland in 1933 and came to this country in 1941 with my grandparents. My grandfather was an Auschwitz survivor, and on my father’s side, my grandmother came from the same shtetl as Stephen Miller’s [family].

We’re making this film at a time when Judaism has been hijacked. Our grief around the Holocaust, and maybe even around October 7, has been hijacked by these right-wing forces. We’re telling a different story about Amy’s righteous commitment to social and economic justice. That is not in spite of her Jewish upbringing, it’s because of it. Her extraordinary reporting about Palestine and Israel is not in spite of her Jewish heritage. It’s exactly because of it.

Amy, the film opens with this incredible scene of you trying to get a comment from a Trump official, chasing him up multiple flights of stairs until you are out of breath. We see you put yourself in harm’s way repeatedly throughout the documentary. Where does this determination come from?

Goodman: It’s just following the tenets of good journalism, chasing the story. If someone won’t answer, persist.

​​Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian.

Ready to speak up for the first amendment and block this aquisition? Go to https://blockthemerger.com/ and click “Take Action” for ways to help stop the merger.

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The letter, available in full here, reads:

This transaction would further consolidate an already concentrated media landscape, reducing competition at a moment when our industries—and the audiences we serve—can least afford it. The result will be fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world. Alarmingly, this merger would reduce the number of major U.S. film studios to just four.

The signatories include Jane Fonda, Javier Bardem, Mark Ruffalo, David Fincher, Ben Stiller, Bryan Cranston, Jason Bateman, Kristen Stewart, Yorgos Lanthimos, Adam McKay, Alan Cumming, and Rose Byrne.

“Competition is essential for a healthy economy and a healthy democracy,” the letter says. “So is thoughtful regulation and enforcement. Media consolidation has already weakened one of America’s most vital global industries—one that has long shaped culture and connected people around the world.”

The letter expresses support for California Attorney General Rob Bonta and his colleagues in other states who are considering legal action to stop the merger: ”We are grateful for their leadership, and stand ready to support all efforts to preserve competition, protect jobs, and ensure a vibrant future for our industry, for American culture, and for our single most significant export.”

Warner Bros. Discovery, a conglomerate that was formed via another giant merger just four years ago, was put up for sale last fall.

Netflix beat Paramount in the initial round of negotiations, announcing in December it would acquire Warner Bros. for $82.7 billion. Crucially, that offer did not include CNN. In late February, Netflix announced it was backing out of the deal, leaving Paramount the victor.

Warner Bros. shareholders are scheduled to vote on the potential merger on April 23.

The deal would:

• Merge two of Hollywood’s remaining five major studios into a single corporate behemoth.

• Likely result in thousands of job cuts across an industry that has already faced huge merger-fueled cutbacks.

• Give the Trump-friendly Ellison family, which already tried to turn CBS News into Fox News Lite and owns 15% of TikTok, total control over CNN. Larry Ellison has reportedly discussed with White House officials making specific personnel changes at CNN.

• Give the Ellisons — who already control a major portfolio of TV channels including CBS, Comedy Central, and MTV — power over a slew of other channels, including Turner Classic Movies, HGTV, Food Network.

• Lead to fewer movies and TV shows getting made, particularly those perceived as creatively or politically risky — like One Battle After Another and Sinners, both produced by Warner Bros.

• Almost certainly impact the creatively risky and political provocative programming at HBO, including satirical shows like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. (As David Ellison’s company Skydance was finalizing its acquisition of Paramount last summer, CBS abruptly canceled The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.)

• Give investors from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, who are helping back the $110 billion Paramount bid, possible influence over entertainment and news coverage.

Meredith Blake is The Contrarian’s culture columnist.

On Friday at around 5 pm PT, Artemis II is scheduled to splash down in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego, bringing an end to the 10-day mission in which four astronauts traveled to the dark side of the moon and journeyed farther away from the Earth than any other humans in history.

In an increasingly fractured media landscape, the Artemis II mission has been a rare unifying event. It is historic not only because of the many milestones reached by Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen. It is also remarkable because of how it has brought together so many people who would otherwise be scrolling through different timelines and consuming entirely cultural content. A year ago, Katy Perry, Gayle King, and Lauren Sanchez Bezos were (justifiably) mocked for their brief, vanity-driven mission to the edge of space in service of a private company. By contrast, the past 10 days have been a celebration of what’s possible when the government invests in science.

Since taking off last week, Artemis II has also produced some of the most awe-inspiring images in recent memory. There’s the moon eclipsing the sun. Earth setting over the cratered surface of the moon. The aurora australis glowing over the Indian Ocean. The terminator line — yes, that’s actually what it’s called! — dramatically enveloping the planet in darkness. Along with these majestic tableaus, there were humanizing moments, like the jar of Nutella that floated perfectly into frame during a livestream of the mission, just minutes before Artemis II broke a record set by Apollo 13 56 years ago. (Even the most accomplished scientists in the world occasionally crave nutty sweetness.)

These pictures are so powerful they’ve been able to evaporate our collective cynicism in an era when rampant AI fakery, endless CGI imagery, and distorting Instagram filters can make us question the very real beauty of the world around us. (The Artemis II astronauts could probably get a lucrative side gig teaching normies how to take better pictures of the sunset on our smartphones — the struggle is real!).

Yet it’s difficult to think about the Artemis II mission, and the indelible imagery it has produced, without also thinking about what’s going on down here on Earth — specifically, the fact that while a handful of American and Canadian astronauts were making history in outer space, Donald Trump was bringing our home planet frighteningly close to the brink of nuclear war. On Monday, April 6, Artemis II completed a lunar flyby, capturing never-before seen images of Earth and the moon. The very next day, Trump threatened a country of 90 million people with genocide.

Photographs that left us feeling humbled by the scale and beauty of the universe, and unified in our shared humanity, also became terrifying reminders of our vulnerability to the whims of an increasingly unhinged narcissist.

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This contrast became glaringly obvious when the president made a congratulatory call to the Artemis II crew members that turned into a nonsensical, self-obsessed diatribe about his friendship with Wayne Gretzky. (At least he didn’t say anything about Arnold Palmer’s penis?) Whether they were stunned into silence, or simply didn’t want to engage with a guy openly waging war on science, the astronauts said nothing in response to Trump’s soliloquy about “the Great One,” leaving the supposed leader of the free world hanging for more than a minute — the dead air a void as potent as any black hole. The moment went viral, prompting a million social media jokes about how it’s impossible to escape Trump, even in space.

As deliciously funny as the moment was, I hope that the other images of the week are the ones that linger in our collective memory, and perhaps spur us into action to preserve our precious spinning orb (and its inhabitants). Other photos from space have done just that. “Earthrise,” taken by Apollo 8 astronaut William A. Anders in 1968, emphasized the planet’s relatively small and finite scale, and has been called the most important environmental photograph of all time. Taken four years ago by astronauts onboard Apollo 17, “The Blue Marble” became a symbol of Earth Day and a galvanizing image for the environmental movement. It’s encouraging, then, that these pictures were taken in a turbulent moment much like this one.

Christina Koch, one of the Artemis II mission specialists, recently spoke about her time on the International Space Station and the (literal and figurative) perspective it gave her on life on Earth.

The thing that changed for me looking back at Earth was that I found myself noticing not only the beauty, but how much blackness there was around it, and how it just made it even more special. It truly emphasized how alike we are, how the same thing keeps every single person on planet Earth alive. We evolved on the same planet. We have some shared things about how we love and live that are just universal, and the specialness and preciousness of that really is emphasized when you notice how much else there is around it.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

Usha Vance recently launched a podcast called “Storytime with the Second Lady.” It’s possible you missed this news, given how much has been going on lately. But in an interview with NBC News, Vance described the podcast as “an advertisement for reading… a way of getting people to think about books again, as a form of entertainment that they can turn to instead of all sorts of other things.”

In each episode of the podcast — which, like most podcasts these days, is really more of a YouTube show you can half-watch while doing other things — Vance briefly interviews a celebrity guest, who then reads a children’s book aloud. In the premiere, Vance reads Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit and talks about her family’s love of books. In subsequent episodes, former NASCAR driver (and MAGA enthusiast) Danica Patrick reads Cars, the book version of the popular Pixar movie, while author and paralympian Brent Poppen shares his book Playground Lessons, about a boy in a wheelchair. The set is decorated with Lego sculptures by the Vances’ children, a fake bookshelf backdrop, and a small, random assortment of actual books (including the decidedly Canadian Anne of Green Gables, Mickey: Get Ready For Fun! and A White House Alphabet).

The three episodes released so far have garnered an average of about 6,000 views each, and seem unlikely to ignite a newfound passion for reading among the nation’s school children. At first glimpse, Vance may be more charismatic than her husband, but so is your average corpse; on-camera, she is wooden and tightly wound, clearly better suited to the world of corporate law than to her newfound role as a would-be children’s TV host. Ms. Rachel, she most definitely is not.

One of the weirdest parts of the show is that, so far, it features no actual children, which will likely make it a tough sell with the young audience Vance is trying to reach. I showed the first episode to my seven-year-old, the ultimate critic, who quickly asked, “Do I have to watch this whole thing?” (I would share the public’s comments from YouTube, but unfortunately they are turned off.)

Think of Storytime with the Second Lady as Reading Rainbow, minus the 1980s PBS production values, the star power of LeVar Burton, the cheerful presence of actual children, or the range of captivating books selected by experienced educators.

But the real failure of Storytime is political, not aesthetic. Vance told NBC that she was inspired to create the podcast because, as the mother of three children (with a fourth on the way), she was troubled by declining literacy rates in young people: “This is really a long-term trend, not just a pandemic-related thing, and it’s worrisome.” She also cited her longstanding interest in education, which dates back to college, and the influence of her parents, who are college professors.

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One problem with that aspiration: the administration her husband enthusiastically helps lead has actively sought to undermine the issues Vance purports to care about. The Trump White House has tried to defund and dismantle the Institute for Media and Library Services, which provides federal funding to museums and libraries across the country (including many in rural areas). It has defunded PBS, imperiling a wide array of free educational programming for kids. It has used executive orders and federal legislation to pressure schools into banning supposedly “objectionable” books. And it has taken steps to abolish the Department of Education.

Thankfully, not all these efforts are succeeding. Just this week, the American Library Association was able to stop the White House from decimating the IMLS. But the administration’s efforts so far indicate “not only an indifference to libraries, reading and information, but I would say, an antagonistic view toward [public] storytimes, people finding jobs, and learning new languages,” among other library offerings, said Sam Helmick, president of the ALA, in a phone interview Thursday.

“We should be reminding the public that readers are leaders…. If we want to be a robust and competitive but also secure nation, deep literacy skills are essential,” Helmick continued. “I’m not seeing any moves [by Trump] to increase access to after school programs or early literacy development, or even to regulate the price of e-books, which would help the American public access information more equitably.”

Rank hypocrisy is nothing new for members of the Trump-Vance administration and their spouses (see: Byron Noem), but there is something particularly galling about the apparent ease with which Vance has embraced the MAGA agenda. The daughter of academics and immigrants from India who have championed diversity on campuses, she resigned from her job at one of California’s most prestigious law firms to campaign for her husband, who has gleefully vilified immigrants, academics, career-oriented women, and members of the legal establishment — everything she represents. Just this week, Usha traveled with J.D. to Hungary, where he urged voters to save Western Civilization by voting for fellow immigrant-hater Viktor Orbán and used a tortured and alarmingly specific analogy about his wife jumping out of a plane to make a point about the war in Iran. (I think? No one is quite sure what he was trying to say, including — one might assume — the vice president himself.)

Vance’s interview with NBC News is mostly a tedious snoozefest, loaded with softball questions about family life and anecdotes about shopping at Costco that are supposed to make the Second Lady seem relatable to the average soccer mom. At no point does correspondent Kate Snow bring up the administration’s multi-pronged attacks on libraries, literacy, and early childhood education. (Or, for that matter, its attacks on countless other programs that benefit children and mothers.)

But it’s worth watching, if only for one moment, when Vance’s carefully controlled veneer cracks for a fleeting instant.

At one point later in the conversation (about 2:45 in this version), Snow awkwardly broaches the subject of the Second Lady’s apparent political conversion: “In 2014, you were a registered Democrat. You’re now clearly a Republican. You voted for your husband for Senate. That’s public knowledge. I wonder if you feel fully comfortable in the universe that you’re in now?”

Like a briefly malfunctioning robot, Vance blinks repeatedly, tilts her head to the side, and asks in a near-whisper. “What do you mean? I’m curious.” Of course, she knows exactly what Snow is asking — and why.

Her response is both polished and studiously vague. “I was myself in 2014. I can be myself today, and I feel very comfortable in that world,” she says, noting that her sometimes idiosyncratic views are tolerated inside Trumpworld because “everyone knows that I really care greatly about J.D.’s success.”

