Hello.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO will undoubtedly be the biggest IPO in history.

What’s unusual about this particular IPO is that it is widely available to retail investors, such as the man on the street. Typically, in any IPO, a certain percentage of the company’s stock is offered to the public, and a large percentage of that stock is already pre-purchased by institutional investors.

The pre-market valuation of the IPO is likely to be in the $1.77 trillion range, according to the Wall Street Journal.

That is not a bad thing. It is an amazing thing. But you are going to hear from all the wrong people that it’s immoral, terrible, even evil. Why?

Envy. It’s a universal human emotion, and envy is bad and wrong, and God explicitly condemns it.

What could destroy the country and the global economy is what has always threatened humanity: Envy.

Jimmy Kimmel is a beautiful example of this. Jimmy Kimmel is a multimillionaire who works for billionaires, and he’s upset about a prospective trillionaire.

Kimmel is an obnoxious, non-funny, woke pope of late-night TV, who’s probably worth somewhere between $50 million and $100 million. He is paid by people worth tens of billions of dollars to complain about a guy who built a company that would be worth $1.77 trillion.

Kimmel mocked:

Elon Musk came to the United States from South Africa in 1995, the son of a humble emerald mine owner, and he is so grateful to this country that allowed him to become a trillionaire. Tesla paid almost no federal income tax over the past three years. You know, for a guy who has been openly cheering immigrants getting kicked out of the country for stealing from us, sure seems like an immigrant who’s been stealing from us, to me.

This is just obnoxious trash. It is not true. Elon did not, in fact, grow up wealthy. His dad was kind of a mess. And as far as the idea that Elon came to the United States wealthy, that is eminently untrue. He was living in some of the worst apartments in America when he came here. And then he didn’t get a job at Netscape despite applying. And then he ended up becoming this unbelievable success.

The notion that he is stealing from Americans by building several of the most successful companies in American history is totally crazy.

What has Jimmy Kimmel built? Ever?

But here’s what’s really going on: Jimmy Kimmel doesn’t like that Elon is really, really, really rich.

Kimmel continued:

Trillion dollars. It’s hard for our brains to conceptualize that. I mean, we know a trillion is a number, but it’s so large. In the same way, we can’t fathom it the same way. We know, like Elon has a lot of kids when we can’t fathom him getting laid, right? So let me try to illustrate it. If you tried to count out loud to a trillion, you would be counting until the year 33,736. $1 trillion is 10 billion $100 bills.

I’m just wondering: Jimmy Kimmel is worth probably $100 million. If you counted to 100 million, it would take you about 3 years, if you counted one number per second and stayed up all night.

Why the envy, why the rage?

There’s certainly something political to it. Jimmy Kimmel was much nicer to Elon Musk back in 2013 when he had him on his show to talk about SpaceX.

He said to Musk:

You know, I want to go over some of your many accomplishments just for the audience in case they’re not familiar with them. In 1983, at age 12, you designed a video game and sold it to a computer magazine for $500. 1995, you quit the graduate program at Stanford to found Zip2. In 1999, you sold Zip2 to Compaq for $309 million.

You co-founded PayPal in 2000. You sold PayPal to eBay for a billion and a half dollars. You founded Space-X. You co-founded Tesla Motors. You helped create SolarCity, the solar power company. Well, it’s great to meet you. If you want to watch the launch, why wouldn’t you want to watch the launch of the Space-x rocket? On March 1 go to Space X.com and take a look.

Barack Obama toured SpaceX with Elon in 2010. The Democratic president of the United States marveled at it.

Musk was talking about reusable rockets back in 2010. That was not achieved for over half a decade. It was an enormous risk. And Obama was marveling at it at the time.

But now we’ve gone from that inspirational view to giant inflatable Elon Musks in Times Square with no shirt on and looking ugly.

What’s really going on here?

The answer is very simple: Envy.

There is a very interesting study in the journal “Frontiers in Psychology” from 2021 that discusses what are called “the two faces of envy.” The authors wrote:

Envy is like a wildfire destroying people. We feel envy for, a classmate who gets a good grade or, a neighbor who buys an expensive car. This kind of emotion drives our different behaviors, like small stones in the heart lake, ruining our peace of mind. … [Scholars] envy as “the intense, unpleasant feeling that one feels when one realizes that another has something that one strives for, pursues, or yearns for.” Envy is a painful emotion.

There are two kinds of envy. One is useful, and one is quite terrible.

One is benign envy: “The envious person may try to make themselves as good as the person being envied. Therefore, envy can increase personal effort, drive behavior to achieve the desired object, and to turn attention to the means of achieving it.”

And then there’s another type: malicious envy. This is where “The envious person may try to degrade the person being envied, to vilify or denigrate the other person’s advantages. Envy can increase schadenfreude behavior that leads to hostility and resentment. It can shift attention to the person being envied.”

By the way, it also leads to violence. There’s literally a full commandment among the Ten Commandments that is directly about envy: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, your neighbor’s wife, his servant, his ox, his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.”

God takes the time to say envy is bad.

By the way, this is the only commandment that has to do with your feelings. All the rest are behaviorally driven: Don’t steal. Don’t kill, don’t blaspheme. Respect your parents and everyone else. This one is emotional. Why did God reserve one commandment for the emotion of envy?

