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A bunch of sundresses (or are they?) Much like “is a hot dog a sandwich” or “does not liking Taylor Swift mean you hate women” (no and no), “sundress season” is one of those things that sparks perennial debate on the internet. The term entered the popular imagination in 2010, when an episode of How I Met Your Mother had Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) extolling the virtues of the garment. “The sundresses, Ted! I don’t think I can make it another eight months with no sundresses,” he says, then poses a riddle: “What piece of women’s attire most stokes a man’s desire?” “What lightweight outfit, pink or white, makes the front of my slacks abnormally tight?” The answer, of course, is the sundress, which has claimed cult status among horny straight men ever since and still, more than a decade later, manages to drive online debate. “When you realize it’s almost sundress season,” reads the caption of one viral TikTok of a man smiling in the grass and listening to Natasha Bedingfield’s “Pocketful of Sunshine.” “If you’re a lady watching this, do your man a favor and buy ‘em all,” said another. But like, what is a sundress? In mid-April, Jacqueline Ryan, a 24-year-old in Baltimore, posed the question to her TikTok following. “I see all these videos of men saying how much they love sundresses,” she said, “What is a sundress? I own every dress. Which one is the sun one?” The video ended up getting more than 9 million views, but even after thousands of comments, no one could provide a definitive answer. @nowletsbeforeal Sundress vs. Sundress Season Explained #duet with @RandyTrembacki #Stitch What Is A Sundress? Depends Who You Ask About sundressseason! @Roni WE know what you meant sis? #Sundress #sundressseason #sundresstrend #pov #blackmenoftiktok #summertrends #blacktiktok #blackgirltiktok #culturetiktok #fypage mens definition of sundress sundress backshots commando sundress black sundress black girl why do men like sundresses what is a sundress wrong ♬ original sound – Let’s Be Foreal That’s when Randy Trembacki, a 30-year-old video producer in Austin, replied with a lengthy video, complete with visual aids, to show what he believed men thought of when they spoke excitedly about sundress season: a mini-dress with a fitted top and flowy bottom, usually in bright colors or floral print. “I’m not a psychiatrist, but I think it’s a mixture of the [fact that] it’s cute and also sexy at the same time, but without being trashy,” he says over the phone when I ask why men keep talking about them. “It accentuates the female form, but in a conservative way.” This, to some, wasn’t quite telling the whole story. Black women and men clarified that when they talk about “sundress season,” they’re referring to dresses that are tight not only in the bodice but fitted all the way through the skirt. “This is the dress that men break their necks to look at,” one TikToker explained while wearing a stretchy, form-fitting maxi-length dress. The thirst account @SundressSzn has been posting examples of women wearing these types of dresses since 2010. Nikki Martin, a fit expert who has worked in the fashion industry for two decades, says she can understand the confusion among people from different backgrounds or generations. “There’s a difference between your granny saying ‘sundress’ and the kid from Harlem or Brooklyn saying ‘sundress season,’” she explains. “It’s taken on a new meaning in African American culture for a certain generation.” “I call it the Skims takeover,” she adds, referring to Kim Kardashian’s brand of skin-tight dresses and sets. “You have the younger generation where now everything is Skims, bodycon, and tight, and so people don’t necessarily adhere to the correct terminology. They think everything is now a sundress.” Her TikTok video explained that the term “sundress” actually does have a specific meaning and a clear history. A sundress is sleeveless, lightweight, and casual, usually with a more fitted bodice and a skirt that flows outward. There’s a specific reason for this: The sundress as we know it today was born in postwar America, when designers began to target an active consumer base with more leisure time than ever. The resulting category — sportswear — would provide the foundations of American fashion for the next century, and remains what most people today wear. Designers like Claire McCardell and Carolyn Schnurer were particularly responsible for the silhouette and feel of the sundress, designed to be “unfussy, required minimal foundation garments and could be worn for a variety of occasions,” according to The Met. “There’s a difference between your granny saying ‘sundress’ and the kid from Harlem or Brooklyn saying ‘sundress season’” By the ’60s, Florida socialite Lilly Pulitzer reimagined the sundress to be even looser and more casual, meant to be worn without the girdles, slips, or longline bras popular into the decade (Pulitzer herself ensured they were double-lined so that she could go without underwear). Unlike the stiff cotton poplin Pulitzer’s dresses were made of, modern clothing tends to be stretchier and more fitted, made with polyester, viscose, and other fabrics that are cheap to produce but terrible for the environment. That’s the thing about fashion: It changes, and yesterday’s sundress won’t necessarily be tomorrow’s. The reason we’re talking about sundresses at all is not because of the evolution of women’s fashion but because of the male gaze. Sundress discourse, especially when men are driving it, feels reminiscent of an earlier era, one where women’s magazines regularly touted features about “what guys REALLY think of your outfit” and offered advice on how to dress “for your man.” That doesn’t happen as much anymore; social media ushered in an era of wider understanding of feminism and body positivity, which the media and entertainment industries reflected and sold back to us. Since then, viral “horny” clothing items have usually been ones worn by men to be admired by women and gay men, from gray sweatpants to thigh-baring short shorts to the guy from Normal People’s chain necklace. We’re currently in a strange era of online gender dynamics, though, with some research showing that young women are leaning more progressive while young men are heading to the right. This has created a renewed appetite for gender essentialist rhetoric by both men and women (take a look at any of the most viral “dating advice” content for a sample of this sort of nihilistic, “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” viewpoint). The result is a brewing gender war, fueled in part by a backlash against Me Too, with influencers gaining clout by spouting controversial takes on sex and gender norms. “I think men are becoming more vocal about their opinions online,” says Ryan when I ask why the “sundress season” discourse seems to be more potent this year. Take, for instance, the man who went viral for complaining about “these fucking wrestling singlets” that he saw women wearing (by which he means athleisure onesies and sets). “It’s sundress season, baby, come on! Us men are waiting, bring ’em out!” he said. That guy was rightfully roasted in the comments section, but the popularity of his video shows that when we talk about sundresses, what we’re really talking about is who gets to decide what women put on their bodies, and for what purpose. How I Met Your Mother’s resident sleaze discussing sexy sundresses played as a standard sitcom joke in 2010, but in 2024, women are more likely to be asking, “Why on earth should I care what a man thinks about my clothes?” It’s a common refrain for men to say that they love sundresses because they provide “easy access” to sex. It’s just as easy to imagine that being a reason why a woman might not want to wear one, so as to avoid being sexualized. These days, a man on the internet complaining that women aren’t wearing sundresses like they used to reads as reactionary, trad, or antifeminist, not that he appreciates women. It was never really about sundresses, then. Martin guesses that the men involved in the sundress debate, if you can call it that, don’t really care about the precise definition anyway. “People are saying, ‘Look, lady, we don’t give a damn what a sundress is. We just want to see you walk by.’” “At the end of the day, I think everyone should wear whatever they consider a sundress this summer, and we’re all gonna be happy,” echoes Trembacki. This year, though, it’s more of a loaded decision than ever.