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As much as she’s trying to avoid saying anything at all, Vance is actually telling on herself here, indicating that she cares more about her husband’s rise to power — and, by extension, her own — than about being consistent in her personal values or politics. With her gray-streaked hair and lack of visible cosmetic enhancements, Vance might not look like your average MAGA acolyte. But politically speaking, she is all in.

Childhood literacy would be an ideal cause for Vance to champion, if only she were also willing to confront her husband’s destructive policies. Instead, she’s done the last thing the world needs and launched yet another podcast.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

“Love for your country is not about putting up a flag,” says Pavel “Pasha” Talankin in Mr. Nobody Against Putin. “It is not about singing the anthem, either. It’s not about exploitation and propaganda. Love for your country means saying ‘We have a problem.’”

Talankin is a teacher at a primary school in Karabash, a small town in Russia’s industrial heartland known for its copper-smelting plant — and not much else). He’s also the subject of Mr. Nobody Against Putin, which was filmed over a two-year period beginning in 2022. The documentary offers a chilling glimpse at life inside Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, as the country undergoes a swift and sweeping process of militarization.

Talankin loves his hometown and its gray Soviet buildings, and he is equally beloved by his students, who see his classroom as a safe space for expressing themselves. But things begin to change after the outbreak of war, when Talankin is assigned to film daily activities at the school and upload the footage to a government portal. The process is supposed to ensure that the school is complying with a mandated curriculum of pro-war propaganda.

Instead, the material has been used to create one of the most unsettling, darkly absurd documentaries in recent memory. Directed by Talankin and David Borenstein, Mr. Nobody Against Putin looks at how Russian schools are becoming places for ideological indoctrination rather than education, in accordance with Vladimir Putin’s adage that “commanders don’t win wars, teachers win wars.”

Through Talankin’s eyes, we watch as an ordinary community is transformed by the regime’s propaganda. We see students goose-stepping through the corridors and listening obediently to teachers who command them to “love your motherland out of obligation, like you love your mother.” Self-sacrifice is glorified above all else, and there are few opportunities other than the military: young people fresh out of school are conscripted into the war, enticed by the promise that — should they die — they will have flowers on their tombstones for centuries.

Talankin grows increasingly troubled by what is happening in his community, and eventually decides to flee the country. Mr. Nobody Against Putin won the Oscar for best documentary feature last month, a testament to how its themes resonate well beyond Russia’s borders.

The project dates back to 2022, shortly after the outbreak of the war, when Talankin was introduced to Borenstein, an American filmmaker living in Denmark. “He was depressed. He felt so trapped in the system,” Borenstein recalled in a recent interview.

They began speaking regularly via encrypted communication channels, and Talankin would share footage from inside Karabash, with the idea of making a film that captured the reality of life for ordinary Russians at a pivotal moment in history.

The material Talankin sent was so compelling that, after a few months, Borenstein asked him to sign on as the film’s co-director, as well as its subject. The footage reminded Borenstein of How to With John Wilson, the sublimely weird HBO docu-comedy filmed (largely) on the streets of New York with a small camera. “It was just him walking around town, on a really cheap camera,” he said. “I found what he was doing was actually really inspiring me.”

Extensive measures were undertaken to ensure the safety of everyone involved in the project (including an unnamed cinematographer working in Karabash). An early chunk of the money from the BBC went to security consulting. “We developed a protocol for filming and transferring data safely through encrypted servers,” said Borenstein.

They also made editorial decisions that were, at least initially, motivated by security —like telling the story from the perspective of a single person rather than multiple characters. “The idea of centering it around Pasha was the best decision for the film. But in the beginning, it also was a security measure,” Borenstein explained. “We can’t evacuate everybody from Russia, so this film really has to focus on one character who is willing and able to make that sacrifice. And that was Pasha.”

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The film consciously subverts the cliches of the “inspirational teacher” movie, with Talankin as the beloved instructor who eventually becomes estranged from his own students, rather than inspiring them to greatness. “Internally, we’ve been calling it Navalny meets Mr. Holland’s Opus,” Borenstein said.

The filmmaking process gave Borenstein an unfiltered look at life inside Russia as the war was raging. Borenstein recalls a “history lesson” taught by a representative of the local ruling party, Pavel Abdulmanov, that was filmed just a few weeks after the invasion. “He says, ‘If you don’t love your country, just get out. You’re a parasite’ to these 10-year-old kids in his class,” Borenstein recalled. “This was really early on, so the whole world was talking about Ukraine, and here I was looking at this really privileged footage from within Russia that provided so much insight into this insane, full-scale invasion that the whole world was trying to wrap their head around.” (Abdulmanov, who also expresses admiration for Stalin’s inner circle and their “interesting jobs,” is later named teacher of the year and wins a luxury apartment.)

Every day or so, Talankin would share new footage, and every day or so, “I saw how this school was shifting and changing,” Borenstein said. “I started to feel like I was this weird alien observer, in this small school that was on the other side of the world.”

Throughout the filming process, Borenstein encouraged Talankin to open up on camera. The film is dotted with confessional-style interviews in which the teacher shares his perspective on the political situation at home. Increasingly disturbed by what’s going on at home, Talankin begins to lash out — at one point playing Lady Gaga’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” during a patriotic ceremony. “My goal was bringing him out as a character, and then figuring out a way to universalize his takes on Russia,” Borenstein said.

The goal was “to have this not just be a film about Russia, but have it be a universal film about democratic backsliding, about how we lose our country, about how complicity and apathy result in terrible situations,” Borenstein said. “I was really interested in finding any way to bring those themes out in the story.”

At the Academy Awards last month, Borenstein made one of the night’s most memorable speeches. On a night when few other winners directly addressed the political climate in the United States, Borenstein minced no words:

Mr. Nobody Against Putin is about how you lose your country. And what we saw when working with this footage, it’s that you lose it through countless small little acts of complicity. When we act complicit when a government murders people on the streets of our major cities. When we don’t say anything when oligarchs take over the media and control how we can produce it and consume it. We all face a moral choice. But luckily, even a nobody is more powerful than you think.

Borenstein had prepared some remarks ahead of time, but mostly spoke off the cuff onstage at the Dolby Theatre. “I knew I wanted to say something that drew a parallel between Russia and the United States,” he said. Throughout the making of the film, the creative team regularly discussed the similarities between what was going on in the United States and what had already happened in Russia, particularly in the early years of Putin’s reign.

Borenstein’s Russian colleagues rejected comparisons between the U.S. and Russia, “because the United States right now is transforming at a quicker pace than Russia did in the first years of Putin’s rule,” he recalled them saying. “That just underlines the importance of pointing this out, because there’s a point where it gets so far that it becomes much more difficult to resist.”

Watch at Kino Film Collection, or in select theaters.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

If Carolyn Bessette Kennedy were alive today, it’s hard to imagine her being on TikTok, Instagram, or — God forbid — Facebook.

The Calvin Klein publicist became one of the most famous women in the world when she married John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1996. Yet even at a time when celebrities were less accessible than they are today, she was an unusually elusive figure who assiduously avoided the limelight. She granted virtually no interviews in her lifetime, and a compilation of every known clip of her speaking amounts to barely a minute long. These days, she is known mostly through the photos taken by the paparazzi who camped outside the couple’s Tribeca loft.

Ironically, Bessette’s utter disinterest in fame — as well as her impeccable minimalist style — has made her an icon with a younger generation raised in a clout-chasing culture. The fascination with Bessette has been building for years, through books about her enduring influence on fashion and films like David Fincher’s Gone Girl, which play on her unknowable image.

But the curiosity exploded into full-blown Bessettophilia in recent weeks, thanks to the release of Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, a limited series following the turbulent relationship between the handsome political scion who was once voted “The Sexiest Man Alive” and his ineffably cool bride (played by Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon, respectively). The finale — which wasn’t made available to the press, but will presumably depict the 1999 plane crash in which Kennedy, Bessette, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, died — airs Thursday on FX.

Since the show premiered on February 15, TikTok and Instagram have been flooded with CBK-related content. There are wistful images from her pre-JFK days, a zillion tributes to her instantly iconic bias-cut wedding gown, creepy renderings of what she’d look like now, and even close readings of her manicure style. Pidgeon’s mannered performance as Bessette has even sparked a meme in which people toss their hair and bite their lips dramatically in mundane settings.

The drama leans hard on ‘90s nostalgia, with a wall-to-wall soundtrack of bops by the Stone Roses, Fiona Apple, and The Breeders, and exacting recreations of shuttered hotspots like The Roxy. With major storylines about George, the glossy magazine Kennedy founded in 1995, and Bessette’s work at Calvin Klein in the Kate Moss and Marky Mark era, Love Story offers a tantalizing glimpse into a bygone era in fashion and publishing. It recreates a period when New York City had yet to be overrun by soulless chain stores and TikTokers, when it was possible for a twentysomething working in PR to afford her own apartment in Manhattan.

But to viewers who grew up in the age of the Kardashians, arguably the most unfamiliar yet enticing part of the series is Bessette — a woman who eschewed the attention she effortlessly seemed to attract.

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“Can you imagine turning down the cover of every magazine? That’s what made her special. She didn’t need it,” says Sydney Steinberg, a thirty-four-year-old writer and comedian in Los Angeles who has shared humorous tributes to CBK on her Instagram account, including one in which she is baffled by the very concept of social media.

Bessette had an undeniable mystique that seems all but impossible to maintain in the age of the smartphone. “You can’t have that anymore, Steinberg says, “We get to see inside every celebrity’s life. They don’t even feel famous anymore.”

Unlike contemporary celebrities turned lifestyle influencers, “She just wanted her private life,” Steinberg says. “I think that’s why they’re so obsessed with her. She just was living, and not for the camera, just for herself.”

Steinberg was eight years old when Bessette died, and remembers the tragedy well. (Her mother and grandmother always admired her chic discretion).

But Love Story — and the social media algorithm pushing CBK content far and wide — have also introduced the ultimate ‘90s It Girl to a new generation, many of whom had limited prior knowledge of Kennedy family lore.

Elizabeth Sweeney, a twenty-two-year-old academic administrator from London, had never heard of Bessette until a few weeks ago, when Love Story kept popping up on her timeline. “Probably because I love romance shows,” she says. She has been watching faithfully, even though she is not impressed by the writing or acting. “It’s the aesthetic that’s making me want to watch…the ‘90s minimalism,” she explains. People her age view the decade as “the ultimate era — before phones really existed, but when fashion and activities like drinking cosmos in cool New York bars were a thing…[It] seemed like a trendy era, but with people trying less hard.”

“I think Gen Z’s are starting to crave simplicity due to the overconsumption we have now,” says a 27-year-old content creator who uses the handle Nordic Cowgirl on TikTok. She grew up in Europe and was not familiar with CBK until three years ago; now she posts almost exclusively about her. “Carolyn definitely had that image about her due to living in the ‘90s. We crave that time we didn’t have, because it seemed so much better than the current world we live [in]. I know I crave the past way of living due to how our society is now, especially our obsession with phones and media.”

The show is a hit on social media and has gotten mostly positive reviews from critics, but its premiere was preceded by months of bad press. Last summer, when Ryan Murphy Productions shared a first-look image of Pidgeon and Kelly in outfits that looked like they were purchased at Zara, the backlash was so furious that the show’s costume designer was eventually replaced. Then JFK Jr’s nephew, Jack Schlossberg, denounced executive producer Ryan Murphy for “making millions” off his family’s tragedy — not the first time the mega-producer has been accused of exploiting other people’s trauma. (The surviving members of the Bessette family issued a statement in 1999 and have said almost nothing since.)

At their best, Murphy’s nostalgic docudramas humanize figures like Marcia Clark, who were once maligned by the bloodthirsty press. In this regard, Love Story is largely sympathetic to Bessette, drawing explicit parallels between her plight and that of Princess Diana, whose death marks an emotional turning point in the penultimate episode. Creator Connor Hines has left out some of the more salacious rumors about the couple’s relationship, and instead chose to portray Kennedy as a devoted, if slightly self-absorbed, husband, not a fatally reckless womanizer. His version of Bessette is funny, free-thinking, and down-to-earth, nothing like the tabloid caricature of her as a volatile cokehead. (By contrast, the show is much harder on Kennedy’s ex, actress Daryl Hannah, who penned an opinion piece for The New York Times denouncing the show’s “irritating, self-absorbed, whiny” characterization of her.)

The series arguably couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Kennedy family, which is dealing with the slow-rolling destruction of the Kennedy Center, the ruinous policies of RFK Jr., and the tragic death of JFK Jr’s niece, Tatiana Schlossberg. But ultimately it has very little to say — good or bad — about the family’s complicated political legacy or well-known history of dysfunction and misfortune.