Because it turns out the entire history of humanity relies on whether we can actually master our envy. This is the story of Cain and Abel. The story of Cain and Abel is about envy. Cain decides to sacrifice to God, and Abel follows suit. And God, for reasons we don’t understand from the Bible, accepts Abel’s sacrifice, but not Cain’s.

And then God says, “Surely if you do right, you will be uplifted. But if you do not do right, sin crouches at your door. Its urge is toward you, but you can be its master.”

What is that sin? It’s envy. And what does Cain do? Instead of going to Abel and saying, “What did you do right and I did wrong? How can I do better?” he kills Abel.

Envy is destructive. It is terrible.

What’s interesting here is when we get envious, because it’s not a universal timing thing; it’s a universal human emotion, we feel it all the time.

But it tends to kick in for anyone who’s just above you on the wealth index. So if you make 100 grand, you may be envious of the guy who makes 200 grand.

But it’s not every person who makes more than you.

There is a particular envy for people who take risks.

That’s because in our heart of hearts, we think we could have done that too. We look at Elon, we say, “I could have founded a SpaceX company. He thought of it, but I could have thought of it. I could have taken the risk. It’s something that’s within my purview.”

It’s really, really interesting to watch New Yorkers who just voted for a Democratic socialist like Zohran Mamdani, who riffs on Citadel CEO Ken Griffin all day long and roots for the Knicks this season. The Knicks are super rich. Really, really, really rich. Karl-Anthony Towns made $53 million this year. OG Anunoby made $40 million. Jalen Brunson makes $35 million a year. That is a lot of money.

But you’re not seeing jealousy or outrage in the stadium. People aren’t showing up and yelling at them about how they need to redistribute their income and pay more taxes, and how many school teachers are out of a job, and do we need more government-sponsored grocery stores.

So why are people so envious of these guys? Because everyone recognizes that these guys have unique talents given by God. You’re not seven feet, you’re not 270 pounds, and you can’t shoot the three.

But when it’s a smart person who doesn’t have exceptional physical qualities, then we get pretty jealous. “Why didn’t we get what he has? Why don’t we all get to be Elon Musk-rich? He’s not that much better than we are.”

But here is the thing. The reason that Elon is super-rich, and I know a lot of people who are as bright as Elon, I know a lot of very high IQ people, and Elon has a very high IQ, he is much richer than any of them, is because he took risks, huge risks, unprecedented risks.

And that is good because risk is what creates innovation. If you don’t have people risking, you don’t get better stuff. If you don’t have people taking out mortgages on their homes to sponsor and subsidize them, a company won’t get built.

If you don’t have people willing to put their own money where their mouth is, their own time, their own effort, you do not get new things.

We need new things. Not only that, we need a system that allows you to keep what you make.

For every single Elon Musk in any industry, there are 10,000 dudes who thought of it, risked it, and failed.

What is the only thing that will keep people risking it and trying to do the thing that actually builds? The only thing that incentivizes that is the possibility of making a lot of money.

That’s what generates people willing to take the risks that actually make the world a better place.

Risk-taking is risky. Take, for example, Blue Origin, run by another billionaire, Jeff Bezos, a competitor to SpaceX. A couple of weeks ago, we watched a Blue Origin rocket explode on the ground. Billions of dollars were lost in one millisecond.

That’s what it looks like when you take risks, because sometimes you fail. You know how many videos there are of Elon Musk’s rockets blowing up on the launch pad?

How do you incentivize a person to keep looking failure in the face over and over and over again? You have to have an American system, a free-market system that rewards risk-taking and punishes failure and rewards success.

That is what you require. People forget that Elon Musk risked pretty much his entire early fortune on SpaceX and Tesla.

This is risk-taking, and it’s awesome, and it should be rewarded.

No matter what Jimmy Kimmel thinks.

The Department of Justice has approved Paramount Skydance’s proposed $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, clearing one of the biggest regulatory obstacles to a deal that would reshape the entertainment industry.

According to reports from Politico and CNBC, the DOJ’s Antitrust Division concluded the transaction does not pose a threat to competition and declined to challenge the merger.

The decision paves the way for Paramount to merge with the media giant behind CNN, HBO Max, Warner Bros. Pictures, TBS, TNT, and other major entertainment brands, creating one of the world’s largest media companies.

The approval is expected to be formally announced on Friday.

Federal regulators reportedly approved the deal without requiring Paramount to divest any assets or accept behavioral remedies, conditions that often accompany major media mergers.

The merger has been among the most closely watched antitrust reviews of President Donald Trump’s second term because of its size and its potential impact on the media landscape.

Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, son of Oracle founder and Trump ally Larry Ellison, reportedly met personally with DOJ officials multiple times during the review process. According to Politico, Ellison spent roughly two hours meeting with Antitrust Division officials and career attorneys several weeks ago to discuss the transaction and its competitive effects.

Throughout the review, Paramount argued that the merger would strengthen competition by creating a larger media company capable of competing against streaming giants and technology firms that increasingly dominate the entertainment business.

