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Sean Krajacic/Getty ImagesSeveral bands have shunned an upcoming metal festival to protest organizers billing them alongside Kyle Rittenhouse, the gunman who shot dead protesters amid a racial justice demonstration in 2020.Shell Shock II, which is scheduled for October 19 in Orlando, Florida, had announced a special guest appearance from Rittenhouse, prompting headliner Evergreen Terrace to pull out of the event, Loudwire reports.At least three other acts—Southpaw, Let Me Bleed and American Hollow— have now followed suit, apparently forcing organizers to bump a Slipknot cover band to the top spot.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Atlanta Falcons veteran wide receiver KhaDarel Hodge could not put into words his game-winning touchdown against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers until he turned to his faith in God.

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Illustration by Eric Faison/The Daily Beast/ABC Studios/Getty ImagesIt’s the age-old question, isn’t it? How much do we really want to know about our neighbors?Over eight wonderful seasons, the ladies of Wisteria Lane exposed all of their dirty laundry. From supermarket shootings to tumultuous tornadoes, numerous hit-and-runs, and a plethora of mysteries, the audacious world of Desperate Housewives fascinated millions of viewers. It all started with the best pilot in television history, which turns 20 years old today.Perfectly self-assured in every moment, the ABC pilot, which aired Oct. 2, 2004, is a masterclass that redefined television. As Mary Alice Young goes about her mundane day, actress Brenda Strong’s sing-songy narration lulls audiences into a sense of comfort, only to pull the rug out from under when our omniscient narrator pulls out a handgun and takes her life.Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Examples are stacking up: Celebrities just don’t like us. Last year, Donald Glover enlisted his famous friends to make a gruesome TV show about a killer pop fan. This year, Chappell Roan, the breakout singing sensation of 2024, called her most ardent admirers creepy. Now Joker: Folie à Deux offers a tedious lecture about the challenges of fame. Audience members may walk out feeling punished for the crime of wanting to be entertained by a comic-book-inspired movie-musical starring some of the most successful performers on Earth.Todd Phillips’s 2019 smash, Joker, connected because it used the extraordinary trappings of the Batman universe to explore the plight of an unextraordinary person. Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck had a mental disorder that caused uncontrollable laughter and some rather involved delusions, but otherwise he was just a soft-spoken dude who kept getting stepped on by other people. Like many of us, he was both enamored with and resentful of the smiling stars he saw on TV. Eventually, Arthur painted his face, started calling himself Joker, and took vengeance on the culture, including by killing a celebrity on air. The fervency of acclaim that the movie spawned—$1 billion worldwide at the box office and a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars—suggested, somewhat chillingly, that the masses found catharsis in this tale.In the sequel, Arthur is now famous for his crimes, and he finds fame to literally be that thing celebrities always say it is: a prison. Or rather, it’s a mental institution, staffed by abusive guards infected with the madness that comes with power and impunity. He meets another inmate-patient, Lady Gaga’s Harleen “Lee” Quinzel, who’s a huge fan of his. She says his murderous stunt made her feel, for the first time in her life, like she wasn’t alone. Arthur is smitten, or flattered, or both—maybe they’re the same feeling. When prosecutors announce that they’ll try him for the death penalty, his mind is still on Lee, and he breaks into a sweet, rasping tune: “For once in my life, I have someone who needs me.” The song he’s singing, made famous by Stevie Wonder, is one of many 20th-century classics Arthur and Lee will perform, moving back and forth between colorful dreamspace and bleak reality.[Read: Yes, ‘Joker’ is a very serious drama. No, that’s not a compliment.]The ensuing courtroom drama investigates a philosophical question: What’s the difference between a person and a persona? Arthur’s attorney pursues an insanity defense, positing that Arthur has a split personality and that Joker is another entity that lives inside his head. Lee encourages Arthur to embrace his villainous side; she even insists on painting his face with clown makeup before they have sex. The movie clearly argues, however, that the Jekyll-and-Hyde conceit invoked by Arthur’s advocates is a dangerous fantasy. The belief that he sometimes transforms into a braver, wilder creature—thereby excusing his sins—inspires his followers to don masks and cause havoc. He eventually disavows the notion that he and Joker are separate, but it’s too late: The myth has gone viral, and Arthur himself could become one of its victims.This is a pretty strange angle on fame. Lots of celebs who adopt stage names insist that they’re basically two different people; Roan, for example, calls herself a drag queen and says that snooping fans violate a boundary she intentionally set between her public and private selves. Gaga, however, has long tried to resist the idea of a bifurcated identity. The brilliance of her early-career self was that she was all surface, all meat dress. About a decade ago, somewhere between her albums Artpop and Joanne, she flipped the routine and started acting earnest in public. “There was a time in my career