Instead, Love Story is framed as a tragedy about an independent, accomplished woman who feared losing her hard-earned sense of self to the man she married — and wound up losing far more than that.

It’s poetic that, 27 years after her death, Bessette is being celebrated in her own right by a younger generation of women, even if all the attention would make her cringe.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

Your book has close to 2000 interviews; eight years of reporting on your part. What kept you coming back to this story that you tell in Days of Love and Rage?

Well, I’ve been a war correspondent for many years, reporting in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and Yemen and often seeing people at some of the worst moments in their lives. And in the course of reporting on the Syrian conflict in 2011, 2012 it was more of that, as people were being killed by their own government.

But in the midst of that, I heard a story about a city that had overthrown the dictatorship and was trying to build a democracy from scratch, essentially. I was drawn to that just because it was different from the usual kind of stories of destruction and loss and devastation, even though there’s a lot of that. I was looking for something that could be a little bit more instructive about, what does it look like to build a democracy from scratch?

It took me eight years, as you said, to write it, but throughout that, I kept coming back because I was always pretty astonished by people’s resolve in the most difficult of circumstances. And the whole time I was reporting on this, the backdrop was the United States. I was thinking about the kind of problems of inequality and authoritarianism that have been plaguing Western countries, and seeing how people in Syria are trying to solve the same problems.

You’re following particular characters throughout a multi-year span. Why did you decide to structure it around these characters, rather than an approach that was more about the events?

I’ve always been interested in the ways in which people’s personal lives, their intimate lives, kind of get translated into their political positions and political actions — and every time I’ve looked into that, it’s always been surprising to me. It’s always been the case when I really try to sit with somebody for months, if not years, and try to understand them, that how they came to their worldviews is not what I would have expected.

We have the story of Abdul Hadi. We meet him in the book early on as a pro democracy activist. Really brave individual who ends up getting arrested and tortured horrifically by the Syrian regime, and then gets out and continues the protests, all in the name of freedom and democracy. And he ends up kind of drifting from that and falling under the sway of ISIS. To me it was a very surprising trajectory, although it turns out that that’s not that uncommon.

Telling that story of how somebody could become disillusioned with democracy and drift towards authoritarianism was one that I thought was best told by zooming into someone’s personal lives and the intimate sort of choices they face.

One of the things I was most struck by, and I think you’ve alluded to this, but you have a society where there’s almost not only no democracy, but no civil society, right? And then suddenly there’s an explosion. What do you think allowed for that enthusiasm and that approach to creating a civil society when no one had really had a chance to do that for decades in Syria?

This is one place where some of my ideas going into the book are really overturned through all the research. I used to think that, basically, people just want to be left alone. People are not going to create organizations or civil societies unless outside agents come in to help them.

But what happens here is there’s 40 years of dictatorship in which there was almost no civil society. There’s no freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. And once the regime was overthrown in the city, all these organizations kind of appeared out of nowhere, and people started to create what were called assemblies, which were like these clubs.

There were occupational groupings, there was councils, there was charities, there was dozens of newspapers that appeared. And people were doing that, not because they had some preconceived idea of what they should be doing, or not because they were political theorists, they just did this because they needed to get things done. You need to figure out how to keep the streets clean, the schools open, the lights on, right? And so people started to band together collectively to try to solve these problems.

Something I was really struck by in the book is this complex view of how ISIS eventually takes over Manbij. It’s not this kind of Hiluxes with black flags, there’s this growth within the city of interest in ISIS.

When the government was overthrown, protesters basically took over the city. They set up something called the Revolutionary Council [who] were all people who had suffered greatly under the dictatorship, and so they really believed in the idea of freedom. What ended up happening as the months went on is people began to debate, “well, what does freedom exactly mean?” Prices started to rise, partly because of the conflict. At the same time, people were fleeing other cities, and so it was driving up the cost of rent.

And so there was a cost-of-living crisis that began to emerge, and the Revolutionary Council was saying, “well, we believe in freedom, and that means freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and also freedom of markets.” Whereas many ordinary people, working-class people, were saying, “freedom of speech and assembly are great, but freedom of markets, I don’t know, because I need to put food on the table.”

Into that came a small group of outsiders, about six foreigners. They studied the divides in the city, and they realized that the vast majority of the city were poor and working class, and they were growing disaffected with the leadership. So they began to wage what basically is a populist campaign against the leadership. Many people began to gravitate towards these six individuals, who revealed themselves to be ISIS.

Within six months, they grew from six people to like, 1,000 and they became the largest political grouping in the city. Eventually they’re able to take over the city and dissolve the democracy, largely from within.

The last year or two has seen dramatic changes in Syria on the ground. Have you stayed in touch with your sources in Syria?

I finished the draft of this book maybe a few days before Assad fell. I had to go back to Syria and write a new ending.

On the one hand, it’s an amazing accomplishment that the regime has been overthrown. On the other hand, the new people in power aren’t real egalitarian Democrats either.

But the difference between now and the Assad regime is because of the legacy of the revolution, there is a little bit of space to try to resist some of the activities of this new government. For example, there is freedom of speech right now in Syria. There is some freedom of assembly. All of that is a legacy of the uprising. Six hundred thousand died in this conflict, and when I talk to Syrians, one of the things they feel is that it wasn’t for nothing, since things are not good and perfect now — but at least they’re better than they were.

Here in the states, we’re at 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, where we launched our own liberal democratic experiment. What do you think Americans can learn from these democratic experiments in Syria?

I think the first thing is we tend to think of democracy as something that happens once every two or four years for a few minutes when you go to the ballot box, and the rest of the time people whom we have no control over basically decide things. This experience in the city shows that there are much more capacious visions of democracy. Not to say that we shouldn’t be able to elect our leaders, but that that’s only the beginning of what a real democracy is. A real democracy has to be responsive to people’s needs. And for a time, democracy in this city was.

The current leader of Syria is someone who used to be al Qaeda. You documented really beautifully how people went from being believers in democracy to leaning into ISIS. Over the last year, and since ISIS was overthrown, have you seen people going back the other way?

If someone would write a book about the city now, the next 10 years, a lot of that would be people who were previously in ISIS or other groups now discovering themselves as egalitarian democrats. This goes back to your earlier question: why I like to focus in on the individual lives and not take the bird’s eye view is because these are the truths of any political system.

People are opportunists. People, even if they’re not opportunists, try to interpret their conditions based on what they see around them. Now, whichever way you end up changing, who knows, but every single person has changed. There’s nobody, I think, in the Syrian conflict who today is the same person they were, had the same ideas they had, back in 2011.

Anand Gopal’s Days of Love and Rage was published on March 3 and is available at your closest independent bookstore.

Who could have seen it coming — except anyone with eyes, ears, and passing knowledge of reality TV history?

Last week, ABC yanked the latest season of The Bachelorette from the air just days before it was scheduled to premiere. The latest installment of the long-running dating show was set to focus on Taylor Frankie Paul, a thirty-one-year-old single mom who also stars in the Hulu series The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, as she looked for love.

On Thursday, TMZ published a video showing Paul in a violent altercation with her on-and-off-again boyfriend, Dakota Mortenson, in 2023. Paul can be seen pushing, kicking, and hurling multiple barstools at Mortenson, while her daughter, then five, rests on a couch nearby. At one point, the child, apparently hit by one of the stools, can be heard crying. “This is called physical abuse,” says Mortenson, who is recording the video on his phone.

The video’s release followed news that The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives had stopped filming after another domestic dispute involving Paul and Mortenson last month. A few hours after the video was made public on Thursday, Disney-owned ABC announced it would not be airing Paul’s season of The Bachelorette.

“In light of the newly released video just surfaced today, we have made the decision to not move forward with the new season of The Bachelorette at this time, and our focus is on supporting the family,” said a Disney Entertainment spokesperson.

The network’s carefully worded statement made it seem as if the shocking video had exposed previously unknown behavior. In fact, Paul’s alleged history of violence is a key storyline on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which follows a clique of Utah influencers who call themselves “MomTok.”

The premiere episode of the series includes police body cam footage filmed in the immediate aftermath of the altercation captured in the TMZ video. An officer tells her she is being charged with domestic violence and places her in handcuffs.

Subsequent episodes of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives chronicled Paul’s turbulent relationship with Mortenson, including the birth of their son Ever in 2024. Paul, who has two other children by her ex-husband, ultimately pleaded guilty to aggravated assault for the 2023 incident. Her Secret Lives co-stars reportedly voiced concerns about Paul’s allegedly dangerous behavior in a call with ABC meetings weeks ago. But it took the video — and the cries of an apparently injured child — to finally disqualify her as a romantic leading lady.

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By casting Paul, a divisive social media star with millions of followers, ABC was clearly making a high-risk attempt to revitalize an aging, scandal-ridden franchise. But the ill-advised attempt at corporate synergy with Disney-owned Hulu backfired spectacularly. According to the Los Angeles Times, ABC faces a potential loss of $70 million as a result of the season’s cancellation. The numerous shows that comprise the Bachelor universe have weathered controversies over racism, sexual assault, and hasty divorces.

The Bachelorette scandal is a tale as old as time — or at least as old as reality TV, which has always thrived on shock value.

Case in point: Paul was not even the only reality TV personality involved in an abuse scandal last week. On Wednesday, Joseph Duggar, a former star of the TLC series 19 Kids and Counting, was arrested and charged with molesting a nine-year-old girl. His older brother Josh, who once worked for the Family Research Council in DC and featured prominently in the series until it was reported that he’d molested his sisters as a child, was convicted of receiving and possessing child sexual abuse materials in 2021.

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Since it first exploded a quarter century ago, reality TV has placed a premium on messy personal drama and turned countless poorly-vetted fame-seekers — from scamming Real Housewives to negligent pageant moms — into celebrities. Cynical TV producers, more interested in boosting ratings than maintaining ethical standards, are all too often happy to turn a blind eye to red flags, no matter how glaring.

Back when reality TV was in its infancy in 2000, Fox aired Who Wants to Marry a Multi-millionaire?, a special in which 50 women participated in a pageant-like competition to marry a wealthy man named Rick Rockwell. It later turned out that Rockwell had been the subject of a restraining order nine years earlier. The incident became a short-lived PR nightmare for Fox, which was soon back at the exploitation game with shows like Joe Millionaire and The Swan. (Incidentally, Who Wants to Marry a Multi-millionaire? was created by Mike Fleiss, the same guy who brought The Bachelor to the world two years later.)

There are numerous other examples of sketchy — and even dangerous — people winding up on reality TV. The most horrific example might be Ryan Jenkins, who appeared in multiple VH1 reality shows despite an assault conviction, and allegedly went on to murder and mutilate his wife, model Jasmine Fiore. (Jenkins killed himself before he could be arrested, but police never named another suspect in the crime.) The tragedy pushed the industry to adopt more stringent background checks.

But amplifying problematic personalities and making them more palatable to the general public through selective editing has always been the goal of reality TV. Consider our current president, Donald Trump, a serially bankrupt real estate heir who used The Apprentice to rebrand himself as a brilliant businessman and stage a successful political career. Muzzled by NDAs, crew members on The Apprentice worked tirelessly to make Trump seem smarter, more articulate, and less overtly racist than he was in private, reportedly even covering up his use of the N-word on set. But it’s not as if Trump was trying to hide his bigotry: by 2011, he was the most vocal proponent of the Birther theory. Yet NBC kept him on the air, perhaps because the network cared more about the free press Trump was generating than the vile racism he was stoking.

But as ABC recently discovered, Americans have some standards — even in the Trump era — and a guilty pleasure reality show isn’t so much fun when it’s platforming an alleged abuser.

Even before The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives debuted in 2024, Paul was a figure of some infamy online. She went viral in 2022 when she revealed that she and her ex-husband had dabbled in “soft swinging” — i.e., physical intimacy but no sex — with other couples connected to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The saga blew up online and attracted the interest of reality TV producers eager to capitalize on public fascination with Mormons — particularly the women of “MomTok,” with their waterfall waves and dirty sodas, who seem to flout conservative church teachings while conforming to a very specific beauty ideal.

The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives has become a breakout hit for Hulu, which has cranked out four seasons of the show in barely 18 months. Paul’s notoriety has exploded: she currently has 6.1 million followers on TikTok and 2.4 million on Instagram. Two of her co-stars appeared on ABC’s Dancing With the Stars. In September, ABC announced she would be the next Bachelorette, praising her “raw, unapologetic storytelling” and “comedic, heartwarming and bitingly honest content.”

But even by the subterranean standards of the Bachelor Nation, Paul’s casting was controversial. Paul would have been the first woman to lead The Bachelorette without first starring The Bachelor.