Earlier this year, Netflix briefly pursued its own acquisition proposal for Warner Bros. Discovery before dropping out of the bidding process. According to CNBC, Paramount’s offer values Warner Bros. Discovery at approximately $31 per share.

Despite the federal approval, the deal still faces additional scrutiny.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, continues to investigate the transaction and could attempt to challenge the merger in court. Attorneys general from several states, including California and New York, monitored portions of the federal review process.

“The Paramount acquisition of Warner Brothers remains an active investigation,” a spokesperson for Bonta’s office told Politico.

The merger must also receive approval from European regulators before it can be finalized. The European Union has opened its own review and set a July deadline for its initial assessment.

On Wednesday, Paramount announced that Australia’s competition regulator had approved the transaction.

Critics of the merger have warned that it could lead to another round of consolidation-related layoffs across Hollywood. Industry unions and some entertainment advocates have argued that the combined company would likely pursue significant cost-cutting measures.

For Paramount and the Ellisons, the DOJ’s decision represents a major victory after months of regulatory scrutiny. The company has said it expects the transaction to close by September if all remaining approvals are secured.

Reprogramming is the new frontier in anti-aging research: Scientists are exploring ways to return cells to a younger state, building on a Nobel Prize, winning discovery that certain genetic factors can transform adult cells into stem cells capable of becoming virtually any cell type.

Big money is flooding in: Billions of dollars from billionaires like Yuri Milner and Sam Altman are backing companies like Altos Labs and Retro Biosciences, signaling serious investor confidence in reprogramming's potential to extend healthy human lifespans.

Past anti-aging trends have stumbled: Earlier excitement around telomere lengthening and "zombie cell" removal faded after disappointing human trials, a cautionary reminder that promising mouse studies don't always translate, and reprogramming faces the same unproven leap.

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Earlier this week, Life Biosciences, a biotech company focused on reversing age-related diseases, announced that it had dosed its first volunteer. A person with glaucoma has had an experimental treatment injected straight into their eyeball.

The idea is to try to treat the disease, which can cause vision loss, by regenerating healthy nerves in the eye. But David Sinclair, the chairman and cofounder of the company behind the trial, hopes to go further. If the treatment can reverse glaucoma, perhaps similar treatments can reverse other diseases of aging. Maybe, just maybe, they can reverse aging altogether.

The approach is designed to work by “reprogramming” cells to a younger state. It’s one of many strategies being explored by biotech companies looking to slow and reverse the process of aging. But of all of them, it seems to be the one that is truly taking off.

Aging is complicated. As we get older, we experience so many changes across pretty much all our biological systems. Scientists have tried to categorize these effects. In 2013, one team published a seminal paper describing nine “hallmarks of aging.” That list features many of the processes scientists have attempted to target. But some of those targets have fallen in and out of fashion over the years.

Take telomere attrition, for example. Telomeres are DNA sequences at the ends of our chromosomes, often likened to the plastic caps that stop the ends of our shoelaces from fraying. When cells divide, telomeres shorten until, eventually, the DNA is vulnerable to damage.

When I started reporting on aging, telomere shortening was all the rage. Shrinking telomeres had been linked to age-related diseases of the heart and brain. Shortened telomeres were considered a sign of premature aging. In 2017 Liz Parrish, CEO of the biotech company BioViva, injected herself with an experimental gene therapy that she hoped might lengthen her telomeres.

Then it suddenly seemed to go out of style. Research continued, but all the excitement within the aging and longevity community seemed to move on to another hallmark. (Parrish also continued with self-experimentation; she calls herself “the most genetically modified person on Earth.”)

That hallmark was cellular senescence. This happens when cells stop dividing but don’t die, instead entering a “zombie” state in which they churn out chemicals that can cause harmful inflammation.

Senescent cells gradually accumulate in pretty much every organ studied, where they are thought to contribute to age-related damage. Why not just periodically clear them out? When a team of scientists took that approach in mice in 2011, they found they could delay the onset of age-related conditions like cataracts and hunchback. The treated mice even looked younger.

But when scientists at Unity Biotechnology trialed a similar approach in people with osteoarthritis and an age-related eye condition in the late 2010s and early 2020s, the results were disappointing. The company laid off every employee in May last year and has since shuttered entirely.

Again, that doesn’t mean senolytic drugs that target “zombie cells” won’t work. But it feels as if many in the field have moved on. These days, the buzz is all about reprogramming.

The idea here is to essentially return cells to a young state. It’s based on the Nobel Prize, winning discovery that four genetic factors can turn an adult cell into a stem cell, which can be encouraged to develop into pretty much any other cell type.

Some promising studies in mice suggest that this approach might help wind back the clock. It seems to improve tissue healing, restore vision, and even improve learning and memory.

Running parallel to all this research are repeated injections of hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. In 2021, my colleague Antonio Regalado reported on the founding of the biotech company Altos Labs to pursue reprogramming for rejuvenation.

Altos was funded by the billionaire Yuri Milner, reportedly along with Jeff Bezos, among others, to the tune of $3 billion, a previously unheard-of figure for a biotech startup. Other well-funded companies have since sprung up in this space.