The science of near-death experiences

4 h

vox.com

What happens when we die? I’ve always been a cold, hard materialist on this one: the brain shuts down, consciousness fades away, and the lights go out. And beyond that, what else is there to say? I had no experience of life before I was born and I expect to have no experience of life after I die. As best I can tell, that’s the most reasonable assumption we can make about death. But “most reasonable” does not mean “definitely true.” The life-after-death question is one of the oldest we have and there are all sorts of theories about how consciousness, in some form or another, might survive the death of the body. However unlikely these possibilities might be (and I do think they’re unlikely), they’re not impossible. So how seriously should we take them? Sebastian Junger is a former war reporter, a documentarian, and the author of several books, including his most recent In My Time of Dying. A few years ago, Junger came as close as you possibly can to death. While his doctors struggled to revive him, he experienced things that rattled his understanding of reality and that left him with profound questions and unexpected revelations. So I invited Junger on The Gray Area to talk about what it’s like to almost die and what he’s come to believe about life and death. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Sean Illing What happened on the day you almost died? Sebastian Junger I was 58 years old. It was four years ago. I’ve been a lifelong athlete. My health is very good, so it never occurred to me that I would have a sudden medical issue that would send me to the ER or kill me. I had no thoughts like that about myself. One afternoon, it was during Covid, my family and I were living in a house in the woods in Massachusetts that had no cellphone coverage. It’s at the end of a dead-end dirt road. On the property is a cabin, no electricity or anything like that. We went out there to spend a couple of hours and mid-sentence I felt this bolt of pain in my abdomen and I couldn’t make it go away. I sort of twisted and turned. I thought it was indigestion, and I stood up and almost fell over. So I sat back down and I said to my wife, “I’m going to need help. I don’t know what’s wrong. I’ve never felt anything like this.” What was happening, I later found out, was that I had an undiagnosed aneurysm in my pancreatic artery, one of several arteries that goes to the pancreas, and one of them had a bulge in it from a weak spot. And aneurysms are widow-makers. I mean, they’re really, really deadly, particularly in the abdomen, because it’s hard for the doctors to find them. If you’re stabbed in the stomach and an artery is severed, the doctors sort of know where to put their finger, as it were, to plug the leak, but if it’s just internal hemorrhage, your abdomen is basically a big bowl of spaghetti. It’s very, very hard to find it. So I was losing probably a pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes, and there’s like 10 pints in the human body, 10 or 12 pints, so you can do the math. And I was a one-hour drive from the nearest hospital. I was a human hourglass, basically. Sean Illing What was the survival rate for your condition that day? Sebastian Junger The survival rate is as low as 30 percent, but I assume that that’s for a reasonable transport time to the hospital. It took me 90 minutes to get to a doctor. My survival chances were extremely low. Sean Illing So you’re in the hospital and there’s a moment when the surgeons and the nurses are working on you and they’re on your right side, and then on your left side there’s this pit of blackness and your father, who I think has been dead eight years at this point, suddenly appears. What happens next? Sebastian Junger The doctor was busy trying to put a large-gauge needle into my jugular vein through my neck. They numb you with lidocaine, so actually I didn’t feel much except the pressure. But at any rate, they were working on that and it seemed to take a long time and suddenly this black pit opened up underneath me and it felt as though I was getting pulled into it. You can think of me as extremely drunk. I’m like, “Whoa, what’s that?” It didn’t occur to me that a black pit suddenly appearing makes no sense. I was just like, “Oh, there’s the pit. “Why am I getting pulled into it?” I didn’t know I was dying, but I sort of had this animal sense that you don’t want to go into the infinitely black pit that just opened up underneath you, that’s just a bad idea. And if you get sucked in there, you’re probably not coming back. That was the feeling I had about it. I started to panic and that’s when my dead father appeared above me in this energy form. It’s hard to describe. I can’t describe what it was like. I just perceived him. It’s not like there was a poster board of him floating above me. It wasn’t quite that tangible. He was communicating this incredible benevolence and love. He’s like, “Listen, you don’t have to fight it. You can come with me. I’ll take care of you. It’s going to be okay.” I was horrified. I was like, “Go with you? You’re dead. I’m not going anywhere with you. What are you talking about? Get out of here!” I mean, I was horrified. And I said to the doctor, because I was conversant, “You got to hurry. You’re losing me. I’m going right now.” And I didn’t know where I was going, but it was very clear I was headed out, and I did not want to go. Sean Illing When you say communicating, what does that really mean? Sebastian Junger I didn’t hear words, but I guess you would have to classify the communication as telepathic, and it was very specific. It was, “You don’t have to fight this. I’m here. I’ll take care of you. You can come with me.” Again, I’m a rationalist, but I’m a rationalist with questions. I wanted to know what that was. Was it just neurochemistry? When I woke up the next morning in the ICU, I was in a lot of distress and the nurse came in and said, “Wow, congratulations, Mr. Junger, you made it. We almost lost you last night. You almost died.” And when she said that, that’s when I remembered my father. I was like, “Oh my God, I saw my father, and I saw the pit,” and it all came rushing back to me Sean Illing The experience you had is not all that uncommon. This kind of thing gets lumped under the umbrella of “near-death experiences.” At this point, does science have a firm grasp on what’s going on here? Sebastian Junger Yes and no. I mean, there was a case where a man was dying. I think he’d had a stroke and they had electrodes attached to his skull to signal different brain activity to know how to treat him. And he passed some point of no return and the doctor said, “It’s okay, you can turn the machines off,” basically, but the sensors were still in place on his skull. So they had the chance to watch what was happening to the brain waves in real time as a person died. What they found was that in the 30 seconds before and after the moment of death — and of course death isn’t just confined to a single moment, it’s a spectrum — there was a surge in brain activity related to dreaming and memories and all kinds of other things. So one of the things that might happen when people die is that they experience this flood of sensations from their life. Why would they? Who knows? It’s hard to come up with this Darwinian reason for why this might be adaptive when a person’s dying. It’s not a question of survival and procreation, and Darwinism is not concerned with emotional comfort. It just doesn’t matter in the Darwinian arithmetic, so it’s hard to know what to make of it. Sean Illing One of the medical paradoxes here is that people who are dying experience near-total brain function collapse, and yet their awareness seems to crystallize, which seems impossible on its face. Do scientists have an explanation for this? Is it even a paradox at all, or does it just seem that way? Sebastian Junger I don’t think anyone knows. Ultimately, no one even knows if what we perceive during life is true. I mean, it’s known at the quantum level that observing a particle, a subatomic particle, changes its behavior. And of course, when you observe something, it’s a totally passive act. You’re not bombarding it with something. You’re just watching. If a photon is sent through two slits and an impassable barrier, and it’s unobserved by a conscious mind, it will go through both slits simultaneously. And once you observe, it’s forced to pick one slit. So as the early physicists said, observation creates the reality that’s being observed, and then the snake starts to swallow its tail. Sean Illing Science is great and we can map the neurochemical changes and I’m sure we can give a purely materialist explanation for them, but do you think it’s wise to leave it there or do you think there’s something just inherently mysterious about this that we’ll never quite understand? Sebastian Junger At one point, someone said to me, “You couldn’t explain what happened to you in rational terms. Why didn’t you turn to mystical terms?” And I said, “Because rational terms is what an explanation is.” The alternative is a story, and humans use stories to comfort themselves about things they can’t explain. I don’t choose to use the God story or the afterlife story to comfort myself about the unexplainable, which is what’s going to happen when I die. But there is one thing that really stood out to me. I bought all the neurochemical explanations. I bought the hard-boiled rationalist explanation that we’re purely biological beings when we die and that’s it and that the flurry of experiences that dying people have is just the dying brain frantically bombarding us with signals like, “What’s going on? Stop. Stop, stop, stop!” Except there’s one thing I don’t understand. If you give a roomful of people LSD, we know that 100 percent of those people will have hallucinations. We know why. We know how that works. There’s no mystery there. You don’t need God to explain that, but they’ll all hallucinate different things. And what’s strange about dying is that only the dying seem to see the dead. They do that in societies all around the world and have for ages. And the people who aren’t dying do not see the dead. And often, the dead are unwelcome and they’re a shock. It’s not some reassuring vision of Aunt Betty. It’s more like, “Dad, what are you doing here?” Or my mother, as she died, she saw her dead brother, who she was not on speaking terms with. When she saw him, she was horrified. She was like, “What’s he doing here?” And I said, “Mom, it’s your brother, George. You have to be nice to him. He’s come a long way to see you.” She just frowned and said, “We’ll see about that.” She died a day later. So it’s not like these are comforting visions, and the fact that only the dying see the dead is the one thing that science can’t quite explain. It’s the one thing that really does make me wonder if maybe we don’t understand everything in scientific terms. Maybe there is something missing here that is very significant about how reality works, how life and death work, what consciousness is, and ultimately what the universe is. Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

People bet on sports. Why not on anything else?