Perhaps most damaging was the revelation that she slept with Mortenson the night before she left to film the series. Fans of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette prefer when the leads at least pretend to be there for “the right reasons,” and not just to get (more) famous. Perhaps anticipating a large audience of rubberneckers and hate-watchers, ABC had been heavily promoting Paul’s upcoming season. She visited Good Morning America, turned up on the Oscars red carpet, and even appeared in a post-Oscars Bachelorette special.

For her part, Paul described the show as an opportunity to break out of an unhealthy relationship cycle. As she told the LA Times, “The only thing I can relate it to is, it is a drug; the toxicity is a drug.”

Paul may in fact be hooked on toxic behavior, but she’s clearly not the only one.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

It was the moment that casting professionals in Hollywood have been dreaming of for decades.

On Sunday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences handed out the very first Oscar for achievement in casting to Cassandra Kulukindis for One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling political thriller.

She dedicated her award to the unsung casting directors “who never got a chance to get up here, who didn’t even get a chance to get their name on the movie.”

Casting professionals have long struggled for credit in an industry where directors reign supreme — literally. It was once unheard of for a casting director to get their own card in the titles of a movie, and to this day (in most American studio movies) they receive a “casting by” attribution (rather than “casting director”).

Yet their contributions have helped transform American movies. As chronicled in the excellent documentary Casting By, legendary casting director Marion Dougherty helped future screen icons like Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, and Glenn Close land early roles, and pushed filmmakers to hire actors based on their abilities rather than (merely) their looks. In the early ‘90s, a group of movie bigwigs like Clint Eastwood and Al Pacino tried to get her an honorary Oscar, to no avail.

But in the decades since, the casting community has been advocating for an Oscars category recognizing their essential and widely misunderstood work. In 2013, the Academy finally added a casting branch. This year, a shortlist of ten films was whittled down to five nominees: One Battle After Another, a political thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn; Hamnet, a tearjerker about William Shakespeare’s family life, led by Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal; The Secret Agent, a drama about an ordinary man (Wagner Moura) forced to go into hiding in 1970s Brazil; Sinners, a horror story set in the Jim Crow South in which Michael B. Jordan played identical twin brothers; and Marty Supreme, starring Timothée Chalamet as a ping pong player in midcentury New York.

All great movies in very different ways. But how do we know what good casting is, anyway?

To get some answers, I called two experts: Destiny Lilly, president of Casting Society, and a casting director for film, theater, and TV; and Richard Hicks, a casting director for film and TV and the casting directors branch governor of the AMPAS.

“No fingerprints”

“One thing I often say is when casting is sublime, it disappears,” says Hicks, whose credits include Zero Dark Thirty. “It’s not hard to understand why people haven’t been in the habit of understanding that there’s a person behind that magic moment, behind that alchemy.”

It’s easier to notice casting when it doesn’t work. “It’s like a bump in the road, and it slows down the audience’s perception” of the story, he says.

Lilly agrees. “People notice it when it’s bad, or when they think people are miscast, more than they notice when it’s good,” she says. “When it’s good, it just feels effortless. It leaves no fingerprints.”

Casting tends to get overlooked, even within the industry, because it happens so early in the filmmaking process, long before most other departments have started work. “By the time the film has been shot, edited, and released, that could be a year or two years,” Lilly says.

Out of necessity, it’s also a process that’s kept confidential, which only adds to the mystery. “We can’t have everyone watching the casting process. It wouldn’t be a respectful way to engage with the actors,” Lilly says.

This confidentiality also means that few people know what goes into casting any given film.

“It essentially happens in a private conversation between the casting director and the producer and the director,” Hicks says.

One Battle After Another boasted DiCaprio and Penn in leading roles. They’re Oscar-winning movie stars who’d be at the top of pretty much any director’s dream list, but casting is about much more than landing the biggest names.

The film also launched an exciting newcomer, Chase Infiniti, who played DiCaprio’s teenage daughter. Similarly, Sinners featured Miles Caton in his first film role as a gifted young blues guitarist. The movie wouldn’t work without his commanding performance.

“I love discoveries,” Lilly says. “As a casting director, you’re like, What? An actor I don’t know? You are immediately googling.”

“World-building”

Then there are the countless smaller roles, cast with performers who lend texture and authenticity to the fictional worlds of their film. One Battle After Another featured memorable nurses, high school students, and Mexican American skateboarders.

“Around Leonardo DiCaprio, a world was created, and that world did not come together haphazardly. It came together through the care and attention of a casting director who takes as much care with the smallest parts as they do with the biggest,” Hicks says. “Even the tiny parts propel the story.”

A huge part of keeping the story in motion is making sure that the cast looks and feels right for the setting. “It’s important that you’re not pulled out of the story by the casting,” Lilly says, noting that in The Secret Agent, “Everybody felt like they were in the ‘70s…The casting helps build the world without people even having to speak. Their faces tell you a story.”

The same is true of Marty Supreme, in which Chalamet was surrounded by actors who looked like they belonged on the Lower East Side in the 1950s — as did their suits, spectacles, and cramped tenement apartments. “Just like you would do world-building in a fantasy story, you are doing world-building in a story that’s taking place in the past,” Lilly says. (It’s worth noting that four of the five casting nominees this year were period pieces; One Battle After Another is set more or less in the present day, but the timeline is intentionally vague.)

Inspired casting of supporting roles can also amplify a powerful lead performance. Jordan won the best actor Oscar for playing identical twins who move and speak in distinct ways. They also have romantic partners, played by Wunmi Mosaku and Hailee Steinfeld, who help further set the brothers apart. “The thought put into casting the love interests of those twins and how those two actors are very different was brilliant,” Lilly says.

Similarly, Hamnet was so devastatingly effective because Mescal, Buckley, and the actors who portrayed their children — especially Jacobi Jupe, who played the doomed title character — were convincing as a family unit. “The casting of children is always very complex,” Lilly says. “Finding children who are able to really do a good job, while also being able to handle the more complex emotions that are required, is really tough.”

Ultimately, Hicks believes a good casting director is interested in “the breadth of human experience,” not just acting.. “We’re sociologists, we’re explorers, we’re librarians, we’re enthusiasts, we’re champions, we’re psychologists — we’re all of that,” he says. “That’s what keeps the job so consistently fascinating.”

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

On Sunday Jessie Buckley won the Oscar for best actress for her gut-wrenching performance as a grieving mother in Hamnet.

Her victory was hardly an upset. The thirty-six-year-old was viewed as the frontrunner in the race since Hamnet, a fictionalized look at William Shakespeare’s family life, hit the fall festival circuit. She had clinched virtually every precursor award, despite a worthy batch of contenders like Emma Stone and Rose Byrne.

But it was surprising in at least one way: Buckley is the first Irish woman to win an Academy Award for lead actress in the nearly 100-year history of the Oscars. Despite Ireland’s rich theatrical tradition, only two other Irish women, Saoirse Ronan and Ruth Negga, have been nominated in the category.

Though she has lived and worked in the United Kingdom for the last 15 years, Buckley paid tribute to her Irish family in a moving, heartfelt speech. She dedicated the award to “the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart,” and ended by saying “Go raibh maith agaibh, slán,” — or “thank you, goodbye” in Irish.

Two years ago, Cillian Murphy became the first Irish-born performer to win the Oscar for best actor, for his role in the historical drama Oppenheimer. (Before you ask, “but what about Daniel Day-Lewis?”, the three-time Oscar-winner has Irish citizenship and has lived there for many years, but was born and raised in England.)

Buckley was the most prominent representative of Irish culture on Sunday night, but not the only winner from her homeland: visual effects artist Richard Baneham picked up his third Academy Award for his work on Avatar: Fire and Ash, and according to Screen Ireland, Irish films and talent earned 10 nominations this year. Irish music also played a pivotal role in Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s Oscar-winning Jim Crow horror story.

In yet another glaring sign of Irish cultural ascendance and recognition, Buckley’s Hamnet co-star Paul Mescal is also Irish. That’s right: A middle-class lad from County Kildare — not a Brit — played The Bard, the most celebrated writer in the English language. (Oscars host Conan O’Brien — a famed Irish-American — even noted that for the first time since 2012, there were no British nominees in the best actor or actress categories this year. Take that, Great Britain!)

Irish president Catherine Connelly acknowledged Buckley’s historic victory in a press statement, calling it “a thoroughly deserved testament not only to Jessie’s outstanding performance in Hamnet, but to her performances both in film and on stage across her career to date. I know that her proud community in Kerry and beyond will be sharing with her in this wonderful achievement.”

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Buckley’s win is one part of a broader surge in Irish popular culture over the last decade.

In recent years, Hollywood has been gripped by Hibernophilia, with Irish actors like Ronan, Buckley, Mescal, Barry Keoghan, Domhnall Gleeson, Andrew Scott, Nicola Coughlan, and Eve Hewson popping up in seemingly everything. (Irish actors and this “green wave” has coincided with the popularity of other Irish cultural exports, like Sally Rooney’s novels, TV shows such as Bad Sisters and Derry Girls, the politically charged hip hop trio Kneecap — and their autobiographical movie — and even Kerrygold butter.)

2023 was a watershed year for Irish talent in Hollywood, when movies and actors from the country racked up 14 Oscar nominations. (And Colin Farrell should have won for Banshees of Inisherin, but let’s not dwell on that.) That year, Paul Mescal, promoting his performance in the film Aftersun, made his home country proud by giving an interview in the Irish language on the red carpet at the British Academy of Film and Television Awards — a highly symbolic venue for such a gesture.

Despite its small size and population (about 6 million), Ireland has long punched above its weight, culturally speaking — particularly in literature and music.

“We’re really good storytellers because that’s all we had for so long,” Sharon Horgan told me in 2024. “We had nothing. We just had the craic and someone to be angry with. There’s an amazing tradition of storytelling, and also this great darkness and ability to harness tragedy and make a great song or a story about it. For a small island, we’ve always had enormous talent come out of it and a hugely influential impact on culture.”

Irish pop culture may be particularly appealing in 2026 because it doesn’t come with the same geopolitical baggage as the equivalent from the United States, the U.K., or pretty much every country in Western Europe. Because of their history as a colonized nation, the Irish are, on the whole, deeply sympathetic to subjugated people everywhere, an affinity that has grown stronger since the war in Gaza began in late 2023. “There’s a nonthreatening feeling to Ireland. We’ve never invaded anyone; we’ve never colonized anyone. What’s not to like about that?” columnist Séamas O’Reilly told Vulture in 2024. Essentially controlled by the Catholic Church just a few decades ago, Ireland has undergone sweeping political and cultural change, and is now firmly on the right side of issues like abortion and gay rights (while certain other countries are frantically moving backwards).

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Since Donald Trump’s re-election, increasing numbers of Americans see Ireland as an appealing alternative to the U.S. According to The Irish Times, the number of American citizens seeking asylum in Ireland has increased more than four-fold since 2024, and nearly 10,000 Americans moved to Ireland in the 12-month period ending April 2025. (Actor Rosie O’Donnell was one of them.)

The politics are one thing. But there’s another, more straightforward explanation for Ireland’s cultural ascendance: money.

Over the last decade and a half, both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland have become busy hubs for film and TV production, thanks to generous government subsidies. The financial incentives are so compelling that a number of American game shows are now filming in Ireland, flying contestants in from the U.S. (because airfare for an entire cast and crew is still cheaper than making a show in L.A.) This production boom has helped train local crews, editors, and technicians. Within the country, programs continue to be launched in support of creative endeavors, including initiatives that provide basic income for artists.

The country, with a rich theatrical lineage, has only recently begun to foster homegrown acting talent.

Ireland is home to the Abbey Theatre, the first state-subsidized theater in the English-speaking world. It was also the training ground for Irish dramatists like J.M. Synge for over a century. But it did not have a drama school on the level of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London until 2011, when the Lir Academy — also known as the National Academy of Dramatic Art at Trinity College, Dublin — opened its doors.

“The idea of professional acting training was never fully appreciated in Ireland,” said founder Danielle Ryan, who helped fund the conservatory with her family’s airline fortune, in 2011. “Mostly the tradition in Irish theater was, ‘Get up on stage and give it a go.’” Though it’s a tiny program, it has already proved successful: Paul Mescal graduated from the Lir in 2017 and was soon cast in the TV adaptation of Rooney’s Normal People — his breakthrough role.

Buckley, who is a few years older than Mescal, followed a more unconventional path to stardom. After finishing high school in her hometown of Killarney in County Kerry, she applied to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, but was rejected. On a whim, she tried out for I’d Do Anything, a talent competition show following the search to find new stars for a West End revival of Oliver! (You can watch highlights on YouTube, but warning: you will definitely get sucked into the late-aughts body-shaming horror of it all.)

She finished in second place, but the visibility helped her land work on the stage — and a place at RADA. A decade and a half after being a reality TV also-ran, Buckley is an Oscar winner, one of the industry’s biggest stars, and the most visible face of a new generation of Irish talent. Hopefully, the Irish government’s investment in the arts will lead to more Jessie Buckleys and Paul Mescals in the future.