There’s Retro Biosciences, for instance, which is pursuing reprogramming (among other approaches) in an effort to add 10 years of healthy life to human lifespans. Retro’s launch was supported by $180 million from OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Last month, the company announced a valuation of $1.8 billion.

NewLimit, another billionaire-backed biotech exploring reprogramming, says it has promising results from research in mice. It plans to trial a drug designed to rejuvenate the liver in people next year. Last week, the company announced it had raised $435 million toward reaching that goal, among others.

Life Biosciences, which was founded by the Harvard biologist David Sinclair, most recently secured $80 million to support its research. The eye trial is now officially underway, but Sinclair also has plans for whole-body rejuvenation. Earlier this week, he told my colleague Antonio that he plans to test a “highly, highly confidential” oral reprogramming drug as part of a $101 million competition organized by the XPrize Foundation.

Reprogramming has certainly caught the attention of scientists, biotech companies, and investors. Studies in mice are hugely promising. Human trials are launching. And research in the field has billions of dollars’ worth of support.A lot of people in the field are really excited about reprogramming. But it comes with risks. And we still don’t know if it will work. The question now is: Do we finally have a rejuvenation drug within reach? And if not, what will the next research trend look like?

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

“We go to war here, spiritually.”

That was what John Porras, a 39-year-old former Marine, told me on my first day at 252 The Weekend, a Christian men’s retreat.

I arrived last Friday morning at 9 a.m., just in time for the morning worship session, which kicked off not with a prayer, but with a cup-stacking contest. Under a large tent, 580 men sat rapt, watching six guys on a stage competing to build the highest red Solo cup tower. Other challenges scheduled for the weekend would include a bench press competition and an obstacle course, the winner of which, I was told, would have his name engraved on a sword.

Run by a New Jersey-based megachurch called Transform Church, 252 The Weekend is named for Luke 2:52. It’s the only Bible verse that references what Jesus, who began his pastoral work when he was about 30, got up to as a teenager and a twentysomething: “And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.” The verse is the weekend’s blueprint, in the words of Transform Church founder and senior pastor Anthony Fleming, who created and runs the retreat, which is now in its fifth year; the aim is “for boys to become young men, and for young men to become great men.”

Read more

Through the magic of sports, we have the following actual headline in Alabama media:

The real star of Alabama’s World Cup match? Freddy from Germany and his 1 a.m. Buc-ee’s dinner

My most requested topic this week is not this classic NBA Finals. Instead, it’s this sudden genre of “Awestruck Europeans traveling through the USA heartland.”

Apparently, due to the World Cup, an event that arguably means less to Americans than the aforementioned Finals or even your standard NFL playoff game, we’ve been invaded by gawking Euros. These visitors see our land through a different lens, excitedly consuming flyover state bounties we often take for granted. This is like if a thousand Alexis de Tocquevilles applied their observations to Bass Pro Shops.

Is this now viral commentary authentic? Flattering? Condescending? Is “Freddy from Germany” even real? Maybe not, but in a way, yes.

With now-famous German fan FreddyLA7, who’s notable enough to receive tourism assistance from NFL great JJ Watt, there’s some mystery here:

He apparently started his X account back in the days when it was known as Twitter in 2021. His X account states he’s based in Germany (according to X, “The country or region that an account is based can be impacted by recent travel or temporary relocation. This data may not be accurate and can change periodically.”). He’s got a verified account, but all that means is that he pays for it. He’s had four username changes since September 2024.

Some cynics, including those who regularly visit this podcast, view the emergent onslaught of Freddys as plausibly part of some astroturfed campaign to raise pro-Murica sentiment during these festivities. The softer cynical theory is just that these Euros have found an easy template for positive Internet engagement. Maybe AleksanderGunner89 doesn’t really like Costco that much. Perhaps what he really likes is all the likes he gets from liking Costco.

And why are we Americans so generously handing out that Internet engagement? Aren’t we infamously incurious about the broader world’s judgment? My take is, contrived or not, the America-loving visitors are tapping into an understandable want.

I think these football tourists landed on a market inefficiency that I first noticed back in March, when the Twitter/X translation feature revealed an entire Japanese subculture of USA fetishization. Those Japanese X users were into the cowboy hats and BBQ, and Americans aware of this phenomenon were mostly tickled by it. Growing up, I associated the export of our brand with gleaming Manhattan skyscrapers. To many around the world, their America was the version Billy Crystal and his New York friends sought in “City Slickers.”

The prevalent Japanese view of USA culture reminded me of that old 2004 election meme of describing the divide in our nation as between the United States of Canada vs. Jesusland. These Japanese America lovers betrayed little interest in the United States of Canada. It seems they preferred Jesusland, or perhaps more currently, Trumpland, a profound source of embarrassment to an American traveler type who craves an image of worldly sophistication. The Japanese Americana moment turned this sore subject on its head. Japan, a high-status travel destination for our coastal elites, contained people who saw high status in what many here regard as low culture. They saw something to be proud of in archetypes that my friends and neighbors view as intrinsically embarrassing.

Now the visiting Euros are putting an additional spin on this. The Japanese were in love with an image, whereas the charmed Europeans are more like Boris Yeltsin at the Houston grocery store. Yes, France might have given the world “democracy, existentialism, and the ménage à trois.” But America invented the free refill.