4 h

vox.com

BALTIMORE, MD - MAY 18: A man wearing an American flag suit places a bet for one of the earlier races in the day ahead of the 149th running of the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico Race Course on May 18, 2024 in Baltimore, Maryland. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images) If you’re an American looking to make some money betting on future elections, I have some bad news. The Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency tasked with regulating financial products like derivatives, has voted 3-2 for a proposal to ban “event contracts” on elections, but also on sports and on events like the Oscars. The rule targets prediction markets, sites like PredictIt or Kalshi that let you place real money on events happening in the future. It probably won’t be in effect until after November, but if you want to bet on the 2026 midterms, you may be out of luck. The case for prediction markets is simple: They give observers valuable information about the future. The information may seem low stakes in the case of the Oscars or sports, but obviously who controls the presidency is of public interest, and with polling getting harder and harder, we need all the help we can get in forecasting and understanding election results. I find these arguments pretty persuasive, and the arguments raised against legally allowing prediction markets frankly silly. Sports betting is now legal in 38 states and DC. It seems incredibly perverse that bets on the Knicks and Pacers would be legal but bets on Senate races that provide actually useful information to citizens the same way polls do would be banned. At the same time, I’m skeptical that a bad legal regime is really what’s holding prediction markets back. Nick Whitaker and J. Zachary Mazlish have a smart essay in Works in Progress outlining a theory I find persuasive: prediction markets aren’t working because they don’t provide enough value to the kind of people you need to make a market work. Who puts money in a prediction market? While the proposed CFTC ban is very broad, prediction markets on subjects other than elections are usually legal. At Kalshi right now, you can bet on what the Rotten Tomatoes score will be for Francis Ford Coppola’s comeback movie Megapolis (bets are currently hovering around 50), whether the Fed will cut interest rates before the end of July, and how thin Arctic Sea Ice will be next summer. But these markets have not exactly taken the world by storm. Only 14 markets on Kalshi have $100,000 or more bet on them. That may seem like a lot, but compared to the stock market or sports betting it’s a pittance. What’s more, the top four markets are all about Fed interest rates, which, as Whitaker and Mazlish note, you can already bet on through the much larger futures market. The novel opportunities prediction markets offer, like betting on Megapolis’s Rotten Tomatoes score, are less utilized. In a world where the markets are efficient and reasonably well-used, there are strong theoretical reasons to think the prices they produce will be accurate. If they weren’t accurate, and it was possible to know that, then someone could be making a ton of money betting in a different way. And once they made that bet, the market would move and become more accurate. For prediction markets to be obviously wrong, someone would need to be leaving easy money on the table, and that doesn’t normally happen in a capitalist society. But when they aren’t well-utilized, this argument doesn’t follow. The price might be wrong simply because the amount of money at stake is too small for people who know better to bother wagering, because the amount they can win isn’t worth the trouble. This is the heart of Whitaker and Mazlish’s case. They divide participants in betting markets into three types: savers, who try to grow their wealth; gamblers, for whom they’re entertainment; and “sharps,” who try to make money from understanding the market better than others. For none of these groups are prediction markets very useful. You should absolutely not invest your 401(k) in a prediction market; whereas the total value of the stock market grows over time, prediction markets are zero-sum. If you take your savings out of the S&P 500 and put it in buying both “yes” and “no” on the “will The Tortured Poets Department top the Billboard charts for over 10 weeks” contract, you will absolutely lose money. Savers are out. Gambling is a more plausible case for prediction markets. But Whitaker and Mazlish observe that in the UK, where this is all much less regulated, the popularity of sports betting completely swamps that of any other kind of contract. Yes, people like to gamble — but just about sports. That makes sense: Sports happen in real time, where the odds are fluctuating constantly, and where betting in real time can give you a certain rush. In-game betting, for instance, is especially popular. Other sorts of questions prediction markets might help us understand — Who’s going to be the next president of Iran? Will China attack Taiwan? Will bird flu become a pandemic? — don’t have this dynamic. They aren’t exciting. “Simply put,” as Whitaker and Mizlash write, “most things that we might want to know about the future aren’t much fun to bet on.” That leaves the sharps (sharks?), who are trying to make money by being more right than the next guy. Prediction markets would be great for them … if there was anyone for them to bet against. But without savers and gamblers to profit off of, the gains for sharps are limited. And if everyone else investing is also a reasonably smart sharp, isn’t that a signal that they’re probably right, and you’ll probably lose betting against them? Without much to offer sharps, savers, or gamblers, prediction markets are left with … no one. There’s no harm in trying The main legal prediction market in the US, Kalshi, is pretty small but its predictive record is still decent. More to the point, limits in the power of prediction markets aren’t a good reason to ban them, as the CFTC is attempting. In fact, it’s hard to find any good reason to ban them. Six Democratic Senators wrote to the CFTC last year that “billionaires could expand their already outsized influence on politics by wagering extraordinary bets while simultaneously contributing to a specific candidate or party.” But billionaires are already able to place unlimited bets on stocks in industries like clean energy or firearms whose fortunes depend heavily on who’s in charge of the government; prediction markets would merely make the information driving those bets easier for the rest of us to access. The idea that these billionaires could swing elections just to make money on bets is similarly far-fetched, as the writer Maxim Lott points out: “the thing with election manipulation is that even the most powerful individuals are rarely in a position to tip an election. It’s much harder to flip an election than a sports match, because of the number of people involved.” More empirically, Britain has had a tradition of electoral betting dating back to before the Magna Carta and has had a legal market since 1961, without any of the horror stories the senators invoke coming to pass. They’ve done a decent job of predicting election winners, and you won’t find any wild stories about how Tony Blair won in 1997 because Lord Sainsbury really wanted to make sure his “Labour wins” contracts cashed out. But I agree with Whitaker and Mazlish that real-money prediction markets need a better value proposition to succeed, even with more reasonable regulations. I’ve been surprised at the vibrancy of Manifold, a prediction market that only uses play money. The whole point of prediction markets is that they make you have “skin the game,” something to lose if you’re wrong. All you lose in Manifold is “mana,” a fake currency. But the frivolity might be part of the point. Precisely because you don’t put real money up, it’s easier for people to have fun making silly markets and betting on silly stuff. It’s a free form of social media engagement, like arguing on Twitter or Reddit. Maybe the more important thing is being simple and fun.