We can all drink to that, especially today. Sláinte.

The ballots have been cast, the limos have been booked, and the Botox has been injected.

On Sunday night, the 98th Academy Awards will take place at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, with Sinners and One Battle After Another both expected to win big.

Hosted by Conan O’Brien and airing on ABC, the awards come at a moment of profound uncertainty in the film business — and the world as a whole. This volatility has seeped into the Oscars themselves; many key categories, particularly on the acting side, seem almost ridiculously wide open.

Only a few things seem certain. Jessie Buckley will win best actress for her gut-wrenching performance as a grieving mother in Hamnet, no matter how much she dislikes cats. Host Conan O’ Brien will be self-deprecating and hilarious, reminding us all why we loved having him on late-night TV. And none of us will be able to get “Golden,” the Oscar-nominated earworm from KPop Demon Hunters that will be performed Sunday, out of our heads.

Every Oscar season brings its fair share of scandals and this year is no different, with a late-breaking controversy involving a certain actor’s feelings about other art forms throwing more chaos into the mix.

Here are the biggest questions about this year’s Oscars. Follow the show with me on Sunday night in The Contrarian subscriber chat.

Will last-minute momentum propel Sinners past One Battle After Another?

The race for best picture has two clear frontrunners, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Though one is a Gothic horror tale about vampires in the Jim Crow South and the other a darkly comic political thriller about a burned-out ex-radical on the run from white supremacist goons, the films have a lot in common. Both speak powerfully to the current moment and confront the pernicious influence of racism on American life. Both were produced by Warner Bros., a studio that’s about to get swallowed up in yet another corporate merger. And both were made by visionary writer-directors who broke out as twentysomething wunderkinds and have since established themselves as cinematic elder statesmen.

One Battle After Another has been the odds-on favorite since September, when it opened to ecstatic reviews and solid box office returns. It has won many precursor awards, including the Producers Guild Award and the BAFTA. But in recent weeks, momentum for Sinners and its stars has been building momentum. It earned a record-setting 16 Oscar nominations — to OBAA’s 13 — and picked up an award from the Screen Actors Guild for outstanding ensemble. A rare box office smash that isn’t part of an established franchise or based on existing IP, Sinners is exactly the kind of film that the industry should support in this uncertain moment, and Coogler an unusually versatile filmmaker equally adept at big-budget superhero movies and Sundance dramas. At a time when Republicans are openly embracing white supremacist rhetoric, the Academy could send a powerful message by honoring a crowd-pleasing film that was directed by a Black man, features a predominantly Black cast, and is a thrilling celebration of Black culture.

Will Timothée walk away emptée-handed?

The award for “most unpredictable category of the year” easily goes to the race for lead actor. In early January, Timothée Chalamet clinched the Golden Globe and appeared to be cruising to an Oscar for his performance as a wildly annoying, pockmarked ping-pong player in Marty Supreme. (An award he hoped to win last year for his work in the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown.)

Then came a bunch of boastful press tour soundbites that made everyone wonder if Chalamet was really just playing himself in the movie, followed by a series of upsets at precursor awards. At the BAFTAs, he lost to Robert Aramayo, the little-known star of I Swear. A week later, the Screen Actors Guild honored Michael B. Jordan for his compelling turn as twin brothers in Sinners. As voting closed last week, Chalamet was in the news again for making dismissive comments about ballet and opera during a town hall conversation with Matthew McConaughey (a sentence I can’t believe I just wrote). The slow-burning Chalamet backlash exploded into a full-blown inferno, with everyone from Nathan Lane to Misty Copeland lobbing criticism at Kylie Jenner’s boyfriend.

All this chaos means the best actor category is surprisingly wide open. While Jordan is now narrowly favored to win, it’s easy to imagine a scenario in which Chalamet gets his long-awaited Oscar anyway, or even in which Wagner Moura, Ethan Hawke, or Leonardo DiCaprio prevails. Each nominee is plausible for different reasons: Hawke is widely beloved and has been nominated four previous times, twice for acting; Wagner Moura is quietly brilliant in The Secret Agent, and is likely to do well with international voters; and Leonardo DiCaprio delivers his funniest, most vulnerable performance in years in OBAA. While my personal favorite is Moura (and not just because he looks so good in bellbottoms), I wouldn’t complain about any of these nominees winning. Even — deep sigh — Chalamet.

Will Paul Thomas Anderson finally nab an Oscar? Or three?

In a career spanning 30 years, Paul Thomas Anderson has made multiple modern classics, including Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, and Magnolia. He is responsible for some of the most indelible cinematic moments in recent memory, and is such an enthusiastic cineaste that he shot OBAA in VistaVision, a widescreen format that hadn’t been used in 60 years, and made it all the rage in Hollywood.

Yet owing to a combination of bad luck and the Academy’s fickle taste, Anderson has yet to win an Oscar, despite 11 previous nominations. In all likelihood, that will change on Sunday night, when Anderson is up for three Oscars for writing, directing, and producing One Battle After Another. He seems all but certain to take home gold for OBAA’s screenplay, which was loosely adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland. But in the Director category, he faces stiff competition from Coogler, and for reasons outlined above, Best Picture could easily go to Sinners. For the sake of the film bros in our lives, let’s hope that Anderson’s losing streak is over, and that he doesn’t become the Susan Lucci of the Oscars.

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How much will Hollywood’s merger anxiety affect the evening?

One of the most painfully ironic things about this year’s Oscars is that two leading best picture contenders, Sinners and One Battle After Another, hail from a studio, Warner Bros., that is about to get swallowed whole by Paramount, a far less successful rival that just so happens to be controlled by the son of a MAGA-friendly billionaire. In October, Warner Bros. Discovery, the giant conglomerate that was formed via merger just four years ago, was officially put up for sale. This sparked a contentious and highly politicized bidding war between Netflix and Paramount that overlapped almost perfectly with an awards season dominated by Warner Bros. Netflix scored an early victory in negotiations but abruptly backed out of the running a few weeks ago amid mounting political scrutiny, enabling Paramount to acquire WBD.

When/if the merger goes through, thousands of people will likely lose their jobs in an industry that has already faced devastating cuts. And David Ellison, the man who put Bari Weiss in charge of CBS News, will have control over CNN as well as entertainment properties like Warner Bros. Will an Ellison-run studio support provocative projects like One Battle After Another, a politically charged thriller in which the undisputed villain is a white supremacist military officer; or Sinners, a Gothic horror story set in the Jim Crow South that uses vampires as a symbol for racism and Black cultural appropriation? It is far from certain.

A media watchdog group has plans to skewer Ellison with a mobile billboard outside the Dolby Theatre Sunday. But the real question is whether anyone onstage will meaningfully address the $111-billion elephant in the room, and what it means for the business — and the art — of filmmaking.

What about the war in Iran, ICE, the Epstein files and everything else going on in the world?

During Trump’s first term in office, celebrities frequently spoke out against the MAGA agenda at industry awards shows and other red carpet events. But since he returned to the White House last year, Hollywood has — on the whole — been much more muted in its criticisms of the president. Aside from a few ICE OUT pins and a barb about CBS News, the Golden Globes in January were almost bizarrely devoid of political jokes. But that was two months and at least one haphazard war ago.

At the Grammys last month, artists like Bad Bunny seemed more willing to voice dissent. Hopefully, this will embolden their peers in the film business. Many of the leading contenders this year are overtly political in nature and offer depictions of people living under authoritarian rule that feel eerily relevant to life under Trump 2.0.

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The villain of One Battle After Another is Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a Greg Bovino-esque white supremacist military officer who hunts down immigrants with glee. Best picture nominee The Secret Agent revisits the Brazilian military dictatorship, while It Was Just An Accident was inspired by dissident filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s time in an Iranian prison. It would be hard to imagine some of the predicted winners — like Penn — not using the stage to say something about, well, everything going on in the world. But we’ll see.

Who will win the new Oscar for casting?

This year brings the first new category added to the Oscars in a quarter-century. For the first time in its history, the Academy will hand out an award for achievement in casting. The move has thrilled many casting professionals, whose job is poorly understood by the general public and even by industry peers. (For great insight into the work that casting directors do, check out the documentary Casting By.) Most prognosticators think that Francine Maisler is likely to win for her work on Sinners, but it’s a brand-new category, and anything can happen.

Will this be the most devastating “In Memoriam” ever?

The last year has been a brutal one for celebrity deaths. Over the last 12 months, we’ve lost internationally beloved stars including Diane Keaton, Robert Redford, Rob Reiner, Robert Duvall, Diane Ladd, and Catherine O’Hara. The annual “in Memoriam” segment is always heavily scrutinized by viewers, who are hyper-sensitive to omissions and perceived slights. Producers Raj Kapoor and Katy Mullan have already said they plan to have an extended In Memoriam this year. “We’ve had an incredibly tough year of losses,” Mullan told Variety. “So many cinema titans have passed away, and there are so many people who care so deeply for a lot of the people we’ll be tributing and honoring.” Barbra Streisand was also reportedly in talks to perform during the segment in tribute to Redford, her co-star in The Way We Were. So have your Kleenex ready.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian. Follow her Live commentary of the Oscars Sunday night within The Contrarian Chat.

On September 9, 1995, the British charity War Child released The Help Album, a compilation featuring the biggest names in British and Irish music, which raised funds for children in war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Inspired by John Lennon’s adage that records should be released quickly (like newspapers), the album was recorded on a single day — September 4 — and was available in stores less than a week later.

Produced by Brian Eno, Help (as it is generally known) included new music by Britpop archrivals Blur and Oasis, as well as acts like Portishead, the Stone Roses, and Sinéad O’Connor. Even Paul McCartney contributed, re-recording a version of the Beatles’ “Come Together” with Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller. It raised £1.25 million for War Child and brought much-needed attention to genocidal violence in the former Yugoslavia.

Thirty-one years later, the situation for children around the world has only grown more dire. According to War Child, about 10% of the world’s children were affected by conflict when Help was released. Today, because of wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Yemen, Sudan, Syria, and beyond, that number has doubled, to 1 in 5 children — or about 520 million worldwide living in or fleeing conflict zones.

But today’s musicians are once again meeting the moment.

On Friday, War Child released Help(2), a compilation that will help support the organization’s work delivering aid to children in conflict zones. It features new recordings by many of the artists from the original, such as Oasis (who contributed a live version of “Acquiesce” recorded at Wembley Stadium during their enormously successful reunion tour last year) and Blur’s Damon Albarn. But it also includes songs by a new generation of socially-conscious musicians, including pop star Olivia Rodrigo, British indie rockers Wet Leg, and Cameron Winter, frontman of the much buzzed-about Brooklyn band Geese.

The songs, a mix of covers and originals, were recorded at London’s famed Abbey Road Studios over the course of a week in November. Producer James Ford steered the project while undergoing treatment for leukemia. “The actual week of the Abbey Road sessions, I was in the ICU with a pipe coming out of my fucking neck,” he told The Guardian.

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Ford started by reaching out to many of the well-known artists he has worked with in the past. Despite the project’s seemingly non-controversial goal — helping children — several acts declined to participate.

“It was actually a great insight into the industry: which people are willing to do something. People who you’d think would be into it flat-out refused because they saw it as too political or something like that. It was fascinating,” he told The Guardian.

Oscar-winning director Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest) was tapped to create a documentary around the project. He came up with the idea of having school children film the studio sessions, and of giving cameras to children in war zones “so we could see what they see,” he said in a press release.

We wanted to remove the adult hand and the adult world around them — the conflict, the injury and the war. What they did with the cameras was up to them, we just encouraged them to play. What we got back was the purest form of their energy, joy and truth. It gives us a chance to not only witness, but experience their innocence, joy and resilience.

The album is available to buy in various formats and stream on multiple platforms. Click here for more info.

Here are a few standout tracks to get you started.

1. Olivia Rodrigo, “Book of Love”

Rodrigo is not only one of the most politically outspoken pop stars of her generation, she also has excellent taste in music that’s much older than she is. Her contribution to Help(2) is a gorgeous rendition of “The Book of Love,” originally recorded by the Magnetic Fields. The accompanying music video (see above), also released Friday, was filmed by children in Yemen, Sudan, Ukraine, and Gaza (listen closely for the sounds of their laughter).

2. Pulp, “Begging for Change”

When it comes to the age-old Britpop debate of “Blur or Oasis?” my answer has always been “Pulp, actually.” The group wasn’t involved in the original Help album, which came out just as they were on the rise in the U.K., but they contributed the money they received for winning the prestigious Mercury Prize in 1996 to War Child. The group’s frontman, Jarvis Cocker, said he started writing this song 14 years ago but couldn’t make it work. “Somehow, with it having the focus of trying to help some people and change their situation, I did manage to finish it,” he said.