when I … spoke in an accent in interviews or told lies, but I was performing,” she recently told Vogue. “Now it’s a much more palatable mixture of authenticity and imagination.” This new approach is apt for an era in which internet-enabled confusion has created a hunger for realness. Performance is always artificial, but stars, more than ever, need us to believe they’re not BSing. Joker: Folie à Deux critiques the impulse to figure out who our idols really are—not because that quest is impossible or even because it’s invasive, but simply because it’s not that deep. An evil clown is an evil clown.Whatever one might think of that idea, Joker: Folie à Deux has all the ingredients to make for a lively, goth-chic bit of metacommentary. Phillips renders the asylum as a convincingly tactile, gray-brown fortress. He selects golden-era-Hollywood musical numbers whose cheerfulness has a poisoned edge, such as “That’s Entertainment!,” a sing-along, from Fred Astaire’s 1953 film, The Band Wagon, about the public’s thirst for big-screen mayhem. But something’s amiss. Folie à Deux is both overlong and empty, padded out with copious shots of characters walking down hallways or staring out of car windows. The romantic storyline develops too quickly, mostly off-screen, and then just stagnates. Themes get stated and restated in didactic, circular dialogue. I liked one performance, “Gonna Build a Mountain,” set in a nightclub where Gaga pounds the piano and Phoenix tap-dances. But otherwise, the musical performances are underpowered, lacking much movement, personality, or surprise.[Read: Want to see a snake eat its tail?]In fact, the film’s problems are so glaring that one can’t help but wonder about what happened behind the scenes. Phoenix has a reputation for prickliness on set. Gaga had some strong moments in A Star Is Born, but as an actor, her main asset is a hard-set pout that’s best suited for generating campy reaction memes. The two have no chemistry on-screen, and the movie feels as though it’s been edited to minimize their interactions. But—there I go, acting like the leering, demanding celebrity-obsessives who are Folie à Deux’s true villains. Hollywood has trained us to look past the facades of what it sells us, to seek the story behind the story. But it resents us for wanting more razzle-dazzle than the stars are always willing or able to give.

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At a rally in Tel Aviv this past summer held by Israel’s beleaguered left, Yuval Noah Harari appeared as the keynote speaker. He began his speech not with the latest developments from Gaza or a grand pronouncement about how the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians might be solved. Instead, he did what Harari does best: place all of it, everything people tend to take for granted, within a very, very long historical framework. “Once upon a time, there was neither a Jewish people, nor a Palestinian people,” Harari said. “A hundred million years ago, this land was home to dinosaurs.”Harari, as anyone who has bought a gift for a dad must know, is a historian whose books, starting with his account of human and civilizational evolution, Sapiens, have sold in the millions. Since the beginning of his stardom, Harari’s identity as an Israeli was no secret. His accent would give that away. But his feelings about his country were not something he openly shared. Consciously or not, he kept his distance from Israel as his stature rose in the pop-intellectual firmament and he jetted off to meetings with the likes of Mark Zuckerberg.But starting two years ago, when Benjamin Netanyahu was reelected prime minister and formed an extreme-right government intent on dismantling some of the basic guardrails of Israeli democracy, Harari felt he couldn’t stay quiet. He is now among the most internationally famous Israelis speaking publicly about the possibility and necessity of peace.As the anniversary of the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel approached, I wanted to hear from Harari, who happened to be in the United States touring with his new book, Nexus. We met on the Upper East Side of Manhattan one morning in mid-September.This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.Gal Beckerman: I’ve probably never felt more despairing in my life about Israel than I have in the past year. You bring historical perspective to everything that you work on, so I’m curious if that makes you see things more hopefully, or whether the country seems even more stuck from where you stand.Yuval Noah Harari: Israel is at a crossroads. I don’t think its existence is at stake. I do think its identity is at stake. The soul of the country is now the battleground, and the outcome will decide not just the shape of Israel for many, many years to come, but also the shape of Judaism. I think that Judaism is at an intersection. Maybe we haven’t been in such a place for 2,000 years, since the end of the Second Temple era.Beckerman: What is the parallel with that moment?Harari: The Second Temple era ended after the Zealots took over with messianic visions and almost destroyed the Jewish people, almost destroyed the Jewish religion, which had to then reinvent itself. And we’ve come full circle. Judaism as we know it was born from the ashes of the Temple of Jerusalem in the failed rebellion against the Romans that the Zealots instigated. For me, the birth scene of Judaism is Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, one of the great sages, fleeing Jerusalem and coming to the Roman general Vespasian, who later became Roman emperor, and asking him for a favor: “Please give me Yavne and its wise men.” And Vespasian agrees. This is