You arrive here and of course aren’t easily finding your way to a cattle drive. The real America isn’t necessarily the one spotlighted in the TV series “Yellowstone.” Instead, it’s a vast expanse of commercialized abundance. It’s the biggest Bass Pro Shops. It’s the Wisconsin Dells water parks. While our elites fetishize the “walkable” European city, World Cup Europeans are gobsmacked by the scale and splendor of the drivable USA safari.

For whatever we lack, we also have a lot of space and stuff. It’s easy to see the flaw in a culture that revolves around consumption, but it’s also easy to take stuff, like air conditioning, for granted. We have poverty, of course. We have gun crime, infamously. We also have a middle class with access to wonders unimaginable to many around the planet. “Freedom” is a well-worn American cliché, but clichés exist for a reason.

There’s so much negativity out there in high culture about our nation, from our own elites and elites abroad. We’re at a current low point in Gallup’s “Are You Proud to be an American?” question, with much of the decline driven by liberals during this Trump era. That makes some sense, but let’s take a 30,000-foot view of that historic bottom:

A record-low 58% of U.S. adults say they are “extremely” (41%) or “very” (17%) proud to be an American, down nine percentage points from last year and five points below the prior low from 2020.

This means that a solid majority of Americans are still “extremely” or “very” proud to be an American. Where in the national news can they find feel-good stories that channel this sentiment? If you’re looking for smaller anecdotes, it’s not especially novel to see Murica-love voiced by a flag-waving Texan. It’s more fun to witness such positivity from the vantage of a cosplaying World Cup Brit.

In conclusion, yes, there might be an aspect of contrivance to the current praise of our country from this influx of visitors. There’s also a real, mostly unmet yearning for that kind of admiration. Perhaps Buc-ee’s isn’t really the best we have to offer. But our country offers a whole lot to a great many, and there’s something glorious about the size and color of the American mundane.

***

This is republished with permission from the author. The original essay appears here.

Ethan Strauss is the creator of the Substack House of Strauss. He is a former NBA PR gopher, basketblogger, and NBA beat writer.

Among all the other artificial intelligence upgrades Apple is rolling out for us this year, you'll find that there's a significant jump forward in Image Playground's AI image generation abilities. Before now, the app's outputs were rather limited in terms of size, style, and possible prompts. It was very much AI images for beginners, with the results mostly basic and generic.

With iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, that's changing. You can try the developer betas now (though you probably shouldn't; the public betas are arriving in July), and Apple says the full releases will appear later in the year (most likely around September). Image generation is something both ChatGPT and Gemini have been steadily improving, to the point where some generations are difficult to distinguish from real photos. So how does Apple's new and improved Image Playground compare?

Here's what Image Playground can do now

Open up Image Playground on the newest versions of iOS, iPadOS, or macOS, and you'll see there are several new capabilities. First, you can ask for photorealistic images in the prompt box, as well as the sketches and illustrations previously possible: Ask for a photo of an English meadow or a towering temple, and Image Playground will oblige.

There's more control over your images, too. You can submit a photo as part of a starting prompt, and you can choose between square, portrait, and landscape orientations for your picture, these options weren't available before. If you want to transport your pet dog to the jungle, that's possible now.

Image Playground can now work with existing images. Credit: Lifehacker

Then there are clever editing tools, similar to those in Google's Nano Banana AI model, that let you change specific parts of a generated image without having to render it entirely again. You can use a follow-up prompt to request changes, and even highlight the part of the picture you want to edit.

You can now change the color of objects, remove objects altogether, change the weather of a scene, whatever you can think of, really. Based on my testing, it all works well, and produces results that look impressive and consistent. I managed to put a cartoon-style cat in a street, and then change the cat's color without affecting the background.

You can use follow-up prompts to make edits. Credit: Lifehacker

Apple says that everything created through Image Playground will have the same SynthID watermark as generations from Google Gemini and ChatGPT, and we know because of Private Cloud Compute that no user images will be stored or accessed by Apple, or used to train any of its models.

Finally, you can do more with these images too, setting them as Contact Posters or wallpaper for the lock screen, for example. You can find more AI image tools in the Photos app, where you can apply edits similar to those possible in Image Playground to whatever's in your photo library.

Image Playground versus the competition

Image Playground is much better, no doubt thanks to a boost from Gemini, but even still, the images aren't quite up to the very high bar that Gemini and ChatGPT have set now. You can see below how my request for "a photorealistic image of a small, ancient-looking spaceship floating between the stars, with an Earth-like planet behind it" was interpreted by Image Playground (left), Gemini (center), and ChatGPT (right).

The spaceship AI challenge. Credit: Image Playground / Gemini / ChatGPT

Apple does okay, but to my eye, Gemini and ChatGPT generated results that are more immersive and detailed, like something you'd see in an actual science fiction film. There's more detail and more imagination, although to Apple's credit, Image Playground rendered the fastest.

For the next challenge, I tried asking these AI tools to "move my cuddly toy from my floor to a pebbly beach, with the tide lapping at its edges." Again, all these attempts are good, but Gemini (center) and ChatGPT (right) add extra layers of verisimilitude in terms of color, angle, and texture (though Gemini seems to have created two shorelines).