3. Fontaines DC, “Black Boys on Mopeds”

In 1995, Sinéad O’Connor contributed a last-minute cover of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe.” This time around, the Irish rock group Fontaines DC (the “DC’ stands for “Dublin City”) paid tribute to the late, great iconoclast by performing “Black Boys on Mopeds,” a haunting, prescient protest anthem from her 1990 album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. Like pretty much everything about O’Connor, the song, about racist police violence in Margaret Thatcher’s U.K, was way ahead of its time.

4. Beth Gibbons, “Sunday Morning”

Gibbons is the lead singer of Portishead, the British trip-hop group whose album Dummy was the soundtrack for countless futon makeout sessions in the 1990s. She lends her yearning vocals to this cover of the Velvet Underground classic. She couldn’t possibly sound more different from Lou Reed, which somehow makes her the ideal person to reinterpret this song.

5. Cameron Winter, “Warning”

This contribution from the lead singer of Geese is about as unsettling as it gets, featuring menacing strings straight out of a Hitchcock movie and obliquely terrifying lyrics like “This is your warning/ You’re gonna appear before a stranger. I don’t know if you’ll be in any danger. For some are not pulled into moving cars/Some are not dragged down Fifth Avenue by the hairs in their ears.”

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

Can you be good at reality TV and have decent politics?

It’s a question that’s as relevant as it’s ever been, a year into Donald Trump’s second term in the White House. A guy who convinced millions of Americans he was a visionary leader by pretending to be one on The Apprentice, Trump also appointed numerous TV personalities to key roles in his administration, including Real World lumberjack-turned-Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy.

The president has long since normalized the idea that reality TV stardom can be a credible path to a career in politics and inspired other conservatives to follow in his footsteps (e.g., Spencer Pratt, the former Hills star who is running for mayor of Los Angeles).

Seemingly attached to the quaint notion that politicians should be vaguely qualified for their jobs, Democrats have yet to turn to reality TV for the next generation of political talent. But when and if they do, might I suggest they recruit Rob Rausch?

Last week, the twenty-seven-year-old snake handler from Alabama won $220,800 in the Season 4 finale of The Traitors after taking advantage of his good looks and Southern charm to play a dazzlingly perfect game.

The next day, he was spotted in New York City wearing an ICE OUT pin — an image that sent shockwaves through the Traitors fandom. A proud farm boy with a penchant for wearing overalls over a bare chest, Rausch does not exactly scream “woke”; if anything, as a Gen Z white guy from the Deep South, he is MAGA-coded.

And yet there he was, in the hottest accessory of the season for progressive celebrities.

As Rausch explained to GQ, “I don’t fuck with ICE. I couldn’t sleep at night not supporting my immigrant brothers and sisters. It’s one thing to enforce the law, it’s another thing to dehumanize people and break up families.”

It was a simple, straightforward message delivered by the man who’d just delivered one of the most cunningly brilliant performances in reality TV history.

No one in the history of The Traitors has played better than Rausch, who managed to almost completely avoid suspicion throughout his run on the show.

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In the hit Peacock series, twenty or so marginally famous people hole up in a Scottish castle, compete in elaborate challenges, and try to suss out the traitors in their midst (while trying not to get “murdered” by said traitors). Hosted by a knowingly over-the-top Alan Cumming, the show is one part Survivor, one part Agatha Christie murder mystery — and is every bit as entertaining as that sounds.

Rausch, who previously appeared on the dating show Love Island USA, was designated as a traitor from the beginning, along with two former Real Housewives stars, Lisa Rinna (Beverly Hills) and Candiace Dillard Bassett.

From day one in the castle, it was clear to viewers at home that Rausch, as the old reality TV adage goes, wasn’t there to make friends. But he was also very good at making everyone in the castle believe that he was. Even as he repeatedly stabbed his fellow traitors in the back, Rausch was able to fly under the radar.

Though obviously intelligent, he never rubbed it in anyone’s face. (Rausch earned my undying admiration when he corrected Michael Rappaport, the actor whose obnoxious antics and poor table manners marred the season’s first few episodes, on the meaning of the word “commiserate.”) He outwitted a cast that included veterans of strategy-intensive shows like Survivor and Big Brother, the host of Top Chef, two Olympic athletes, and Travis Kelce’s mom. In other words: people who understand how to play games on TV.

By the time last week’s finale rolled around, it seemed inevitable that Rausch was going to win. Yet the episode was full of dramatic twists and shocking betrayals. In a moment that will surely be memed for the rest of time, Rausch revealed to Maura Higgins, his best friend on the show, that he had been a traitor all along — even though he had pinky promised her that he wasn’t.

“You’re never gonna have a girlfriend after this,” she replied, visibly stunned. “You’re such a good liar.”

Higgins, a Love Island alum known for her enormous hats, had repeatedly talked about her difficulty trusting men. But don’t feel too badly for her: this week, to make it up to Higgins, Rausch bought her a Birkin bag.)

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Excelling at The Traitors requires an ability to win the trust of others while avoiding suspicion. For this reason, the show is also an illuminating case-study in unconscious bias. (There’s a depressing tendency for Black women to get voted off early.)

There’s no doubt Rausch’s victory, though well-earned, was also aided by the fact that he’s an unusually attractive good ol’ boy with White Walker blue eyes, a perfect ski jump nose, and a feathery swoosh of dark hair that would make an Osmond brother jealous.

Rinna, the traitor he betrayed, recently argued that Rausch’s blinding hotness protected him from detection.

“He’s so good looking that people are too afraid to look at him for very long,” she said on TikTok.

This charisma will serve Rausch well no matter what he does next. Like the true ally he is, he’s already voicing erotic audiobooks (“I did it for the girls and the gays,” he said) and has expressed interest in acting (might I suggest a role in Heated Rivalry Season 2?). There’s no indication Rausch has any political ambitions, but he could be a formidable candidate in a state that has elected (far less intelligent) celebrities before. And by taking a public stance against ICE the day after clinching victory on The Traitors, Rausch has shown that he’s willing to use the fame he won by being a very handsome white guy for good.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

Tracii’s day begins early — before dawn. She arrives at work, turns on the lights, and thoroughly searches the building for intruders. Then she checks outside, where it’s still dark, making sure no one is hiding in the woods or behind a dumpster.

Tracii is the head of security at an abortion clinic in Atlanta, and is also the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary short, The Devil is Busy. Directed by Christalyn Hampton and Geeta Gandbhir, the film follows Tracii over the course of a long, stressful day at the clinic, as she works tirelessly to ensure not just the safety but the comfort of the women seeking care. (Neither her last name, nor the name of the clinic, gets mentioned in the film.)

Over the constant din of megaphone-wielding protestors, Tracii calmly helps the patients check in. She assures the “guests,” as she likes to call them, that they’re in good hands and provides them with snacks and water, since many have driven overnight to get there. Occasionally, she has to turn women away because they’ve arrived too late. In Georgia, which has one of the most restrictive policies in the nation, abortion is banned after six weeks. (Women there have died after being denied reproductive healthcare.)

Available to stream on HBO Max, The Devil is Busy is a compelling portrait of a deeply compassionate woman on the frontlines of the abortion war. It packs a lot into 31 minutes, exploring not just the precarious status of abortion care post-Roe v. Wade, but also the fraught intersection of race, religion, and women’s health.

Executive producer Soledad O’Brien said the project originated several years ago. As it became increasingly clear that the Supreme Court was going to overturn the historic ruling guaranteeing the right to an abortion, she and the team at her production company began to think about ways of covering the potential ramifications.

“What would be the story that we would want to tell about the aftermath of the end of Roe v. Wade?” she recalled in a recent Zoom chat.

Hampton, who was working in Atlanta, soon identified Tracii and her colleagues as ideal subjects. “Once I saw the dynamics with the protesters and how Tracii managed her team, I felt like there was a story we could tell,” said Hampton, who spent time at the clinic getting to know the women and their routine before filming began. She was impressed by “how caring and sensitive everyone was.”

O’Brien also found Tracii deeply compelling. “You could watch her eat cereal,” she said. “She doesn’t shy away from anything. She doesn’t couch her language. She’s never checking to see what you want to hear.”

After preliminary research at the facility in 2022, Hampton returned in 2024 for an intense day of shooting. By that time, Roe had been overturned and 25 million American women were living in states with abortion bans or severe restrictions. As a result, there was a discernible shift in the atmosphere at the clinic, with more women traveling from places like Texas and Tennessee, and more getting turned away because it was too late.

The sense of ever-present danger was very real, Hampton said. “You definitely feel it, because the energy of the protesters is so aggressive… As Tracii says, you have to keep your head on a swivel.”

While most of the employees at the clinic, including Tracii, are Black, seemingly all the protestors are white men, and they use language co-opted from Black Lives Matter as a rhetorical weapon against abortion rights (e.g., a crass sign with a fetus saying “I can’t breathe.”) The documentary reveals that one of the protestors served time in prison for setting fire to a Black church. (But God forgave him for that, or so he claims.)

“You get a very clear sense of the hypocrisy of the debate,” said O’Brien, noting that any time she has done a piece on an abortion clinic, “race is very much intertwined into that story and used as leverage.”

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Religion also plays out in surprising ways in the film. While the protestors constantly invoke God and Jesus (“God’s knitting that child together in your womb right now,” one of them shouts), Tracii begins and ends every day with a prayer. She describes her work in almost spiritual terms, saying that her mission is to make every guest feel loved and valued: “That’s the way God blesses me; so that I can bless other people.”

“I rely very heavily on my faith while I’m here,” she says, “because the devil is busy out there.”

O’Brien likes the way the film subverts expectations about religious people and their views on abortion. “It was such an interesting twist to talk very thoughtfully about religion with a deeply religious person who’s also very committed to helping the women in this clinic,” she said.

The title, inspired by Tracii’s quote, is meant to be ironic.

“A lot of people, if they saw the title The Devil is Busy, would think it was about the women in the clinic,” Hampton said. “But we’ve been able to turn that mirror around and say, look at what these [protestors] are doing. Look at how they’re weaponizing and using race and sex against the women who come in here for healthcare services.”

The filmmakers hope that The Devil is Busy brings attention to people like Tracii and the other employees at the clinic, who provide essential services (in addition to abortion).

“People don’t think — or don’t know — that these clinics also provide pap smears and mammograms,” O’Brien said. “So when these clinics disappear or go out of business, understand that all this healthcare for women goes with it.”

“We really do have to get past ‘the A-word,’” said Hampton, “so [clinics] can continue to provide the healthcare that women in these underserved communities need.”

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O’Brien has been busy this Oscar season: She also produced this year’s Academy Award-nominated documentary feature The Perfect Neighbor, which looks at the shooting of an unarmed Black woman in Florida by her white neighbor (and was directed by Gandbhir).

Despite the gloomy state of the journalism industry and the documentary marketplace, O’Brien remains optimistic about telling important, politically-charged stories.

“It’s been a very challenging time for [projects] about social issues, and yet, two of the projects that we’re doing are literally about social issues around Black people,” she said. “I like doing this work, and we’re going to continue to do this work and find the places and the people that want to help us do it.”

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

Jonathan M. Katz is a freelance journalist who previously covered Haiti and other international assignments for the Associated Press. He wrote his first book, The Big Truck that Went By, on the 2010 Haitian earthquake and his experience covering it. His second book, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire covers America’s “small wars” in the early 20th century through the experience of Butler — showing how these conflicts in Haiti, the Philippines, Mexico, China and elsewhere are remembered abroad and often forgotten at home, even when they impact our current politics.

Katz spoke with The Contrarian about his book and its relevance to our current moment. The following is excerpted from that conversation, with edits for length and clarity.

When did you first become interested in this current and historic study of American interventions abroad? What drew you to this topic?

In some ways, it precedes or developed alongside my journalism career in undergrad. I went to Northwestern, I was an American Studies major, and I also got a second major in history. I was into that stuff, and then moved away from it as I got into my journalism career and became hyper-focused on the moment that I was in. Haiti is when a lot of this stuff started coming into focus — the impacts of the past on the present and the ways that those histories still lived.

Remembering and forgetting the past, these interpolations — I hadn’t learned to question those things to the degree that I did in Haiti. When I started writing my books, I started re-exercising those muscles that I had developed earlier on to go back into the histories, understand the ways that forgetting and mythologizing those histories were informing the present.

Why do you think Americans are so bad at remembering these interventions abroad?

That’s a really good question. There’s a couple of different pieces of it.

One of them is that we as humans have a deeply inborn capacity to remember and to forget. They’re both key to, in a lot of ways, a healthy life, and in some ways a healthy civilizational life. If a pain can’t heal and go away and you can’t move on, then you can’t function. But it’s also an injury to other people, and it makes for a really poorly understood life and politics if you just forget everything — especially if you forget the things that you did.