myth more than history. But this is the founding myth of Judaism. Yavne was a small town not far from present-day Tel Aviv, and that was where ben Zakkai established a learning center, and it changed the nature of Judaism.Beckerman: It turned from a religion based on priests and temples and sacrifices into a religion of learning, right?Harari: What do Jews do for the next 2,000 years? They learn—they sit in Yavne and they learn. They go to Egypt; they learn. They go to Brooklyn; they learn. And eventually the circle is almost closed. They come back. They come back to Jerusalem. And the Zealots have now taken over Jerusalem again. And the question that keeps bothering me: What did Jews learn in those 2,000 years? Why did ben Zakkai have to go ask Vespasian for Yavne? He could have just asked Vespasian, Tell me, how do you build an army? How do you fight wars? You Romans, you are so good with power, with violence. We Jews, we want to learn violence. We want to learn power. And Vespasian could have told ben Zakkai. Why did it take 2,000 years of learning in yeshivas to go back to that same moment and basically adopt the values of the Roman legion? Because if I think about what the values are of people like Itamar Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu—it’s the values of the Roman legion.[Read: Yuval Noah Harari’s apocalyptic vision]Beckerman: So if Netanyahu and his partners on the extreme right are the Zealots, how do you see the other side—yourself—in this battle for the soul of Israel?Harari: I would say that the other side is Zionist, and it’s important to emphasize and reclaim this word, which has been vilified, not just now, but for decades. When I hear people compare Zionism with racism, this itself is a racist statement, because Zionism is simply the national movement of the Jewish people. And if you think that Zionism is racist and is abhorrent, you’re basically saying that Jews don’t deserve to have national feelings. Turks can have national feelings, and Germans can have national feelings, but when Jews have national feelings, this is racism. Zionism basically says three simple things that should be uncontroversial. It says that the Jews are a nation, not just isolated individuals. There is a Jewish people. The second thing Zionism says is that, like all other peoples, the Jewish people also have a right to self-determination, like the Palestinians, like the Turks, like the Poles. And the third thing it says is the Jews have a deep historical, cultural, spiritual connection to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, which is a historical fact.Beckerman: This is Zionism as I understand it. But the term has taken on different dimensions for so many people.Harari: What the political conclusion is from these three facts, that’s up for grabs. And throughout Zionist history, for the past 150 years, people had different ideas. Some ideas were definitely racist and very violent. Some Zionists have denied the existence of a Palestinian people and the right to self-determination of Palestinians. But this is not a logical conclusion from the premises of Zionism. You can acknowledge that there is a Jewish people. It has a right to self-determination. It has a historical connection to the country. And at the same time, there is a Palestinian people. It also has a right to self-determination, and it also has deep historical, spiritual, cultural connection to the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. And now the political question is, what do you do with these two facts? And there are potential solutions, a two-state solution, which you can argue, where exactly will the border pass and what will be the rights of Palestinians who remain in Israeli territory? And we can discuss all that. But basically, Zionism doesn’t deny the existence and rights of Palestinian people.Beckerman: One of the other things I’ve been struggling with this past year has been the inability of most people to contain more than one narrative in their minds—like the two narratives you just described. And I’ll go a step further, which is to ask about empathy. I can contain the pain and the sorrow that I feel for what happened on October 7 and the people I know, what happened to Jews. And I can still open the newspaper and see what’s happening in Gaza and feel extraordinary pain too, but there are settings in which I can’t talk about the pain that I feel for one side or the other, because it immediately becomes a zero-sum game.Harari: It’s like in an emergency room in a hospital, where there is triage. You have a couple of people shouting in pain. I’m shouting in pain and somebody near me is also shouting in pain. If the doctor pays attention to them, then maybe they take care of them and not of me. So I shout harder, and like any attention given to the pain of the other person, I feel it as an attack on me, because it has repercussions. I will suffer.Beckerman: Do you think that Israelis’ capacity for empathy has been degraded over the past year?Harari: This is one of the things that wars do. This is not unique to Israelis. When there is a war, the first few casualties get so much attention. The millionth casualty, it’s just a number. And this is one of the biggest dangers with the current war, is this process of desensitizing people, brutalizing people. This is how violence breeds more violence, because you get used to it, and it becomes easier. And this is what is now happening with the hostages. When Gilad Shalit was taken hostage 18 years ago, the whole country was focused on that, and Gilad Shalit’s family was sacred. Whatever you thought about the deal to release Shalit, to say a word against him or his