The toy on the beach challenge. Credit: Image Playground / Gemini / ChatGPT

I asked all three models to remove the toy and just leave the beach, and they all managed it more or less perfectly. These are Photoshop-level edits that used to take me hours, but can now be completed in seconds. It's truly impressive. Gemini and ChatGPT still have the edge in terms of quality, but Image Playground comes built into billions of Apple devices. It's now good enough that many users will likely choose not to switch to something else when they need to generate an image with AI, which might make all the difference.

The New York Knicks made NBA Finals history in Game 4 on Wednesday. They came back from 29 points down to win and take a 3-1 series lead. The team did it in front of a sold-out Madison Square Garden with Taylor Swift in attendance. There was also an incident during the Knicks radio broadcast that went viral on social media.

Monica McNutt called the pop superstar “not a Knicks fan.” However, she wasn’t aware that the microphone was on. Swifties fired back at the radio host and she received a lot o backlash for her comments.

MORE: Taylor Swift’s appearance at Knicks-Spurs Game 4 sparks mixed reactions

McNutt issued an apology to Swift the following day. She admitted that she “misspoke” and gave the 14-time Grammy winner a shout out.

“Swifties, I appreciate your passion,” McNutt said, via TMZ. “I said what I said. And here’s the deal, if I’m wrong, I am wrong, apparently, because she’s got an OG Amar’e Stoudemire jersey. … I misspoke. I did not know, but here’s the deal.

“I literally just did a piece on celebrity row. I’ve been with the organization for five years. I know these folks. Ben Stiller. His wife, Christine. Spike Lee. All of them. Fat Joe. I had not seen her here this year or last year, and we just saw her in Cleveland with her fiancé. Obviously, Travis supports the Cavs. She didn’t have on any Knicks paraphernalia, so I did not know of her Knicks loyalty. But shoutout to T-Swift. We can be united in orange and blue, like, it’s fine.”

Ben Stiller, Alana Haim, Este Haim, Taylor Swift and Mariska Hargitay react in the second quarter between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs during game four of the 2026 NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden. Mandatory Credit: Geoff Burke-Imagn Images

Taylor Swift watched her 4th Knicks game live

Swift made headlines for attending Game 4 at Madison Square Garden. However, it wasn’t her first time watching New York play live. She and her fiancé, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, were at Rocket Arena for Game 3 of the Eastern Conference finals on May 23.

The 36-year-old has two other documented Knicks game appearances. She watched a regular-season game versus the Chicago Bulls at MSG in October 2014. Swift followed it up by attending another matchup the following month against the Orlando Magic.

Millie Bobby Brown is celebrating the launch of her latest collection on social media.

In a recent Instagram post, the 22-year-old actress announced the launch of Americana, the latest collection from her clothing line, Florence by Mills Fashion.

The "Enola Holmes" star posed for a selfie in a tight blue shirt with white polka dots, a deep V-neckline, and capped sleeves. She paired the look with a denim skirt and a red bandanna in her hair.

She posed for the photos next to a vintage red convertible parked at a gas station, captioning the post, "pov: i said i’d be there in 5. Americana now live."

KYLIE JENNER GOES TOPLESS ON INSTAGRAM FOR LATEST FASHION LAUNCH

Fans couldn't help but show their excitement for the new collection in the comments section, with one writing, "Mills, IM OBSESSED WITH THIS OUTFIT SERIOUSLY," and another adding, "Okay but this whole Americana era is EVERYTHING ❤️⭐🤠."

"❤️💙It’s perfect for summer❤️💙," a third fan wrote.

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The brand also shared photos on Instagram to promote the new collection, writing: "welcome to: americana ⭐🐴 👢⛽️ sunny days, scenic routes, and long country nights under a sky full of stars… this is confidence with the windows down. *available in us only"

The actress recently caused a firestorm online when the first trailer for the upcoming third installment of Netflix's "Enola Holmes" franchise dropped on social media.

Many fans of the film series took issue with Brown's clearly manicured nails, as she is meant to portray a young detective living in the 19th century.

'STRANGER THINGS' STAR MILLIE BOBBY BROWN SHARES REAL NAME AS SHE ADMITS CHANGING IT FOR 'S, -S AND GIGGLES'

"Forget the mystery, let’s talk about the time-traveling nail tech who set her up with that almond shape in the 19th century," one fan wrote on X.

"Are the acrylic stiletto nails historically accurate?" another wrote, while a third chimed in adding, "pulling up to 1885 with a fresh gel set."

Brown began playing the character when she was 16 years old, after breaking into the entertainment industry when she was cast as Eleven in the hit Netflix series, "Stranger Things," when she was 12 years old.

She went on to play the character for five seasons over nine years, from 2016 to 2025.

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"I think I’m ready. It’s been such a huge factor in part of my life, but it’s like graduating high school, it’s like senior year," she told Vanity Fair in August 2023 before filming the final season began. "You’re ready to go and blossom and flourish and you’re grateful for the time you’ve had, but it’s time to create your own message and live your own life."

The actress recently came to her husband's defense on Kylie Kelce's podcast, "Not Gonna Lie," after internet trolls called him out for not helping her carry her bags or push their daughter's stroller in paparazzi photos.