The epigraph of Gangsters of Capitalism, it’s a Haitian proverb — Bay kou bliye, pote mak sonje, “The one who deals the blow forgets. The one who carries the scar remembers.”

That capacity for forgetting, that capacity for amnesia, palliative as it may be if you are the one who was injured, becomes very destructive — and self-destructive — [if you are the one] who did the misdeed. It is a constitutive part of empire-making. This is not particular to the American empire. This is true of every single empire. It is important for the functioning of the empire to forget, but the results are bad.

Forgetting these things doesn’t make the memories go away in other people. These things end up getting sublimated and then kind of rising up through the cracks of your society.

What do you think we miss about our current political moment when we don’t know [this history]? How do these things that happened in the early 20th century, mid 20th century, impact how we do politics today in the United States, not just abroad?

Well, not knowing about this, you miss everything.

The War on Terror never ended. Obama’s big contribution to the War on Terror was continuing it, basically making it a permanent thing. And now Trump is, unsurprisingly, turning it back on to the metropol; he’s turning it back to the people who live domestically.

But even more than that, when you open the aperture even more, one of the easiest ways to answer the question of “what is missed?” is if you didn’t know about this stuff when Trump appeared it would have seemed like it came out of nowhere.

“This isn’t who we are,” right? That’s a phrase that you hear a lot. “How could Americans treat other people this inhumanely? How could we treat the world as if it’s just a repository of resources for us to invade and steal at will?”

And the answer is, because that’s been a huge current of American life since the beginning. It’s the reason why the imperial boomerang became such a philosophical obsession among a small but important group of intellectuals in the mid, late 20th century — they were trying to understand, “where did Nazism come from?”

It took the work of people like Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, who had grown up under French colonialism, saw its brutality, experienced it in various forms, and then saw, French and German brutality in Europe, fought against it, and then in Fanon’s case, saw continuing renewed French brutality against Algeria. But also, Hannah Arendt is in a concentration camp. She is persecuted, hunted by the Nazis. She knows Nazis from her youth, some of them very well, and she’s also putting these things together.

It’s still a moment of reckoning that we’re in, of trying to figure out, “where the hell did that come from?” And one of the answers is, it was there all along. You ask what we miss — it is not a coincidence that so much of the Trump administration’s preoccupation has been literally erasing history.

Do you think that there has been in the last five years a better awareness [of the USA’s history abroad], perhaps prompted by this new Donroe Doctrine interventionism in Latin America? Or do you think we’re still missing a lot of this stuff that would help us explain how we got here?

I can tell you, as n equals one, that when the intervention in Venezuela happened, all of a sudden I started getting a renewed burst of interest in Gangsters and my work in general. Every day I sound less crazy talking about the fact that we’re living through a resurgence of fascism in the United States.

And insofar as moments of reckoning with fascism helped cement some of these understandings of the way that history fits into the present, maybe for many people, this could be a moment where these ideas take — and are held. But Americans have an incredibly rich and dynamic set of tools to drop memories out of our brains and just forget everything.

As I was re-reading Gangsters, [I noticed in the early 20th century] there’s people in the Philippines, in China, people looking to the United States for help in their rebellions. But 250 years on for the Declaration of Independence, how do you see that kind of modern republic idealism being interpreted or aspired to abroad? Is it still?

I think a big part of the reason why the Declaration in particular has such an incredible, sustained power is it was literally a revolutionary document. And so anyone who is fighting against the power, fighting against an empire, trying to assert themselves in any way, there’s a lot in there to look at, especially in the first part.

I don’t know the extent to which people overseas today are following in the tradition of Emilio Aguinaldo and Ho Chi Minh and others who looked at these founding documents in the United States and saw inspiration for themselves. But I would not be surprised if it remained a big piece of it.

Other than Gangsters of Capitalism, at this 250 year anniversary, what is one book you’d recommend people read to get a better sense of this American history and interventionism?

Well, Spencer Ackerman’s book, Reign of Terror. That’s a really important one to read. A good companion to Gangsters about a later period is The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins. I can tell you one, it’s the obverse of intervention: Kathleen Belew’s Bring the War Home, which is about the ways that in the post-Vietnam War era, people came home from Vietnam and other wars of that time and created the far right.

Also, everybody should read Robert Caro’s series on Lyndon Johnson, just on general principle.

It’s incredible. I finally bit the bullet on it, and now I’m waiting on the fifth volume, which will be the Winds of Winter for me. It’s like, “come on Bobby, you’ve got this one in you.”

When Andrew Jarecki starts making a documentary, he rarely knows where the film is going to take him — or even whether he’s making a documentary at all.

But the director has a bloodhound-like ability to sniff out a good story, and a willingness to follow up a hunch with a tremendous amount of legwork, as evidenced by documentaries like Capturing the Friedmans, about a father and son accused of child molestation, and The Jinx, which helped lead to Robert Durst’s conviction for murder, both of which feature jaw-dropping twists and revelations.

The same can be said of his latest documentary, The Alabama Solution, which is nominated for an Academy Award.

Using video footage filmed by incarcerated men on contraband cell phones over many years, the documentary paints a harrowing portrait of life inside Alabama’s prisons, which are among the deadliest in the United States, with the highest murder, overdose, and suicide rates in the country.

The journey to making the film began in 2019 when Jarecki, at the urging of his teenage daughter, read a memoir written by Anthony Ray Hinton, a wrongfully convicted man who spent 30 years on death row in Alabama.

Soon enough, Jarecki started making trips to the state to look into its notorious prisons, where conditions are so dire that in 2016 the Department of Justice opened an investigation into whether constitutional rights were being violated.

Although members of the media are generally prohibited from prisons in the state, a warden invited Jarecki and co-director, Charlotte Kaufman, to film a revival at Easterling Correctional Center in Barbour County. They figured that documenting an event on the prison grounds, however carefully curated it might have been, was better than nothing.

Numerous incarcerated men approached them off-camera and urged them to dig deeper into what was really going on inside the system. They shared horrific stories about fellow prisoners being held in solitary confinement for years and others brutally getting beaten by guards.

“Once we started to understand that, we thought, ‘We have to make a film about this,’” Jarecki recalled in a phone interview with The Contrarian this week.

In order to make that happen, they relied heavily on footage recorded by a group of incarcerated activists: Melvin Ray, Robert Earl Council (who goes by Kinetic Justice), and Raoul Poole. Using phones obtained on the prison black market, they document nightmarish images: floors soaked with blood; drug-addicted men passed out on the toilet and left unattended; rat-infested cells. They face extraordinary repercussions for their efforts to bring these conditions to light, especially Council, who is nearly killed by guards, loses sight in one eye, and spends years in solitary confinement.

These men also tip Jarecki and Kaufman off to the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten to death by correctional officers in 2019, in what the state has claimed was a justified act of self defense (an account that is contradicted by numerous other witnesses). He is one of more than a thousand people who have died in Alabama prisons since the DOJ investigation was launched in 2016.

The Alabama Solution exposes a system of almost unimaginable cruelty that is largely motivated by profit. According to statistics cited in the film, incarcerated workers produce more than $450 million a year in goods and unpaid services for the state of Alabama.

The men featured not only work in prisons, they are also loaned out to private companies, including fast food restaurants and government agencies (incarcerated men tend the grounds at the mansion where Governor Kay Ivey resides), despite the fact that many have also been deemed too dangerous to be granted parole.

This ultimately leads Council and his fellow activists to organize a weeks-long work stoppage in 2022.

“The state of Alabama continues to thrive on the bodies of Black, Brown and poor white people,” Council says in the film. “The institution of slavery is real. You can change the name of it but the undergirdings of it are the same: exploitation.”

Premiering on HBO in October, The Alabama Solution has helped bring attention to the activists trying to improve conditions in the state’s prisons — and in facilities across the country — a fight that is ongoing. In late January, Council, Ray, and Poole were moved to solitary confinement by Alabama officials after they called for a work stoppage.

Ahead of the Academy Awards on March 15, I talked to Jarecki about this urgent, alarming film. The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Tell me about how you were able to get this video while keeping these prisoners safe?

They’re very, very strong humans. It was clear when we started talking to [Robert Earl Council] that it was part of his mission to get this material out. He’s never been afraid to speak out. Amazingly enough, when we first got in touch with him, he was just coming out of solitary. He had been in solitary, at that point, for the better part of five years. When he spoke to Charlotte [Kaufman], my co-director, he was immediately engaged and wanted to participate. We were worried that he would not be ready to keep speaking about it. Most people wouldn’t. It’s an incredible level of commitment and bravery.

The cell phone video was a practical solution for you as filmmakers who couldn’t get inside the prisons. But creatively, it also allows these men to tell their own story.

That line from Melvin [Ray] early on is so powerful. [During a video call], Charlotte asks, “Would a regular phone call be better?” And he says, “No, we want to be able to show our whole selves, not just our voices.” He’s onto something, of course, which is that prisoners, in general, are so dehumanized by the system. The less you know about somebody who’s incarcerated, the easier it is to accept the conditions of their incarceration.

When people see this film, sometimes they’ll awkwardly say, “It’s the first time I’ve ever [heard from] somebody in prison.” They have no contact with anyone who’s incarcerated, because that’s hard-wired into the system. These people don’t have their First Amendment rights. They’re not allowed to speak, which means they’re not allowed to be seen as humans, so it’s much easier for us to accept treating them in inhumane ways.

That’s why the Constitution talks about cruel and unusual punishment. Theoretically, that’s the minimum level you’re supposed to observe when you’re taking responsibility for somebody else’s life. But it’s easy to ignore even that if you’re told that the people inside are just this sort of monolithic evil.

Attorney General Steve Marshall says in the film, “I think there are evil people in this world, people that have no regard for human life,” This is a person who is overseeing death camps. He doesn’t see the irony in that at all, because he’s just so willfully blind to it. There’s comfort with a level of cruelty. It’s also politically expedient for people to say that they’re keeping the horde of horrible, dangerous people at bay, and therefore we should be thankful, even if they do it without any regard for human rights.

To what extent is this driven by greed?

Certainly, it’s a huge part of it. It’s such a valuable system. To have $450 million a year in unpaid labor is something that people will jealously protect.

Can you say more about who’s making the money?

It’s pretty diffuse. One of the reasons why it works the way it does is because everybody gets some benefit from it. It’s not that there’s one evil boss at the top of the whole thing.

To go a little wider than the free labor, the drug trade [inside prison] is a source of a tremendous amount of the employees’ compensation. They were getting $36,000 - $38,000 a year as corrections officers when we [started making the film]. I talked to corrections officers who said, “Without the drugs, I’m making half as much money. Without the [contraband] cell phones, I’m making half as much money.” It’s not a minor driver. It’s such a big part of the survival of the people involved, who are living in an impoverished community and don’t have a lot of opportunities for jobs.

These people are making money because the system is allowed to be filled with drugs. It’s reasonable to say that the Department of Corrections is the largest law enforcement agency in the state of Alabama, and it’s also the largest drug dealing operation.

You’ve got wardens who are making money. You’ve got captains making money. You’ve got rank and file officers making money. And the same goes for the cell phone trade and anything that’s contraband. Going all the way up the ladder, you have politicians getting reelected because they’re talking about how you have to be tough on crime.

Then when you get up to the next level, you see that there’s an enormous industry around the prisons. So if you’re McDonald’s, you’re benefiting. If you’re Burger King, if you’re Hyundai, if you’re the local Budweiser distributor, you’re using prison labor, and can benefit not only from getting advantageous pricing, but from the fact that [the workers] have no protections. They’re not unionized. You can work them whatever way you want.

And then you get into the whole issue of construction. Sometimes we call it the “Alabama Department of Construction,” because they don’t address their prison problem unless there’s an opportunity to line the pockets of contractors. [Governor] Kay Ivey was trying to build these new prisons. She said they were going to cost $900 million. That was a fantasy. The first one has now cost more than $1.3 billion, and it’s still not finished. It’s clearly just open season for the contractors to come in and start making money.

As of January, Melvin, Robert, and Raoul were in solitary confinement in what could be seen as retribution for their involvement in this project. Can you share any updates?

I don’t think they’re being punished for their involvement in the film, because the film was out for a year [after debuting at Sundance] before that happened. Remember, they have been retaliated against consistently for a long time, even before we met, and it’s almost always happening around labor. [State officials] obviously don’t like them being outspoken — no matter what. But in this particular case, their supporters had announced a new labor strike for the beginning of February, and [they were put in solitary confinement] in advance of that. My expectation is that Alabama just did not want another labor strike, because labor strikes are so effective. They’re so disruptive.