family was really blasphemy. And now the police are beating up the families of the hostages. The people spit at them. People curse them. There is a propaganda campaign against them through the right-wing media.Beckerman: Does this worry you?Harari: It bothers me, and at the same time, as a historian, unfortunately it makes sense; it’s humanity. Most people have no capacity to empathize with the suffering of the other side, partly because it’s like a resource that is exhausted. In the Second World War, you would not see in British newspapers a lot of images of German families burned in their homes during the bombardment of Hamburg or Dresden.Beckerman: I’ve heard you talk about the distinction between peace and justice, as a more reasonable way of trying to think about the conflict.Harari: To some extent, every peace needs justice and every justice needs peace. But they are different ways of looking at reality, at history. Every peace deal in history required giving up some justice. You can’t have absolute justice. Peace is more objective. You can see, are people being killed or not? But people have very, very different concepts of what justice means to them. So if you try to gain absolute justice, you will never have peace. You cannot go back and bring the dead to life; you cannot undo the injuries, the rapes, the humiliation. The only change you can make is in the present. How do we make sure that more people are not killed and injured now and in the future?[Read: The war that would not end]Beckerman: I’m curious what you think about the pro-Palestinian protests here and why they have been so compelling, in particular, to young people.Harari: Obviously, as often happens, you project your own problems, your own issues, onto a distant conflict. And many times, people don’t really understand the conflict. I see it especially with this projection of the colonialist interpretation. People take this model, which is very central in the United States and other Western countries, and impose it on a completely different situation. And they say, Okay, the Israelis are the white Europeans who came to colonize the indigenous Palestinians. And there are some kernels of truth in this, but it’s a wrong model. I mean, it denies the fact that there was continuous Jewish presence on the land, going back 3,000 years. For 2,000 years, Jews were one of the chief victims of European civilization, and suddenly now they become the Europeans? This also ignores the fact that more than 50 percent of Israeli Jews are not European. They are descendants of Middle Eastern Jews from Egypt, from Yemen, from Iraq, who were brutally expelled from their ancestral homes after 1948 by Arab governments in revenge for the 1948 war. So my husband, for example, his family is from Egypt, expelled by Gamal Abdel Nasser.Beckerman: I know that you made a decision to publicly weigh in when Netanyahu’s coalition tried to pass a law curbing the power of the supreme court; you saw a threat to democracy. Does it still feel like that threat exists?Harari: Yes, and then even after everything that has happened with October 7 and the war, Netanyahu and his colleagues are still at it. You know, he has not taken any responsibility for October 7. I don’t hold him responsible for every decision of some company commander in the army and so forth. But the prime minister, the leader of the country, has one major responsibility—to set the priorities. He decided that the No. 1 problem with Israel is the supreme court. The priority is to destroy the supreme court. And this is his responsibility, nobody else’s. And if he, if Israel had given a quarter of the attention that was given to the supreme court to Hamas, there would have been no October 7. And the other thing, which goes back to the beginning of our discussion: The Israeli nation is collapsing, the patriotic bonds that hold the nation together are being torn deliberately by Netanyahu and his colleagues. He is the most hated person in the history of Israel. Like 50 percent of the people just hate him on a level that is unimaginable. I think the No. 1 responsibility of a leader, especially for a country in such existential danger as Israel, is to unify. And he’s the last person on Earth who can unify Israel. If you go down the street in New York, you pick at random some person, that person has a better chance of uniting Israel than Benjamin Netanyahu.Beckerman: This interview will be published around October 7, on the first anniversary. I’m curious where you think we will be next year, on the second anniversary.Harari: I think it has a lot to do also with events in the United States, with the election in November. You see this wave of strongmen who believe only in power, only in force, who spread hate. People here ask me, Should Jews vote for Donald Trump? Should Jews vote for Kamala Harris? Who is better for the Jewish people? The key question is, what are the values of the Jewish people? Are the values of the Jewish people those of a bully who sees the world simply as a power game, where you need to subdue and win over everybody else?Beckerman: Do you think the United States should exercise more pressure over Israel? A lot of activists really want Harris to pledge to stop selling arms to Israel. Do you think that’s a good thing?Harari: Israel is facing a real existential threat from Iran and its proxies, and it’s no secret. They say it openly: They want to destroy Israel. What I think is that the United States should continue to support Israel, but demand something. Here, I am with Trump. You know this transactional worldview. You give so much money. Make some conditions for what Israel should do in exchange; use the leverage.