Furiosa’s hard-won feminism

20 h

vox.com

Anya Taylor-Joy as Furiosa George Miller’s Fury Road prequel Furiosa has a lot riding on it — not just the titular character’s war rig, but also her entire feminist legacy. The main appeal of Miller’s Mad Max universe has always been its intense dieselpunk worldbuilding, but with 2015’s Fury Road, the series gained an infusion of new energy and new iconic characters. Thanks to a strong ensemble cast, incredible action scenes and production values, and a high-stakes, high-concept chase that lasted for most of the run time, the film gave depth and beauty to its brutal post-apocalyptic wasteland. It also delivered an empowered, women-centric reconfiguration of a story known for its intense violence and machismo. That framing came in large part thanks to Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, a brusque but compassionate hero drawn in the tradition of Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor. With her metallic arm and husky-voiced butch competence, she immediately became a geek feminist icon. Anya Taylor-Joy, taking over the role to play a younger version of the character in the new film, had her work cut out for her trying to fill Theron’s shoes. She also had to overcome a lot of embedded brutality within the Mad Max universe, including what was originally a surprisingly sexist backstory, as articulated in a 2015 follow-up comic pegged to her character. Then there was the brutality of Miller’s production environment. The Mad Max Wasteland is exactly what it sounds like, a ravaged desert no-man’s land, but by all accounts, the Furiosa set in the sweltering Australian Outback wasn’t much better. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Taylor-Joy stated she’d “never been more alone” than during the production, and implied that she needed the full two years between the set and the film’s release to “deal with” the trauma of the filming process. Yet she also framed the role as a badge of honor, noting how “alive and purposeful” she felt during the filming process. Certainly, Taylor-Joy seems to have joined other actors in taking on psychologically complex roles that tiptoe the line between “method” acting and infliction of apparent trauma; she mentioned to interviewer Kyle Buchanan that she’d been unable to watch an early cut of the film without sobbing. But it also feels significant that Furiosa — a character who rarely talks and frequently speaks through actions rather than words — has now exacted this toll on two extremely talented actors. It isn’t a stretch to say she’s joined the ranks of larger-than-life fictional icons whose mythos looms over the actors who play them: a Joker or a Blanche Dubois. Has Furiosa herself led us down this thorny path? Or is Furiosa the film indicative of storytelling that, despite its best efforts, still limits what female action heroes are allowed to be? Furiosa’s — the film and the character — is a solitary journey (and very nearly a sexist one) Miller’s vision for Taylor-Joy in Furiosa seems to have been sparing and hardcore. Taylor-Joy told the Times that the role required her to do intense acting, often only with her eyes. The intricacy of the film’s elaborate action sequences also left her going for “months” without reciting a line of dialogue. She further told Variety that Miller would direct her to act scenes with her jaw tightly clenched. She also described clashes between her vision for the character and Miller’s vision, including one fight that eerily mirrored Theron’s on the set of Fury Road, with both women fighting for the right to let Furiosa erupt in anger. That’s interesting given that Furiosa’s backstory, as first mentioned in the highly incendiary, flagrantly misogynistic comic Furiosa, involves her having been a trafficked child singled out by Immortan Joe to become one of his wives — the same refugees she later breaks out of Joe’s Citadel at the beginning of Fury Road. In the comic, rather than being an ally to the women, Furiosa berates and even physically attacks them, at one point telling them they should be grateful for their life of sexual slavery because things are so much worse on the outside. Yikes. The comic implied strongly that Furiosa and all of Immortan Joe’s wives were beholden to him as a benevolent rapist who chose to treat them well and protect them. Not only that, but from a 2015 interview with Theron, we can see brief glimpses of the toxic mirrorverse that both Fury Road and Furiosa nearly fell into. In the interview, Theron mentions a backstory in which Joe discarded Furiosa and cast her out from the wives because she was infertile: “She couldn’t breed, and that was all that she was good for.” That grim statement implies that Furiosa’s character was originally intended to be the stereotypical “strong female character,” which is to say, one formed out of sexual trauma — and a character without much if any agency over her own life. The oft-repeated storyline implies that women are inevitably sexual objects who can only gain agency through their sexualization, or even their dehumanization. It’s a depressingly narrow vision of what could motivate a woman to act, and unnecessary in a world like Mad Max’s. She’s impacted by the sexist abuse in the universe around her, but there’s no accompanying subtle, sick fantasy of male violence to undermine her The other details Theron mentions as going into Furiosa’s backstory — her growing up in “the green place,” being sold to Joe as a child, her subsequent hiding out and disguising herself as a boy among the war pups, and her eventual escape — all play out onscreen in Furiosa. Fury Road thankfully erased any hint that Furiosa was ever a sexual pawn or a victim of sexual abuse and trauma, and Furiosa similarly jettisons this plot. Instead, the would-be child bride escapes her fate early on, and the rest of the film unfolds just as Theron hinted. Furiosa’s character is still deeply informed by trauma, loss, and abuse from childhood on, just never sexual abuse or infertility. She’s still impacted by the sexist abuse in the universe around her, but there’s no accompanying subtle, sick fantasy of male violence to undermine her. Still, the fact this detail was ever a part of Furiosa’s backstory at all leaves questions about how much Miller absorbed the feminism of the character, let alone intended her to be a reclamation of his nihilistic dystopia rather than a badass representative of it. Taylor-Joy implies that the 79-year-old filmmaker may have missed the importance of allowing Furiosa her expression of female rage after all the injustices she’s witnessed and abuse she’s survived. (Ironically, her informal audition for Miller for the role involved her performing the iconic “mad as hell” monologue from Network — one of the greatest expressions of male rage ever filmed.) For his part, in the Times profile, Miller compared Furiosa to other giant-statured heroes like those of John Wayne or Clint Eastwood — hardly a feminist vision, but certainly a potentially empowering one. It’s notable that this clashing vision of the character played out over two separate films in which the filming conditions seemed to mirror the character’s unforgiving psychology. Miller has stressed that filming conditions for Furiosa were by no means as conflict-heavy as the clashes between Theron and method-acting co-star Tom Hardy on the Fury Road set. But Taylor-Joy told Variety that Miller’s close-mouthed, eyes-only vision for her performance “create[d] a radiation off the character, because she is being suppressed continuously throughout the film.” Taylor-Joy gets at something fundamental about Furiosa here: This suppression isn’t just the foundation of her character. It might ultimately also be the key to Furiosa’s wild popularity. Sure, her grease-painted raccoon eyes, badass shaved pate, and glittering silver arm are all key ingredients as well. But audiences, especially female viewers, recognize the loss and hardship that echo in Furiosa’s thousand-yard stares and taciturn speech patterns, and we celebrate her for rising above it in whatever ways she can. In a post-Roe world, the thought that we nearly had a Furiosa whose worth was derived entirely from her ability to deliver children becomes a chilling what-if that thankfully we don’t have to confront. It all serves as a reminder that the life Furiosa was running from still nips at our own heels today. Perhaps saving her from that fate becomes an unspoken duty for whoever plays her — a combined joy and sorrow for the actor who steps into her shadow.

Birth control is good, actually

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vox.com

Hormonal contraception is getting a flood of bad buzz lately. One TikTok creator told viewers it took her six years to “fix her hormones” after stopping birth control. Another cut up a pack of birth control pills that she said “ruined me as a person.” A third called it “one of the most damaging things you can put in your body.” Hormonal contraception is getting a flood of bad buzz across social media, where posters are listing side effects like depression, anxiety, low sex drive, acne, unwanted weight changes, and more. While it’s hard to measure the size of the trend, it’s become visible enough to make its way into headlines, chats among friends, and conversations between patients and their doctors. The result is that if you’re an American of reproductive age, it can feel like the pill, ring, IUDs, and other hormonal methods are terrible medications that result in only bad outcomes. It’s important not to dismiss people’s bad experiences with birth control, especially since women’s medical concerns in general have too often been devalued by doctors and ignored by researchers. Indeed, the lack of public conversation around contraception and its side effects may be part of the reason for the recent wave of critical posts. Women also have good reason to be annoyed that their birth control options haven’t changed much in decades, while male birth control seems to remain perennially five years in the future. But the negative posts can mask a basic truth: Birth control is a very effective way to avoid an unplanned pregnancy, an experience that also has profound effects on people’s bodies, not to mention their lives. No contraceptive method is perfect, but experts say people who experience side effects with one can often find another that works for them. And for many people in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, “contraceptive access is becoming more and more important,” said Mengyang Sun, an OB-GYN in New York City and a fellow with the group Physicians for Reproductive Health. Now, that access may be in jeopardy, with former President Donald Trump stating in an interview this week that he is “looking at” restrictions on the medications (he later walked the statement back, saying he would “never advocate” restrictions). The side effects of birth control have also been cited by conservatives as a reason to oppose the medications. With their availability under threat, experts say it’s crucial to remember the good the medication does for the millions of people who use it. Hormonal birth control is very effective at preventing pregnancy People have been sharing negative experiences with birth control for many years, but critiques of contraception are receiving a new level of attention in recent months, with creators and influencers posting horror stories or tips for stopping the medication, sometimes including misleading information. Those stories may be honest, but some users also spread deliberate disinformation to further an anti-contraception agenda, said Deborah Bartz, an OB-GYN at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital who studies depictions of birth control on social media. In reality, hormonal contraceptives are a reliable way of preventing pregnancy: Birth control pills are about 91 percent effective with typical use, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, while long-acting reversible methods like IUDs and contraceptive implants are more than 99 percent effective. For comparison, condoms are about 82 percent effective (they can leak or come off), and fertility-based awareness methods, which rely on charting the menstrual cycle and avoiding sex or using condoms on the most fertile days, are around 76 percent effective. Reliable contraception has an enormous impact on people’s ability to plan their futures. Research has shown that access to birth control boosts women’s earnings, helps them achieve their educational goals, and makes them less likely to fall into poverty. “Every pregnancy-capable person should be able to decide if/when to have a pregnancy, and birth control really helps them to be able to plan that and make that decision for themselves,” Sun said. Hormonal contraceptives are also used to treat a variety of medical conditions, including endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome. The medications have “a lot of medical benefits,” Sun said. What doctors say about side effects Birth control does come with side effects, the most common of which are menstrual changes such as lighter or absent periods. Some people take birth control to reduce or stop their periods, but for others, the changes can be unwelcome, said Christine Dehlendorf, director of the Person-Centered Reproductive Health Program at the University of California San Francisco. A lot of social media posts about birth control mention weight gain, though only a few methods, like the Depo-Provera shot and contraceptive implant, have been conclusively linked with weight changes, Sun said. Other top concerns are impacts on mood and libido, which can vary by method and by patient. For some people, IUDs can be extremely painful to insert. Anesthesia and other pain relief methods can help, but, troublingly, doctors often underestimate the pain of the procedure and do not offer pain control, the Washington Post reported. Some critics of birth control are also concerned more broadly about the impact of taking hormones like estrogen and progestin, the active ingredients in many methods. The medications are associated with a small increase in breast cancer risk, and some carry a small risk of blood clots. However, doctors say any risk with birth control needs to be balanced against pregnancy, which carries health risks of its own. “Whenever my patients ask me about the hormones in the birth control, I do tell them, when you’re pregnant, your body secretes similar hormones in way larger quantities,” Sun said. It’s important for doctors to honor people’s concerns about birth control, listening to them without being paternalistic or dismissive, Dehlendorf said. “There needs to be repair and restoration of trust between health care providers and communities and patients about people’s experience of birth control methods if we are going to be able to give people information.” But experts also say that it’s especially crucial now to protect birth control access for people who want it. “Contraception is a valuable tool for people who do not want to get pregnant, one that it is absolutely essential to have access to in the context of the post-Dobbs era,” Dehlendorf said.

Actually, you should say something if you hate your friend’s partner

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vox.com

Arrogant selfish person in crown making group of people annoyed and angry. Lonely girl having behavior problems. Vector illustration for aggressive society, bad communication concept It’s not that Sammy didn’t like Natalie at first. She was nice enough. It was only after Natalie started dating Sammy’s best guy friend and roommate, Dan, that things got tense. Sammy, Natalie, and Dan were part of the same grad school cohort when Natalie and Dan got together. Sammy, now 33, got the sense that Natalie and Dan were on different pages. Dan was a few years older and tended to pursue more casual romances; Natalie had never been in a relationship before. (All names in this story have been changed to allow people to discuss their friendships candidly.) Natalie and Dan were on-again, off-again for a few months, and when they were back on, Sammy noticed the normally social Dan would leave hangouts early at Natalie’s behest. When Natalie did come around their larger group of friends, she wouldn’t interact with anyone but Dan, Sammy says. Sammy was afraid she was losing one of her closest connections. Things came to a head after a Halloween party when Natalie erupted on Sammy. “She goes on this weird, 20-something girl tangent about ‘We’re dating, deal with it,’” Sammy says. Dan overheard the entire exchange. After that, Sammy couldn’t hold her tongue anymore. She told Dan about how he’d changed after he started dating Natalie and how her behavior at the Halloween party was inappropriate. Dan took the conversation in stride, addressing Sammy’s concerns but not committing to ending things. They continued to date for another year and a half, but Dan no longer brought Natalie around his friends. The unspoken compromise, Sammy says, was Dan making time for their friendship while still dating Natalie. “I still feel good about the way I approached it,” Sammy says. “It was not like, ‘She’s boring and dumb and sucks.’ But I was like, ‘I don’t think you were the best version of yourself, and as your friend I want better for you.’ I painted it as not a personal attack, but rather I don’t think that this relationship is serving you to the fullest.” Sammy and Dan now live in different cities but are still long-distance friends. It’s one of the most common and deeply felt friendship conundrums that we have very little control over who our closest confidantes date. Ideally, our pals would partner up with someone as wonderful as they are, but real duds can worm their way into the mix. As a friend, of course we want to support our bud’s romance, but what if we think they’re wasting their time with an overly opinionated blabbermouth? Or dating someone who isn’t a good fit? Worst of all, what if they’re with someone who’s just not a great person? “It was not like, ‘She’s boring and dumb and sucks’” It’s our responsibility to let our friends know when we think their romantic relationship is bringing them down. “It’s my job as her friend,” says friendship coach Danielle Bayard Jackson, author of Fighting for Our Friendships: The Science and Art of Conflict and Connection in Women’s Relationships, “to let her know why I feel this is not good for her from the vantage point of being a person in her life intimately familiar with who she is, what her goals are, what might be a good partner.” These discussions don’t need to be friendship-killers either. As with any difficult conversation, there are ways to express concerns so a friend can accept them (even if they don’t agree) rather than feel attacked. The goal for the conversation, Bayard Jackson says, is to tell your friend what you see, show them your support, and manage your expectations around how they react to that information. (If you believe your friend is in an abusive relationship, this advice will vary. More on that later.) When to share your concerns (and when to keep them to yourself) While it’s true that you owe it to a friend to tell them when something feels off about their relationship, there are limits to what counts as reasonable concerns. Only broach a conversation if the noxious partner in question (and their behavior) is impacting your friend, you, or your friendship, says therapist Israa Nasir. For example, maybe you notice that your friend’s significant other constantly criticizes them or puts them down. Or perhaps your friend confides in you about how their spouse dismisses their feelings every time they try to have a serious conversation. Think twice before commenting on aspects of someone’s personality “because for your friend, they might enjoy those parts of their partner,” says therapist Shade Adekunle. If you find your friend’s new boyfriend’s jokes incredibly annoying but inoffensive, you may need to figure out how to manage your irritation (or limit the amount of time you spend with him when he’s feeling full of jokes). If you do decide to discuss an issue about a friend’s partner, make sure you’ve actually spent some time with them, Adekunle says. It’s possible their significant other was nervous or shy the first time you met them; don’t let one interaction color your entire view of them. However, don’t let years pass where you amass a mental dossier of your friend’s fiancé’s past infractions. “Giving that to somebody will make them feel defensive,” Adekunle says. Your friend might think, “You’re just judging me. You’ve hated them all along and you just didn’t say anything.” Comment on the behavior, not the person Once you’ve determined there’s something to be gained from voicing your concerns, be specific about what worries or upsets you. Simply saying “he’s annoying,” “she’s shady,” or “they’re untrustworthy” doesn’t explain how it impacts your friend or your friendship. You should also avoid giving your friend an ultimatum or asking them to choose between you and their partner. “That’s just not your place,” Nasir says, “even as a friend.” Maybe you’ve noticed your friend shrink away because their significant other always has to be the center of attention. Make an observation rather than a judgment, Nasir says. Try saying, “I noticed that when you’re with your partner, you tend to become very quiet.” Be honest about how the partner’s actions made you feel, Nasir suggests. You can also invite your friend into the conversation and ask them if they’ve clocked similar observations. Again, you might say, “I love how happy you are with Mark, but I’ve noticed he has a regular habit of interrupting everyone, even you. Is that something you’ve ever brought up with him before?” Simply saying “he’s annoying,” “she’s shady,” or “they’re untrustworthy” doesn’t explain how it impacts your friend or your friendship When her friends vent about their significant others, Julie sees an opening to gently push back. Instead of urging a friend to break up with their partner, Julie, 31, says something along the lines of, “That doesn’t sound like a great situation. Is this someone you want to continue to spend your time with?” The hope, Julie says, is “that they see themselves in the way that you see them. You’re like, ‘I know you’re not like this. I know you’re not a person that goes in your shell. Or you seem upset a lot of the times that we talk about it.’ I’m hoping that they see this is not normal.” Be prepared for pushback Broaching your concerns with empathy and curiosity gives your friend space to confide in you about problems in their relationship. But regardless of your approach, they may also respond defensively — and you should be prepared. Your friend may feel judged or that their decisions are being questioned, Adekunle says. It’s not unreasonable to expect some unkind words from your friend, who may feel caught off guard. Give your friend some time to cool off and don’t take what they say too personally, Nasir says. Should a friend have a negative reaction, Bayard Jackson finds it helpful to say, “I totally get that. If things were reversed, I’d feel the same way. But I also have to be honest.” That way you’re acknowledging their feelings while not trying to force your friend to see things your way. Let them know you trust them when they say everything is peachy in their relationship and that you’re always open to talk if anything changes, Adekunle says. It’s also true that you’re only privy to so much of the dynamic in your friend’s relationship. “This is tough to swallow, but he offers her something that you don’t and he offers her something that maybe you don’t understand,” Bayard Jackson says. “They have moments that you’re not a part of.” Set boundaries when you need to You probably won’t be able to completely avoid spending time with a friend’s partner, but you do have control over the duration and frequency of those hangouts. Be discerning when making and accepting plans, Bayard Jackson says. You might politely decline an invitation to join the two of them for dinner or suggest one-on-one hangouts, but you probably won’t be able to duck out of bigger events, like a birthday party. If you know you’ll be spending time with a friend’s partner who you don’t like, make a plan for how you’ll interact with them, Bayard Jackson suggests. Say hello and make small talk, but don’t spend more than a few minutes chatting. It’s better not to roll your eyes when they say something irritating. The goal is to continue to support your friend without undermining their relationship. Sometimes setting boundaries can grow into creating space. Andrew and Jacklyn were a few months into their friendship when Jacklyn started dating John. The romance was quickly intense, with Jacklyn discussing marriage after a few weeks. Andrew describes it as co-dependent. Andrew noticed Jacklyn would cancel plans at John’s behest. Throughout the entire relationship, Andrew questioned Jacklyn about John’s behaviors: “Why do you think he’s doing that?” or “How did that make you feel?” even “Why do you think you’re still in the relationship?” “I was like a broken record in what I was saying to her,” Andrew, 35, says. After less than a year, Jacklyn and John split. “She did say to me, ‘I appreciate you pointing out about John being this way and that way,’” Andrew says. But Andrew quickly found himself in a similar role when Jacklyn started dating another man Andrew saw as volatile. One night after a fight with her new boyfriend, Jacklyn was venting to Andrew. He tried to be validating, he says, but thought, “I can’t be invested in this again.” So he started spending less time with Jacklyn. They’re no longer friends, he says. What to say when you really don’t have anything nice to say For people like Andrew who are constantly on the receiving end of their friend’s gripes about their partner, you do have permission to point out the pattern, Adekunle says. You could say, “The last few times we’ve hung out, I’ve noticed you bring up Alex a lot. What’s going on there?” Or if your friend is constantly rehashing the same issues — they complain about their spouse’s poor communication skills — you might ask them whether they’ve brought up their concerns with their partner. “We want to be honest with them,” Adekunle says, “and say, ‘Was there something about this that you contributed to in some way? Could that go differently? Could that be better?’” Keeping the conversation focused on your friend can also help you avoid saying anything negative about their significant other. Maybe your pal says they’re so excited for a comedy show their partner bought tickets to, but you think the comedian is lame and their seats are cheap. Express your genuine interest in your friend’s excitement: “I love that you guys are doing that!” or “I’ve never been to that venue before, let me know how it is.” Avoid any sarcasm or passive aggressive language. What to do if you suspect abuse If you believe your friend is experiencing physical or emotional abuse, you’ll need to take a different approach. According to Adekunle, signs of abuse include a change in your friend’s demeanor, marks on their body, low self-esteem, or if they disclose how their arguments with their partner have intensified or become physical. You’ll want to be more direct. Adekunle suggests saying, “I’ve known you for 10 years and over the last six months I’ve seen a big change. I love you and want to know what’s going on.” Should they deflect or brush off your concern, let them know you’re worried about them: “I hear that you’re saying it’s fine, but from my perspective, it’s not looking that way. So can we try to talk about it?” Adekunle suggests. Once your friend feels comfortable opening up to you, try creating a larger support network if they’re comfortable. You might loop in another friend or a parent or sibling. This way you can collectively offer your friend resources and a plan to exit the relationship when they’re ready. “Maybe you talk about how could you let us know if things are escalating and you need help?” Adekunle says. “What would that look like?” Regardless of the relationship dynamic, the bottom line is you want to ensure your friend knows that you love and support them. You can’t control who your friends choose to be with, but you can control how you continue to show up for those you care about.

3 theories for America’s anti-immigrant shift

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vox.com

Six years ago, the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy at the southern border went into effect. Thousands of immigrant families were split up; migrant children were taken and kept separately while their parents awaited prosecution. The images and sounds of caged children stunned the nation, and the outcry was swift: Democrats rallied against then-President Donald Trump, protests swept the country, and public opinion was sharply against Trump’s policy. Immigration soared to become a top concern again, and the share of Americans saying immigration was a good thing for the country jumped. That sentiment continued to grow during the rest of Trump’s presidency. Now, things look much different. Americans once again view immigration as the country’s single most important problem, but public sentiment appears to have taken a turn to the negative. Recent polling seems to suggest that a significant share of American voters — not just Republicans — are warming up to the idea of tough-on-immigration policy proposals and rhetoric. Inside this story Numerous polls suggest the American public is souring on immigration, with even Democratic voters showing more interest in Donald Trump’s policy proposals for mass deportations. It’s a reversal of the public’s several-decades-long trend of increasing sympathy and appreciation for immigrants. This piece lays out three reasons for this surprising trend in public opinion. A recent poll suggested 42 percent of Democrats would support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Other polls have also found an anti-immigrant shift in the public’s mood. Gallup’s long-term tracking poll, which has been running since the 1960s, shows a more general decline in the share of Americans who want to increase rates of immigration or keep them the same. Conversely, the portion of Americans who want to decrease immigration has grown: 41 percent of Americans feel this way, up from a low point of 28 percent in 2020. This shift against immigration is happening even as the general American consensus has been moving in favor of immigrants over the last few decades. In 1994, for example, 63 percent of Americans believed that immigrants were a “burden” to the country; only 31 percent said immigrants strengthen the country, according to Pew Research Center data. By 2019, those dynamics had flipped: 62 percent of Americans believed immigrants were an asset to the nation; only 28 percent thought they were a burden. Now, with the public seemingly lurching to the right on immigration, politicians are moving accordingly. There’s been a rightward pivot by Biden and congressional Democrats, and Trump — who built his first campaign on demonizing immigrants (and particularly immigrants of color) — has stepped up his constant attacks on the Biden administration’s immigration policy. So what explains the American public’s souring mood on immigrants and immigration? Though there are no simple answers, pollsters and immigration researchers offer a few explanations that can be roughly sorted into three theories. The first theory centers the role of elected officials — specifically Republicans, and more specifically Trump. As Republicans left power and shifted into opposition mode, they’ve refocused attention on immigration as a threat to American identity. Other experts argue the economy — particularly inflation and the public’s “scarcity mindset” — has made more Americans critical of immigration. When the public feels as though the economy is booming and there’s plenty to go around, they feel more open to sharing that wealth. But when people perceive the economy to be tenuous, like after the pandemic when inflation took off, Americans feel more hesitant to share with outsiders. A third group argues that the anti-immigrant turn is being driven by concerns about the rule of law and social disorder. This theory posits that the post-pandemic surge in crime, combined with heightened media coverage of disorder in public, prompted greater concerns from Americans about security and quality of life — concerns that were then also applied to the border and people trying to cross it without documentation. Theory 1: It’s the politicians Trump’s first presidential campaign — starting quite literally with his announcement speech — was built on demonizing immigrants and claiming that open borders were destroying America. But that created a rhetorical tension once he took office, as he had to claim that the problem was rapidly improving thanks to his new anti-immigration measures. Since Joe Biden took office, he has pledged a more open, humanitarian approach to immigration and border politics. He paused construction on a border wall; he issued new protections for DACA recipients, and sent a new immigration bill to Congress. He essentially sought to create the sharpest contrast possible with Donald Trump’s legacy. That shift, however, created the perfect opportunity for Republicans, led by Trump, to once again cast immigration and immigrants as a threat to American identity. The surge in illegal border crossings and legal asylum seekers that followed the pandemic — as well as this liberalizing of migration policy — were fodder for the fear-mongering and exploitation of racial and social fears. And right-wing politicians and commentators have routinely played up this threat, unifying immigrant-skeptical Americans. The lead-up to the 2022 midterms and the 2024 campaign so far provide evidence of this shift. While the 2020 campaign centered on the pandemic and the economy, once Biden took over, Republican candidates across the country shifted into talk about “open borders.” For example, the pro-immigration groups America’s Voice and Immigration Hub in 2021 tracked an increase in mentions of the terms “Biden-Harris border crisis” and “mass amnesty” in paid advertising, as well as increased anti-immigrant discourse online. Once the midterm season picked up, more Republican campaign ads began to mention immigration negatively — about one in five ads in March 2022, for example. And in 2024, Republican candidates (most visibly Donald Trump) have also stepped up talk of immigrant “invasions.” Trump’s more recent framing of illegal immigration as “poisoning the blood of our country” is a key example of this more vitriolic talk of immigrants. And it fits into a longstanding history of American xenophobia; immigration scholars consider this kind of discourse a direct appeal to “in-groups”: existing communities that define themselves against “out-groups” like immigrants, and exploit suspicion and bigotry. Still, this theory can’t fully explain the shift in negative sentiment since the pandemic. Republican politicians (including, famously, Trump) and right-wing media have previously led other cycles of outrage and panic over migration, “caravans,” and the southern border. Immigration was a key campaign point for Republicans during the 2018 midterms, but support for immigration continued to rise. Theory 2: It’s the economy When Americans feel good about their financial security and the health of the national economy, they also feel good about immigrants and immigration. That’s the lesson from the last few decades of Gallup polling, according to Jeff Jones, one of Gallup’s data and public opinion experts. “We saw some declines around the Great Recession — favorable percentages were in the 50s — and then in 2018 and 2019, opinions were quite positive,” Jones told me. In fact, both Republicans and Democrats were more positive about immigration during that time. But after the pandemic and its ensuing inflation and interest rate hikes, economic sentiment took a nosedive, and anti-immigrant sentiment began to pick up as well. These more recent swings also show up in a few of Gallup’s other tracking polls. When asked whether immigrants have a positive or negative effect on job opportunities, taxes, or the economy in general, negative sentiment tended to increase in the lead-up to the Great Recession but recovered after. A similar dynamic emerged before and after the pandemic: 43 percent of respondents said immigrants had a positive effect on the economy, while 31 percent said it had a negative effect. By 2023, respondents were nearly evenly divided: 39 percent to 38 percent. But economics alone don’t explain recent twists. Both economic conditions and sentiment about the economy have been improving more markedly over the last year, but the public’s anti-immigrant shift has been accelerating. Clearly, something else is happening here. Theory 3: It’s the “law-and-order” mindset Matthew Wright, a University of British Columbia political scientist who studies immigration, suggests a third complementary explanation: a renewed public desire for “law-and-order” policies prompted by the pandemic-era rise in crime and the Biden-era increase in border-crossing attempts. Compared to the lull in rates of immigration during the pandemic, the surge in border crossings in the last three years was unprecedented, overwhelming what federal and local officials have been able to manage. That volume has resulted in dramatic scenes at the border, in border communities, and in big cities, where many asylum seekers have been moved. Wright suggests that a good chunk of Americans feel conflicting emotions that conflate illegal immigration, asylum seekers, and immigration in general with a sense of public disorder. They are torn between having sympathy for immigrants in general and feeling worried about public safety, order, and the rule of law. And they combine their feelings about the border with their attitudes about crime and governance. “In terms of what people are concerned about, the way I read these figures and these trends is that they’re mainly concerned about illegal immigration, and they’re mainly concerned about the border,” Wright said. “There’s something to be said for people being seriously uncomfortable with the idea that their country doesn’t have a border, that the border is not something we can enforce.” Gallup polling also provides some clues of shifting sentiment here: In 2023, 47 percent of Americans said they believed immigrants had a worsening effect on crime in the US, up from 42 percent in 2019. And the share of Americans who say they personally worry a “great deal” specifically about illegal immigration has steadily increased since 2020 — from 32 percent in March 2020 to 48 percent in March of this year. To Wright, these findings complement other polling that shows a confounding mix of opinions on immigration. A not insignificant number of voters hold both these more critical views of immigration as well as generally open views: positive toward refugees, favoring reform of legal migration, and supporting pathways to citizenship for those already here. This law-and-order theory suggests that these voters can hold competing ideas in their minds: not opposing migration, but wanting it done in an orderly manner. This theory also explains why Trump and Republicans may have a unique opening this year — to activate both nativist and bigoted attitudes in some voters, as well as to exploit fear of “chaos” and bad management. “They can use a very simple message to capture different kinds of people: They can capture both the prejudicially motivated person and the pure law-and-order guy — that person is not expressly racist, necessarily, but values order in society,” Wright said.