She explained that "nobody knows my husband," adding that while he is "the most polite, sweet, will-do-anything-for-me" kind of man, "he also knows I'm capable."

"When did women become incapable of holding their own bags, car seats and stuff? This stems from me holding all of my suitcases and bags and my kid and people are like, 'Your husband doesn't hold a single thing.' Because I'm three miles ahead. I have been planning this all night."

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She later added: "We’re all about empowering girls and, ‘You got it’ and ‘You don’t need a man.’ But then when I’m like, ‘OK, I can carry my own things,’ people are like, ‘Where’s your husband?’"

Some excerpts from Judge Lewis Liman (S.D.N.Y.) long opinion today in Wayfarer Studios LLC v. Lively:

[Blake] Lively filed a complaint with the California Civil Rights Department ("CRD") against [Justin] Baldoni and his co-defendants, the Wayfarer Parties, alleging, among other things, that Baldoni and others sexually harassed her on the set of the Film {It Ends With Us} and that the Wayfarer Parties retaliated against her for raising complaints about that harassment by launching a smear campaign to tarnish her reputation….

Lively then sued over that alleged behavior, and the Wayfarer Parties "counter-sued, asserting claims, including defamation, against Lively and others for making statements that the Wayfarer Parties" engaged in or tolerated "sexually inappropriate conduct" or retaliation. The Court rejected that counterclaim, on the grounds that

"the fair report privilege … precluded the Wayfarer Parties from bringing a defamation claim against Lively for providing a copy of her CRD complaint to the New York Times,"

"the Wayfarer Parties had insufficiently alleged that text messages Lively may have provided to the Times were defamatory," and that

they hadn't adequately alleged "that Lively was responsible for any statements made by her husband Ryan Reynolds" "or publicist Leslie Sloane."

In May, the parties settled all their claims, but expressly left open whether Lively can recover attorney fees and damages under Cal. Civil Code § 47.1. (They also waived their right to appeal from any such determination.)

Section 47.1 … [seeks] to shield "survivors of sexual assault, harassment, and discrimination from defamation lawsuits", and, in particular, the burdensome and invasive discovery process those lawsuits often entail, "by clarifying that claims made in good faith are a form of protected speech." [It also seeks] to compensate survivors for successfully defending themselves against meritless and retaliatory defamation suits by permitting them to recover attorneys' fees and damages incurred as a result of the suits.

To accomplish these goals, the law establishes that "[a] communication made by an individual, without malice, regarding an incident of sexual assault, harassment, or discrimination is privileged under Section 47." (Section 47 provides for a number of other defamation privileges, including the fair report privilege.)

Section 47.1 provides that prevailing defendants in such defamation cases (and recall that Lively was in effect a defendant as to the counterclaims) are entitled to reasonable attorney's fees as well as treble and punitive damages.

The court held that, given Lively's choosing to bring the motion under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(d), the "treble and punitive damages" aspect of § 47.1 is unavailable in this case:

Rule 54(d) is titled "Costs; Attorney's Fees," and it discusses certain procedures for the award of those two categories of expenses. It does not mention "damages", compensatory, treble, punitive, or otherwise….

That treble and punitive damages cannot be sought through the procedural vehicle of a Rule 54(d) motion finds further support from a reading of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure "as a whole." The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure establish that "[t]here is one form of action, the civil action." … "A civil action is commenced by filing a complaint with the court." That formal filing "trigger[s] the full array of legal, procedural, and evidentiary rules governing the process by which a court adjudicates the merits of a dispute."…

By seeking damages through Rule 54(d), Lively circumvents this web of procedures and processes designed for the orderly, just, and fair determination of civil claims in federal court. In essence, she seeks to pursue a kind of malicious prosecution or abuse of process claim … and to hold the Wayfarer Parties liable not only for actual damages, but to triple those damages and to impose additional punitive damages, all without the benefit of formal pleading, discovery, and dispositive motion practice in line with Rules 12(b) and 56.

Also lurking in the background is a potential conflict with the Seventh Amendment, which guarantees in federal court the right to a jury trial "in Suits at common law." To the extent a claim for damages under Section 47.1 resembles a kind of abuse of process or malicious prosecution claim, courts have held that "[a]n action for malicious prosecution falls well within the recognized forms of action at common law" for Seventh Amendment purposes….

It is understandable that Lively might attempt to shoehorn her damages claim into a Rule 54(d) motion. Litigation is costly, time consuming, and risky, and to the extent Section 47.1 is intended to remedy harms to defamation defendants as quickly, efficiently, and easily as possible, Rule 54(d)'s procedures, which permit fee liability and award determinations based upon mere motion and evidentiary hearing, present an alluring alternative to the normal arc of litigation. But those benefits cannot come at the expense of the rights of the defamation plaintiff….