You can shave thousands of dollars and years off your home loan if you can swing a bit extra to prepay your principal each month.

Host Jean Smart and musical guest Jelly Roll at SNL’s season premiere. In April, Kristen Wiig hosted Saturday Night Live, an occasion that, under normal circumstances, would merit some excitement. But anyone familiar with the peculiar lore of SNL would know better: This was Wiig’s fifth time hosting, and when someone hosts SNL five times, the opening monologue becomes absolutely unbearable. This is the fault of SNL’s longtime schtick known as “the Five Timers Club,” where the conceit is once you host the show five times, you get a velvet smoking jacket and entrance into a mythical exclusive society full of other laureates like Steve Martin and Tina Fey and Justin Timberlake.  It is also an excuse for the show to indulge its worst impulses: Packed with A-list guest appearances, Wiig’s monologue saw Paul Rudd pitifully ask why he wasn’t asked to be one of the celebrity cameos; Matt Damon, who has hosted only twice, wearing a Five Timers jacket because executive producer Lorne Michaels said he was so good that he deserved it; and Jon Hamm and Martin Short begging Michaels offstage for a chance to host again. In total, eight of the country’s most beloved actors joined together to fawn at the altar of SNL and, specifically, its creator.  There are infinite ways for SNL to be unbearable: a sketch outstays its welcome, the rookie featured player keeps flubbing his lines, the writers forgo jokes altogether and instead force us to listen to a bizarre piano ballad in an attempt to say something earnest about politics. But by far the worst version of SNL is when the show becomes more interested in its own mythology than making people laugh.  This year, the institution’s 50th, promises to be full of such moments. In the season premiere, host Jean Smart recalled her younger self watching the very first episode of SNL, knowing she’d one day host the show, while the “SNL50” branding was everywhere, from interstitials to the top story on Weekend Update.  The slate of hosts this fall are largely limited to repeat hosts, including John Mulaney and Michael Keaton, who will return for their sixth and fourth time hosting, respectively. The nostalgia tour extends beyond the show: On October 11, Saturday Night, a movie that dramatizes the story of SNL’s 1975 debut, will premiere in theaters. In the meantime, Questlove is producing a documentary about SNL; filmmaker Morgan Neville of Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is, somehow, producing five of them.  The worst version of SNL is when the show becomes more interested in its own mythology than making people laugh.  And on Valentine’s Day 2025, SNL will host a “homecoming” event at Radio City Music Hall, produced by Michaels and Mark Ronson, in addition to a live primetime reunion special with current and former cast members to air the following Sunday.  The film Saturday Night, directed by Jason Reitman, received just-okay reviews, with many critics irked by its exorbitant flattery of both Michaels and SNL. Rolling Stone called it a “gushing love letter”: “Saturday Night Live has long swooned over its own self-mythology, and Saturday Night is happy to add to that backpatting as the show’s golden anniversary approaches,” writes David Fear. Put more plainly, according to the New Republic, the film is little more than “a cinematic circle jerk.” To be fair, franchise nostalgia is a plague affecting more than just SNL. Pop culture is in a deeply self-referential, self-obsessed mood: Endless reboots that recycle previously successful intellectual property is a symptom of an entertainment industry that has strained under the weight of crushing corporate consolidation. The result is films about recognizable companies’ origin stories (Nike, Pop Tarts, BlackBerry, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, to name a few), TV prologues (The Rings of Power, House of the Dragon), and constant sampling in pop music.  Or take, for example, the sprawling Marvel Cinematic Universe, which sold movie tickets throughout the 2010s by promising hardcore fans that they might see their favorite character in a post-credits scene. Or the other blockbuster cultural product of the decade, Taylor Swift, who orchestrated the highest-grossing tour of all time by packaging and repackaging nostalgia for her fans.   When SNL commits the sin of self-referentiality, it feels worse, not because it’s any more guilty than the rest, but because SNL is supposed to be funny. There’s nothing hilarious about watching rich and famous people congratulate themselves (that’s what award shows are for!). Instead, it comes across as profoundly lazy.  