The film has been in some ways protective of the men, because I think Alabama doesn’t really want to have a lot of stories showing up in the press about retaliating against these me. People are paying attention to who they are. A lot of people who saw this film had gone to the website where we put out a call to action. There were thousands of people who wrote letters and called. And Melvin was actually released from solitary shortly after that. It’s always touch and go with them. But the opportunity for them to be able to speak out continues to be valuable to them, and to the people that they care about.

Your must-watch clip of the week

If anyone is looking for some inspiration today — and who isn’t? — I’d urge them to watch this interview with dissident Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who sat down with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show Monday to discuss his brilliant Oscar-nominated film, It Was Just An Accident, a darkly humorous look at a group of former political prisoners considering revenge on the man they suspect of being their tormentor. (You can now stream it on Hulu. And you really should!)

Stewart referred to Panahi (who has continued creating movies despite being banned and imprisoned by the regime) as “a real hero of mine.” In December, while in the U.S. promoting the film, Panahi was sentenced in absentia to a year in prison for “propaganda against the regime.” He has repeatedly said he plans to return to Iran when Oscar season is over, no matter what awaits him.

As he told Stewart Monday, “Everyone will find a way to show resistance, even in death. I too will find a way in my job to work and to resist, and I know that resistance will come with a price. I’m not doing anything extraordinary. What people are doing is much bigger than what I’m doing.”

According to The Daily Show, Panahi’s visit was already booked when the United States attacked Iran over the weekend, but the timing made this conversation — between two artists whose countries are currently at war — even more essential.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

The emergence of this new songbook is, in some respects, a surprise. When Trump came back to power last year, many musicians appeared reticent to engage in overtly political songwriting. My brilliant colleague Meredith Blake marked that troubling silence in a piece headlined: “Where is the great anti-Trump protest song?”

But the brutal street slayings of the poet and mother Renee Good and of the Veterans Affairs nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis — amid the broader, violent abuses of ICE and the Border Patrol — have altered the moral and artistic calculus.

Below, we survey artists who are denouncing the Trump regime and the presence of its roving paramilitary gangs on the streets of the Twin Cities — and wherever the fear of mass deportation hangs heaviest.

Billy Bragg

“City of Heroes”

A fixture of protest music since the 1990s, Bragg brings a deep sense of history to his new song for Minneapolis. “City of Heroes” plays off the World War II-era poem, “First They Came” — written by a regretful witness of Nazi violence, who stood back as vulnerable groups were rounded up, only to find that, when the jackboots came for him, “there was no one left to speak out.”

Above jangly acoustic guitar chords, Bragg celebrates the sharp contrast created by the “heroes” of Minneapolis who “learn the lessons of history” — standing up for the first targets of fascist violence, instead of opting for “silence” or “complicity.”

When they came for the refugees

I got in their face

When they came for the five-year-olds

I got in their face

Bruce Springsteen

“Streets of Minneapolis”

Days after the slaying of Pretti, the Boss released the raw, angry “Streets of Minneapolis,” saluting the resistance of the city’s residents who “fought fire and ICE... ‘Neath an occupier’s boots.” The song takes aim at Trump’s authoritarian deputies Stephen Miller and Krisi Noem by name, and it became a viral hit, topping the iTunes charts in 19 countries.

The music video features footage of Border Patrol henchman Greg Bovino gassing city residents, as well as the terrified face of 5-year-old Liam Roberts in his bunny hat. Springsteen belts out the names of the Minneapolis martyrs, Pretti and Good, and praises the city for its solidarity with “the stranger in our midst.”

It’s our blood and bones

And these whistles and phones

Against Miller and Noem’s dirty lies

U2

“American Obituary”

No surprise that the “Sunday Bloody Sunday” rockers would weigh in on political violence in the United States. But quite different from Bragg and Springsteen’s spare tributes, U2 crafted something more energetic and anthemic with “American Obituary.”

The track pays tribute to “Renee Good, born to die free,” but also summons courage, with the repetition of a new rock mantra: “The power of the people is so much stronger than the people in power.”

The worst can’t kill what’s best in us

But they can try

America will rise

Against the people of the lie

Jesse Welles

“Join ICE”

Welles has leveraged his platform on TikTok to revive a tradition of American folk music last in vogue in the 1970s. Singing straight to camera with his gravely voice, beat up guitar, and a cutting humor evident in his lyrics, Welles comes across like a latter-day John Prine.

Welles has released two songs that cut to the moral rot of Trump’s deportation machine. “Join ICE” is a darkly ironic tune, seeking to “recruit” new agents to ICE by highlighting the agency’s rock-bottom employment standards and eagerness to give police-rejects a gun. The song can frequently be heard at street protests and earned Welles an appearance on The Late Show.

We can sneak around town

Hunt workin’ folks down

I hear they got a great benefit plan

“Good vs. ICE”

After the senseless homicide of Good in her car, Welles released “Good vs. ICE.” The song imagines a conversation between an ICE agent and a friend (”How’s work?”

“Well, they got us shooting women now”) before Welles insists: “You probably don’t need to shoot someone in the face, to do the thing that you’re calling a job.”

I’ve had more dangerous encounters at gas station counters

And the Walmart parking lot

But the smaller the man the quicker the plan

Goes to “Somebody’s getting shot”

Street Protest Music

In addition to the contributions of professional musicians, protesters themselves are writing simple songs that have featured prominently at ICE Out demonstrations. (Here is a literal songbook of such music.)

Annie Schlaefer / Singing Resistance

“It’s OK to Change Your Mind”

Written by a Minnesota community song-leader named Annie Schlaefer, “It’s OK to Change Your Mind” leads with humanity rather than mockery — calling on ICE agents to defect, letting them know they are welcome on the other side of America’s moral divide. Protesters across the country have sung the catchy, gospel-style tune during demonstrations in front of hotels housing federal agents.

In late February, at a benefit concert for Minneapolis, Brandi Carlile invited Schlaefer and her “Singing Resistance” song group on stage to lead a sing-along of “It’s OK” with a crowd of 12,000 at the Target Center. In those numbers, the music seemed transformed into a more general, joyous call to all MAGA Americans, inviting them to have a change of heart.

It’s OK to change your mind

Show us your courage

Leave this behind

Lu Aya / The Peace Poets

“This Is for Our Neighbors”

Written by activist Lu Aya, a member of a spoken word collective known as The Peace Poets, “This Is for Our Neighbors” touts the solidarity of citizen protesters with undocumented community members who are terrified by roving federal agents demanding papers and snatching people off the streets. It has become a fixture of protests, and even church services, throughout the Twin Cities and beyond.

This is for our people who are locked inside,

Together, we will, Abolish ICE.

Tim Dickinson is the senior political writer for The Contrarian

I am willing to bet that women in the United States — and beyond — have probably never been more interested in men’s hockey than they were going into the Winter Olympics this year. And that’s largely because of a few entirely fictional hockey players.

In November, a series called Heated Rivalry premiered on Crave, a Canadian streaming service, and was quickly picked up by HBO Max.

Based on the Game Changers novel series by Rachel Reid, the show follows the illicit romance between Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), a cocky Russian, and Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams), a straitlaced Asian Canadian, who meet as rookies in a fictionalized version of the National Hockey League.

They play for opposing teams and are marketed to hockey fans as fierce, bitter rivals, but the truth of their relationship is far more interesting: after a few charged encounters, they start hooking up in secret whenever they’re in the same place — often after facing each other on the ice. Over the years, their steamy situationship blossoms into a surprisingly tender romance. Meanwhile, a key subplot revolves around another closeted player named Scott Hunter (Françoise Arnaud) who falls for Kip Grady (Robbie G.K.), a smoothie-making grad student.

The series, made for approximately five Canadian dollars and starring a cast of unknowns, has become a massive hit and cultural phenomenon, turning leads Storrie and Williams into overnight stars. Less than a year ago they were both waiting tables; now they’re Olympic torchbearers who get swarmed like K-Pop stars wherever they go. This weekend, Storrie will host Saturday Night Live. Bookstores around the world are selling out of Reid’s novels, three of which are on The New York Times bestseller list this week. You can even rent the lakefront cottage from the show on Airbnb (good luck getting a reservation).

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Its popularity has largely been fueled by women, who make up roughly two-thirds of the show’s audience. Numerous think pieces have tried to understand why women are “feral” for Heated Rivalry. According to one compelling theory, the show’s portrayal of an intimate relationship unburdened by gender hierarchy is particularly appealing to female viewers, especially at a time when we are being bombarded with headlines about powerful, predatory men. A few years ago, a debate about whether women were safer getting stuck in the woods with a bear or a man blew up on social media. Most women said they’d feel safer with the bear, though I imagine their choice would be different if the man were Shane or Ilya.

Though it has garnered a lot of attention for its graphic sex scenes, Heated Rivalry has really caught on because it’s an emotionally insightful love story about young men learning to be vulnerable with each other in an environment steeped in misogyny and homophobia. It suggests that true masculinity is about being open-hearted and empathetic, and it celebrates men without denigrating women. (Both Shane and Ilya pursue relationships with women over the course of the series as they try to figure out their feelings for each other, but these women are portrayed as supportive friends and allies, not adversaries.)

I have had countless conversations about Heated Rivalry over the last few months, with women and gay men who have also become obsessed with the series. I’ve evangelized to friends who haven’t gotten around to watching, telling them it will only bring them joy in a gloomy time. More than once, I’ve seen the Heated Rivalry phenomenon described as a mass psychosis event, and it’s an apt comparison: the show is so uplifting it will temporarily alter your brain chemistry (in a fun, non-life-threatening way).

Part of what makes it so intoxicating is how it imagines a world less infected with misogyny.

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Reid, the books’ author, grew up in Nova Scotia loving hockey but feeling alienated by the culture around it, particularly by the allegations of sexual abuse by Canadian hockey players. She wrote the books in part to process her complicated feelings about the sport, imagining what it would be like for a closeted player in a setting rife with toxic masculinity — and what would ensue if they finally came out. “I started thinking about the ripple effect — what would happen to the other players?” she said in The New York Times.

In reality, the NHL is also the only men’s professional sports league in the United States that has never had a current or former player come out as queer. (By contrast, the Professional Women’s Hockey League currently has 30 openly queer players.) The league has been criticized for measures like banning rainbow stick tape (a decision that was reversed) and getting rid of Pride jerseys.

The show’s enormous popularity has inspired at least one gay amateur player to come out of the closet. It has also compelled women and queer people to check out the sport, according to a source as authoritative as it gets: the National Hockey League itself.

“There are so many ways to get hooked on hockey and, in the NHL’s 108-year history, this might be the most unique driver for creating new fans,” a representative for the league told The Hollywood Reporter in December.

Heated Rivalry, though fictional, provided a huge PR boost to the actual sport just in time for the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics. The men’s and women’s Olympic finals both set viewing records in the US — a sign, perhaps, of growing interest in a sport that is still more of a regional pastime than a nationwide obsession. For the first time in history, both the American men and women’s teams won gold in the same games.

But within a few hours of the men’s final on Sunday, much of the goodwill and enthusiasm generated by Team USA’s gold-winning performance had been squandered in a beer-soaked orgy of misogyny. First, there was the embarrassing spectacle of FBI director Kash Patel shot-gunning beers with the victorious men’s team in a Milan locker room (meanwhile, the agency he supposedly leads is removing Epstein documents related to Trump).

Then there was the president himself, who dialed in via Patel’s cell phone to invite the men’s team to the White House and make a gross joke at the expense of the women’s team. “I must tell you, we’re going to have to bring the women’s team,” he said. “You do know that. I do believe I probably would be impeached [if he didn’t].” Here’s where one of the players could have said “We are proud of the women”; instead, they laughed approvingly.

It was (literal) locker-room talk of the worst kind — sexist, demeaning, and the exact opposite of everything that made Heated Rivalry so irresistible. (Laugh at snide comments about women? Ilya and Shane would never.)

The president’s obvious contempt for female athletes was especially galling given that American women once again outperformed the men at the winter games, winning 63.6% of Team USA’s overall medals and 8 out of 12 golds.

The women’s team subsequently declined his offer to visit, while most of the men’s team happily showed up to eat cold McDonald’s at the White House and serve as props at the State of the Union.

The backlash against the men’s team has been swift and intense, but so far only one player has expressed anything close to regret. Goalie Jeremy Swayman told reporters, “We should have reacted differently.” (A more typical response came from player Jack Hughes, who claimed that detractors “are trying to find a reason to put people down and make something out of almost nothing.”)

Women’s captain Hilary Knight offered a more forceful denunciation. “I thought it was sort of a distasteful joke and unfortunately that is overshadowing a lot of the success,” she said.

Once the men’s team gets over their jet lag — and their indigestion from all those cheeseburgers — I’d suggest they fire up Heated Rivalry and take some notes. It won’t make them better players, but it might just make them better men.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian