Culture

There’s something very religious about nihilism. For proof, look to the new capital of American nihilism, Minneapolis. A callousness toward death and danger has fallen over the city. Of the many disturbing videos to come out of Minnesota’s anti-ICE protests, one of the stranger examples shows a white man walking up to a line of heavily armed law-enforcement officers, shouting: “Shoot us in the fucking face! Shoot me in the fucking head!” What possesses someone to do that? I understand being against Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s blitzkrieg deportation policy. And it’s not irrational, in the viral age, to protest theatrically. But this is psychotic. It is the death drive

And now his watch is ended. Sir Will Lewis fell on his sword last night, resigning as CEO and publisher of the Washington Post. “After two years of transformation at the Post, now is the right time for me to step aside,” Lewis said in an email to staff. In his note, Lewis thanked only the Post’s proprietor Jeff Bezos. Cockburn hears that least one journalist replied to Lewis’s email, “Bye, bitch.” Lewis had a troubled and confusing tenure. In his final week, the Post cut 30 percent of its staff, including the full books section and scores of foreign reporters. The publication also folded its vaunted sports section into features. “I believe the new tagline

Even if you haven’t seen the movie, you probably know the macabre legacy of Martin Scorsese’s early masterpiece Taxi Driver. Released 50 years ago this month, the tale of the eponymous cabbie Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, still has something potent to say about what can happen when a brooding loner finds himself adrift amid the menace and jammed chaos of New York’s streets with a .44 Magnum for company. Perhaps one of the reasons Taxi Driver resonates with so many people is because of this human void that lies at its center. At one time or another, we’ve all felt as alone as Travis Bickle. Fortunately, most of us are

On a cold January night in New York City, Chris Hayes walked off the set of CBS’s Late Show with Stephen Colbert only to face a pressing ethical dilemma. As he left the Ed Sullivan Theater and walked on to Broadway, he got a text from a friend who covers technology for NPR with a screenshot of a Yes/No market that had been spun up on the prediction market Kalshi, based on what Hayes might say on the evening’s broadcast. What would he say about Donald Trump? Would he talk about affordability, Russia, China, Greenland or other topics? It was just a $22,000 market in volume, a minor amount. But

Long ago, in a different world, I edited a magazine called InStyle Weddings, which showcased the nuptial celebrations of the rich and famous. Melania Knauss Trump graced the cover of our spring 2005 issue, in her wedding gown, next to the headline “Behind the Scenes at the Trump Wedding.” My boss at the time had attended Donald and Melania’s January 2005 knot-tying at Mar-a-Lago, as an invited guest, alongside other Manhattan media machers, plus politicians, movie stars, famous athletes and… Jeffrey Epstein. The Trump Organization furnished the quotes for our article, and also approved all the photos. That the occasion was a precisely orchestrated publicity event as much as a wedding

When Billie Eilish declared, during her acceptance speech for song of the year with “Wildflower” at last night’s Grammy awards, that “I feel like we just need to keep fighting and speaking up and protesting, and our voices really do matter,” she was speaking in the approved register. “Fuck ICE,” she added but it was more of the same. In contrast to the Golden Globes, where the neutral tenor of the event was made up of tame jokes about the age of Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriends, the Grammys have turned into an opportunity for musicians to express political outrage. The awards themselves went as expected last night. Kendrick Lamar and Bad

As far as teaser trailers for summer blockbusters go, it takes quite a lot to make jaded audiences – or cynical critics – sit up and say, “What the hell?” But what’s exactly what the latest trailer for Christopher Nolan’s eagerly awaited The Odyssey has done. Not because it has featured a couple of new shots of Tom Holland’s Telemachus squaring off with Robert Pattinson’s villainous Antinous, or Matt Damon’s Odysseus participating in the bloody sack of Troy with his fellow Greeks, but because it introduces the most unexpected cameo of the year, possibly of the decade. Ladies and gentlemen, enter the latest feature of Nolan’s all-star cast: the hip-hop

Hello, it’s me, your Gen X auntie who spends too much time online. I regret to inform you that I’ve been on a journey and, like Hermes bringing information from the underworld to mortals, I am here to tell you about the poor, unfortunate lost souls I’ve become aware of against my will. They have names like Sneako and Clavicular – and if I have to know about them, you do too. It starts with a livestream and a boys’ night out, although these aren’t your ordinary frat boys or celebrities. They are some of the internet’s most infamous edgelords, caricatures of men, masculinity and fashion. A limo rolled up

The casting of the new James Bond is the biggest story in Hollywood at the moment. The sheer amount of disinformation and exaggeration that has accompanied snippets of news about the production of a new 007 adventure is remarkable, even by the standards of La La Land. Ever since the Bond franchise was purchased by Amazon, taken out of the restrictive hands of Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, and placed in the care of Amy Pascal and David Heyman, the question of who’s doing what has been a source of fascination. The hiring of Dune’s Denis Villeneuve to direct was broadly seen as a smart, auteur-ish move; the decision

We Americans celebrate July 4, 1776, as our national birthday, and this year, of course, marks our 250th. But the American Revolution began before that. And when did it end? Maybe it never did. In 1812, warhawks in Congress and president James Madison – the man known to posterity as the very father of the Constitution – launched an invasion of Canada in the hopes of completing the American Revolution. Canada was unfinished business. We had invaded Québec in 1775, but that was a disaster. And even though the 13 colonies that became the United States succeeded in winning their independence from Britain, the newborn US was not altogether free.

The news that the producer Kathleen Kennedy is stepping down with immediate effect as president of Lucasfilm, to be replaced by Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan, may not sound especially consequential; film executives come and go all the time, and their arrival and departure is normally only of interest to those in the movie business. Yet Kennedy, who has run Lucasfilm – home of Star Wars, Indiana Jones and a great deal more – since 2012, and been in sole charge after the departure of the company’s founder George Lucas the same year, is the most consequential Hollywood studio head of the past couple of decades. And, her millions of