SNL’s best moments have always been the ones where you haven’t a clue what kind of brain they could have come from. With few exceptions, its topical and political material is never as memorable as its quirky characters and absurd sketches — recent standouts include last year’s silly Beavis and Butthead sketch and Lisa from Temecula. In other words, SNL works when it lets the young comedy nerds who staff the show do their thing without reminding us that we’re watching a show that’s been on the air for 50 years.  That, however, isn’t usually what happens when an aging leader doesn’t understand that the best use of their power is to hand it to someone else. Lorne Michaels is a show business icon who is also nearly 80 and can be forgiven for wanting to stick around long enough to enjoy a victory lap (50 years helming a network powerhouse is nothing to sneer at, after all).  Despite Michaels’s statements to press in 2020 that he was planning to retire after the 50th season — a position repeated in 2023 when he hinted that his replacement “could easily be Tina Fey” — he recently told multiple media outlets that he now plans to stay indefinitely. “I’m going to do it as long as I feel I can do it,” he said to the Times, adding to the Hollywood Reporter, “As long as it’s important and I can be useful, I’ll stay.” To say you watch (or even care about) SNL in 2024 is itself kind of embarrassing, though this has been the case for decades — people who tuned in as children or teenagers tend to believe no cast could possibly live up to the one who introduced them to sketch comedy. You could say it sucks at any point in its history and you’d at least be a little bit right, but it’s especially depressing to watch talented writers and performers spend their energy deifying and worshiping their own employer. Like too much of pop culture right now, SNL is relying on audiences pointing and saying, “I get that reference!” instead of creating work that’s genuinely fresh or funny or compelling. After all the meta in-jokes, all the celebrity cameos, all the cutaways to the big boss looming offstage, there’s hardly any room left for laughs. If the bland season premiere is any indication, don’t expect many of those this year. 

A reveal from Love Is Blind trying to prove whether or not love is blind. | Courtesy of Netflix ©2024 While Virginia is reportedly for lovers, most everyone acknowledges that nearby Washington, DC, is not. The nation’s capital has been consistently ranked as one of the worst places to date and one of the US’s worst cities for singles. Too many type As, too many people too into their jobs, too many people ready to leave after two years — it’s not exactly a city that screams romance. They say that politics is show business for ugly people, which would make DC the Hollywood of uggos.  Given Washington’s notoriety, it was only a matter of time before Netflix took Love Is Blind to the nation’s capital.  In its first season, the Netflix reality dating series asserted the hopefulness of romance — the possibility of falling in love with someone sight unseen and marrying them within a month — but it has become a show about irreparable incompatibility featuring terrifying tales of red flag-waving monsters. There have also been lawsuits from contestants alleging toxic and inhospitable workplace environments in and out of the “pods.” Yet the love experiment is one of Netflix’s biggest hits, and each season a captive audience tunes in to see a new batch of daters and the horrors — body shaming, weaponized therapy speak, flies in toilets — that await them on the other side of the wall.  Now we have what sounds like a perfect, hellish match: one of the worst dating cities in the US, combined with one of the bleakest reality TV dating shows in history. On paper, it feels more like a dare or taunt, a gift to haters. Truly only the freakiest freaks, some real District of Columbia sickos would sign up to be on Love Is Blind: DC.  But while this immensely watchable season has plenty of villains and inter-crossing love triangles, it, sadly, doesn’t feel very DC. For one thing, no one on this season explicitly works in government. To be fair, the show isn’t very specific when it comes to its participants’ professions, so an “IT specialist” could ostensibly be working for some military government contractor and an “engineer” could be doing research for, say, Lockheed-Martin. Still, the closest we get is a cast member being described as a “policy advocate,” which seems like a nice euphemism for lobbyist. Capitol Hill keeping their employees from representing on Love Is Blind is understandable because of how embarrassingly and negatively many of the participants are portrayed. But that dynamic of an adjacency to national political power fueling a person’s dating identity is exactly what makes DC dating unique and (from all these news stories about people who hate dating there) so hostile. That the show spent a season in DC and couldn’t capture the snobbiness of a staffer asking “Who do you work for?” feels like a loss.  There seems to be a reluctance to get into politics this season, too. A contestant talks about how he voted in the 2016 and 2020 elections, and there’s a conversation about what kind of political beliefs one has while serving in the military, but politics as they relate to dating preferences  — e.g., whether love trumps politics, whether similar politics mean compatibility, etc. — is barely addressed. That’s a missed opportunity, not only given how politically active DC allegedly is, but also because finding partners who share the same politics has increasingly become more and more important to singles.  That said, there’s still enough relationship dysfunction this season to sustain its horror-junkie audience.  Brittany, a beautiful woman who wants to be a trophy wife and tells the camera she cannot spell the word “physicist,” falls for Leo, a young art dealer who tells everyone that one of his insecurities is that he inherited a humongous amount of money and never has to worry about anything financially. The more the audience gets to know Leo, the more it seems like this isn’t an insecurity at all. The more Brittany gets to know Leo, the more interested she is in his “insecurity.”  There’s also Hannah, a 26-year-old woman who quit her “dream job” to be on the show. The dream job in question? Medical device sales. Perhaps there is honor and allure in, say, the vending of CPAP machine accessories, but she’s given it all up for the possibility of sight-unseen reality TV love. To that end, she tells Nick, one of her pod suitors, that she dates athletes and she’s always worried that men only see her as a hot girl. Nick tells her he looks like a less buff Henry Cavill. Neither is setting themselves up to overdeliver.  Hannah, Nick, Leo, Brittany and their cohort deliver a season draped in red flags and dealbreakers. From chilling fights about yapping too much to roundabout conversations about getting the ick from watching your partner straddle patio furniture, there’s plenty here. If you’re coupled, they’ll make you breathe a sigh of relief that you’re not in the dating pool. If you’re single, they’ll make you relish it.  Love Is Blind is still a riveting, deranged exploration of the worst people falling in and out of love, even if it doesn’t feel like DC.  This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

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Michael M. Santiago/Getty ImagesDonald Trump launched into an unhinged attack on Liz Cheney after the former Republican congresswoman denounced him in a speech at a Kamala Harris campaign event on Thursday afternoon.“Liz Cheney lost her Congressional Seat by the largest margin in the history of Congress for a sitting Representative,” he fumed in a Truth Social post after the former Wyoming rep’s remarks. “The people of Wyoming are really smart! She is a low IQ War Hawk that, as a member of the J6 Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs, ILLEGALLY DESTROYED & DELETED all documents, information, and evidence.”Trump’s ire appears to have been provoked by comments from Cheney at Thursday’s rally, where the former lawmaker appealed for other longstanding GOP supporters to follow her example in backing the Harris campaign.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Reuters/File PhotoThe Menendez brothers could be “out of prison by Christmas” now that the Los Angeles district attorney has scheduled a hearing to review new evidence their father sexually abused them, Ryan Murphy says.And if that’s the case, the Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story showrunner would consider shooting a couple of bonus episodes of the hit Netflix series, he told a Variety reporter on Thursday.Prosecutors are still convinced Lyle and Erik Menendez shot and killed their parents in the family’s Beverly Hills mansion in 1989, when the brothers were 21 and 18, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón told a press conference on Thursday. The brothers maintained all along they were motivated by their father José’s physical, emotional and sexual abuse—which they say began when they were children—and by their mother Kitty’s silence and complicity.Read more at The Daily Beast.