Hacks shows cancel culture is a joke

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vox.com

Jean Smart as Deborah Vance in Season 3 of Hacks The worst thing to happen to very good television shows is when they run out of things to say. Telling a good story and what fans and network executives want (more show) are forces often at odds with one another, and I’ve watched more than a few of my favorite shows crumble under the pressure to give it one more go. That’s why I was a little worried about Hacks, which stuck its landing in season two. The second season finale had Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) firing Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), telling Ava that it was time for her to succeed on her own. The move came from love, and perhaps from Deborah, a little bit selfishly, wanting to enjoy her success alone. As a conclusion for these characters, it was well played and well earned — good for fans, extremely tricky for the writing team. The show relies on the friction created by the strange, begrudging love these two have for one another. Without the turbulence, there is no show here, and at the same time, more of the same rocky road antics between the two could feel repetitive. But it turns out, I had nothing to worry about. Hacks still has plenty to say. The show continues to be a consistent delight. This third chapter focuses on Deborah’s ambitions of becoming a late-night network TV talk show host. Through her journey, the show asks questions — both cynical and earnest — about what the future of commercial comedy looks like and which comedians actually get to take risks. The answer to the latter is usually the very rich and very famous. These themes collide in “Yes, And,” the eighth and penultimate episode of the season, in which Hacks’s antihero finally gets “canceled.” This was inevitable — cancellation is one of the most omnipresent conversations in modern comedy. There are few things less enjoyable than an allegedly funny boomer unable to see how unfunny they’ve become. And as the show establishes, Deborah Vance has always been a boomer (derogatory). But as the show makes clear, she’s not quite the worst boomer. Hacks is deeply self-aware, with its sharpness balancing its optimistic sitcom underpinnings. We’ve followed along as Deborah has learned how to navigate the modern world with a terminally millennial woman as her guide, and both of the main characters’ fumbles are framed more as miscommunications than personal failings. Still, below the slapstick of a “woke mob” coming for Deborah Vance, Hacks has canny observations about who gets canceled, who holds power, and what actually means anything in an industry that revolves around the rich and powerful. “Yes, And” opens with a seemingly innocuous mistake: Deborah Vance has been double-booked at both a UC Berkeley ceremony where she’ll be awarded with an honorary degree and an appearance at Palm Springs Pride. It’s a tough call, but Deborah has to go to Berkeley because she’s trying to build some momentum and buzz for the late-night hosting gig. A fancy event at a prestigious college will do that, and it turns out that a vaunted New Yorker writer profiling Deborah will also be there to finish up the article. Knock this out of the park and that late-night show is hers. But unfortunately for Team Deborah Vance, that plan quickly goes south — enough to make double-booking the least of their concerns. While at Berkeley, a supercut of Deborah telling racist and ableist “jokes” emerges and goes viral. Calling them jokes is generous because they’re just blobs of bigotry without anything resembling a punchline (e.g., cars shouldn’t be made by Asian people because Asian people aren’t good drivers). As Deborah tells Ava, the clips are stitched from material she did decades ago and she obviously doesn’t feel that way today. More importantly, though, Deborah needs the New Yorker and network executives to know she’s not problematic because she really wants this job. As the clip circulates, Deborah and Ava have to figure out what to do. Ignore it and hope it goes away? Admit she said those things, but don’t apologize? Acknowledge the clip and apologize? Deborah complains about being picked on, and that it isn’t fair that she’s being targeted. Ava thinks Deborah’s completely lost the plot. “You get to be rich and famous for making jokes,” Ava replies, urging Deborah to just say sorry. “People are allowed to have their reactions to them.” As Ava delivers this very astute observation Deborah (at a frat party no less), it’s not difficult to connect her point to the contemporary discourse surrounding real–life comedians getting critiqued for their jokes or behavior and then calling themselves victims of cancel culture. Whether it’s Dave Chappelle trying to defend his anti-trans humor, Amy Schumer talking about Middle East politics, Jerry Seinfeld talking about the state of modern-day comedy, or Ellen DeGeneres talking about getting “kicked out” of the business — it all revolves around not being able to handle critique. As Ava points out, there are no victims of cancel culture. No one is ever canceled. No one’s success is ever taken away. No one’s actually being censored. It’s simply a personal misreading of the power dynamic. All of the comics I listed above continue to have some combination of robust deals with streaming services, accolades for speaking out, and huge stadium shows. Fame inverts the comedy landscape. Famous comedians will always have more power than a non-famous person they’re targeting, which means they can’t help but punch down, a comedy no-no. Now that social media platforms and the internet have democratized fame and visibility, said famous comedians are being held accountable. Accountability can feel a lot like some kind of injustice to very famous, rich people. But at the end of the day they’re still very rich and famous. “No one’s actually canceled,” Ava says. The show putting these words in Ava’s mouth is important because she also lost a job over a joke. In the first season, Ava fires off a tweet about an anti-gay senator that gets her fired and kicks off the events of the show. Unlike famous comedians, she had to suffer consequences for what she did (i.e., moving to Las Vegas and working for Deborah Vance). She has firsthand experience about what being professionally “canceled” is actually like. At the same time, her trials and tribulations — becoming a landlord and not having much of a social life — were extremely privileged problems to have. Ava keeps reminding Deborah that she could end the kerfuffle by apologizing. Deborah, so stubborn, would rather go through the fresh hell of college improv and bribing frat brothers with wine than say sorry. She insists comedians don’t apologize for their comedy. It isn’t until a dean pulls the plug on her ceremony, and ostensibly damages the New Yorker profile, that Deborah finally agrees to attend an on-campus town hall and listen to the students offended by her old material. The ending of the episode is indistinguishable from a fairy tale. After Deborah’s apology, her New Yorker profile is glowing. It’s all about her humanity and how she’s a difficult, but daring comedian for wanting to learn and grow. With this newly demonstrated ability to listen, the writer surmises that Deborah would be the perfect late-night host. Right after Ava reads her the article, Deborah gets word that she clinched the gig and snagged her dream job. But while Deborah Vance got her happy ending, there’s a sly wryness to it that comes back to the show’s bigger point about famous people complaining about cancel culture: It’s all a joke. Of course, we’re happy when Deborah’s past doesn’t derail her future because she’s the show’s protagonist, and we know her story and who she is. (It doesn’t hurt that her transgressions are much less severe than real-life parallels.) She also apologizes because she seems to have some semblance of regret and wants to be better. And because she listens to the students tell her how wrong she was and shows remorse, she gets a glowing profile in a fancy magazine. The barest minimum gets a handsome reward because the bar is on the floor. While that’s a satisfying story for our fictional hero, it’s a little less enjoyable to think about how the episode underlines that Deborah’s job was never really in question. The viral clip and online rage were never going to ruin her chances. The network would likely always have given her the hosting gig. Between the second and third seasons of Hacks, Deborah has reached that tier of Seinfeld and DeGeneres, the level of prestige where any consequence can be met with complaint, and that’s just as good as an apology. It ultimately doesn’t matter whether Deborah was actually sorry about the offensive stuff she said or if she just wanted to appear sorry because her dream gig was being threatened. “Yes, And” gets at the idea that we all want to believe that people, especially famous rich ones, can be held accountable. We want our personal judgments to have some kind of bearing on an industry run by rich and powerful people. But that’s all a setup, something we fall for because it feels a little better than being the punchline.

The Supreme Court’s new voting rights decision is a love letter to gerrymandering

2 d

vox.com

An abortion rights activist flies an upside down US flag, the international sign of distress, outside of the US Supreme Court during a protest in Washington, DC, on June 26, 2022, two days after the US Supreme Court scrapped half-century constitutional protections for the procedure. Elected leaders across the US political divide rallied on June 26 for a long fight ahead on abortion -- state by state and in Congress -- with total bans in force or expected soon in half of the vast country. (Photo by Samuel Corum / AFP) (Photo by SAMUEL CORUM/AFP via Getty Images) The Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 decision along party lines on Thursday, which represented its fullest endorsement of partisan gerrymandering to date. In the past, legal restrictions on racial gerrymandering — maps drawn to minimize the voting power of a particular racial group, rather than the power of a political party — had the side effect of also limiting attempts to draw maps that benefitted one party or another. While the Court largely tolerated gerrymanders that were designed to lock one party into power, those maps sometimes failed because they also targeted racial minorities. Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, however, is written explicitly to permit political parties to draw rigged maps, even when those maps maximize the power of white voters and minimize the power of voters of color. Indeed, Alito says that one of the purposes of his opinion is to prevent litigants from “repackag[ing] a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim by exploiting the tight link between race and political preference.” Along the way, Alito’s opinion gives the Court’s explicit blessing to maps that are drawn for the very purpose of maximizing one political party’s power. In the very first paragraph of his Alexander opinion, Alito states that “as far as the Federal Constitution is concerned, a legislature may pursue partisan ends when it engages in redistricting.” This is a significant statement, as it endorses a practice — partisan gerrymandering — that the Court has previously treated as unseemly. The Court’s most significant previous opinion on partisan gerrymandering, Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), held that federal courts lack jurisdiction to hear cases challenging partisan maps, but it stopped short of saying that such maps are actually permissible under the Constitution. Rucho even declared that partisan gerrymandering “leads to results that reasonably seem unjust” and called it “incompatible with democratic principles.” The Court just concluded that the solution to this anti-democratic practice is “beyond the reach of the federal courts.” Alexander, by contrast, contains none of these caveats. Rigged maps now enjoy the Supreme Court’s unambiguous support. On top of all of this, Alexander achieves another one of Alito’s longtime goals. Alito frequently disdains any allegation that a white lawmaker might have been motivated by racism, and he’s long sought to write a presumption of white racial innocence into the law. His dismissive attitude toward any allegation that racism might exist in American government is on full display in his opinion. “When a federal court finds that race drove a legislature’s districting decisions, it is declaring that the legislature engaged in ‘offensive and demeaning conduct,’” Alito writes, before proclaiming that “we should not be quick to hurl such accusations at the political branches.” So Alexander is a very significant decision, and a very significant loss for proponents of fair legislative maps. The case is likely to cause partisan gerrymandering to proliferate in the United States even more than it already has. The big question in Alexander: What happens when a legislature engages in both racial and partisan gerrymandering? For many years prior to Rucho, the Supreme Court at least held open the possibility that it might strike down maps drawn to benefit one political party or the other. Rucho, which, like Alexander, was decided along party lines with the Court’s Republicans in the majority, cut off any possibility that a partisan gerrymandering case could move forward in federal court. Yet while the Court no longer allows challenges to partisan gerrymanders, it has long allowed civil rights plaintiffs to challenge racial gerrymanders: maps drawn to increase the power of voters of one race, or to diminish the power of voters of a different race. The South Carolina map at issue in Alexander, however, was both a partisan gerrymander and a racial gerrymander. In 2018, former Rep. Joe Cunningham, a Democrat, won a narrow victory in South Carolina’s First Congressional District. In 2020, he got over 49 percent of the vote but lost that seat to Republican Rep. Nancy Mace. Everyone, including Alito, acknowledges that South Carolina’s Republican legislature redrew its congressional maps after the 2020 census to shore up Republican control of the First District. The lower court that heard this case determined, however, that the legislature did so by using race as a proxy to identify voters who were likely to vote for Democrats. In 2020, 90 percent of Black voters in South Carolina voted for President Joe Biden, so mapmakers knew that if they moved large numbers of Black voters out of the First District, that would make the district more Republican. And so the lower court found that South Carolina’s mapmakers chopped up Charleston County, including many white voters from that county in the First District, while excluding nearly 80 percent of Charleston’s Black population. Before Alexander, using race in this way was illegal. The Supreme Court held in Cooper v. Harris (2017) that “the sorting of voters on the grounds of their race remains suspect even if race is meant to function as a proxy for other (including political) characteristics.” Though Alito’s Alexander opinion does not explicitly overrule this holding from Cooper, it effectively achieves that goal. As Justice Elena Kagan writes in dissent, Alito’s latest opinion closely tracks his dissent in Cooper. “Today, for all practical purposes,” Kagan writes, “the Cooper dissent becomes the law.” Alito writes a strong presumption of white racial innocence into the law Much of the case turns on a factual dispute about whether South Carolina Republicans actually did use race to identify which voters to move out of the First District. Alito’s opinion argues that the lower court reached the wrong factual conclusion when it determined that they did; Kagan’s opinion takes the opposite position. Ordinarily, appellate courts are not supposed to second-guess a trial court’s factual findings. Trial judges hear witness testimony and develop the intimate familiarity with a case that comes from hearing both parties’ full presentation of their factual arguments; the Supreme Court does not. As the Supreme Court held in Cooper, a lower court’s “findings of fact — most notably, as to whether racial considerations predominated in drawing district lines — are subject to review only for clear error.” Alito’s Alexander opinion pays lip service to this clear error standard, but it effectively eliminates it in redistricting cases. The new rule is that state lawmakers enjoy a “presumption of legislative good faith” when they are accused of racial gerrymandering. Alito writes that “nothing rules out the possibility” that movement of Black voters out of the First District “was simply a side effect of the legislature’s partisan goal.” And given the presumption that legislatures can do what they want, “that possibility is dispositive.” Later in his opinion, Alito goes even further. The lower court, he claims, “critically erred by failing to draw an adverse inference against the Challengers for not providing a substitute map that shows how the State ‘could have achieved its legitimate political objectives’ in District 1 while producing ‘significantly greater racial balance.’” What Alito is saying here is that, when a state draws a partisan gerrymander, anyone who wants to challenge it as an illegal racial gerrymander should show that there is some way to draw more racially equitable maps that still achieve the same partisan goals. And if the challengers can’t do that, courts generally must rule against those challengers. So Alexander is a significant victory for gerrymandering, for lawmakers who wish to use race to draw legislative districts, and for Alito’s Republican Party.