But the court held Lively "is entitled to attorneys' fees and costs." It explained why that's consistent with federal procedures and with § 47.1, and also adds this about Wayfarer's First Amendment defense:

The First Amendment protects the rights of citizens to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. This includes petitioning courts for redress. The Noerr-Pennington doctrine stems from this principle. It stands for the proposition that "efforts to influence governmental action through litigation, lobbying, and the like" are "immunized from antitrust liability," "provided the activities are more than a mere 'sham.'" Courts have held that the doctrine is "relevant outside the context of antitrust actions." …

[But] "fee shifting is not civil liability within the meaning of the Noerr-Pennington doctrine." "[B]eing charged with the costs of a suit is not the same thing as being civilly liable for having filed the suit." "Fee shifting simply requires the party that creates the costs to bear them." At least with respect to fees, then, the Court finds the Wayfarer Parties' First Amendment concerns unfounded.

And the court had this to say on the merits of the § 47.1 claim:

[A] defamation defendant is entitled to recover fees and damages under Section 47.1 where: (1) they prevail in the action; (2) the communications at issue in the action conveyed factual information related to an incident of sexual assault, harassment, or discrimination that the individual personally experienced, including workplace harassment under FEHA; (3) the communications were made without malice; and (4) there is or was a reasonable basis to file a complaint regarding the assault, harassment, or discrimination….

[Section 47.1(c) requires that defendants] show that the information contained within the allegedly defamatory statement be the kind for which it would be reasonable to file a complaint. Put differently, Section 47.1(c) serves a gatekeeping function, ensuring that defendants do not unreasonably attempt to stretch the substance of the contested statements to fall within the purview of the statute.

It would be unreasonable, for example, to file a complaint of sexual harassment based on a single instance of vulgar language in the context of a comedy writer's room for an adult show with adult themes. Cf. Lyle v. Warner Bros. Television Prods. (Cal. 2006). A defamation defendant's statements about that experience therefore likely would not benefit from the Section 47.1 privilege. It would also be unreasonable to characterize a supervisor's comments about "bringing his 'guys' into the company" and his rejection of a single travel and expensive reimbursement request as "conduct based on sex or of a sexual nature." See Haberman v. Cengage Learning, Inc. (Cal. Ct. App. 2009). A defamation defendant's attempts to invoke Section 47.1 in that circumstance also likely would be rejected.

The Court need not explore the boundaries of the privilege and all the circumstances in which it might not apply, as it is clear here that the allegations contained with Lively's statements are the kinds for which it would be reasonable to file a complaint. To reiterate, the Wayfarer Parties do not dispute that the statements at issue are ones regarding sexual harassment or discrimination. Of course, they do so indirectly insofar as they dispute the truth of Lively's allegations. But they do not contest the categorical subject-matter match between the substance of her statements and Section 47.1….

The burden accordingly shifts to Wayfarer Parties to demonstrate that the statements were made with malice. {"The malice necessary to defeat a qualified privilege is 'actual malice[,]' which is established by a showing that the publication was motivated by hatred or ill will towards the plaintiff or by a showing that the defendant lacked reasonable grounds for belief in the truth of the publication and therefore acted in reckless disregard of the plaintiff's rights."} … And the Wayfarer Parties have provided little evidence in connection with the motion, and none establishing that Lively acted with malice….

The only evidence that the Wayfarer Parties have submitted in connection with the Section 47.1 motion which might arguably bear on Lively's malice comes from [Danny] Greenberg's deposition, in which he was questioned about a single message he sent in which he used the word "extortion" to "referenc[e] just cumulative behavior that both the studio and Wayfarer and Justin was having to manage." This evidence falls far short of satisfying the Wayfarer Parties' burden.

The testimony excerpts make only vague reference to "behavior" issues without specifying what exactly those issues were or the background surrounding them. There is no indication that Greenberg, who was Baldoni's talent agent at the time and who was proposing language for Baldoni to use in a letter to Sony Pictures Entertainment, was referring to Lively's complaints of sexual harassment, as opposed to something else. Indeed, the Wayfarer Parties' own briefing asserts that these comments were made in connection with Lively's "threats that she would not return to the set unless she was given control over the script and editing", not that they were made in connection with false and malicious complaints of sexual harassment. Greenberg further added at his deposition that he did not "remember [his] state of mind when [he] wrote" the comment.

Without more, the Wayfarer Parties cannot carry their burden of defeating the Section 47.1 privilege. Lively is entitled to fees and costs.

The amount of fees will be determined later.

The post Blake Lively Entitled to Attorney Fees (But Not Punitive Damages) in Justin Baldoni et al.'s Libel Lawsuit Against Her appeared first on Reason.com.

In 2023, iconic tailgate beverage Bud Light was hit with a nationwide boycott by right-wing activists over the brand’s collaboration with a trans social media influencer.

Political boycotts, however, are nothing new in the American beer industry.

Long before Bud Light, Coors was the target of a consumer boycott that lasted more than twenty years and became, in the words of historian Allyson P. Brantley, “one of the most prominent and longest-running consumer boycotts of the late twentieth-century United States.”

Running until the late 1980s, the “beercott” brought together an unlikely political coalition of pro-labor advocates, including gay rights groups, radical Chicanos, the Black Panther Party, and unionized “hardhats,” who were typically blue-collar, right-wing-leaning men.

“I understand that to this day you cannot buy Coors beer on Castro Street.”

“Hard-fought efforts to build this coalition, including outreach and affirmative action campaigns, cultivated a movement that bridged the divisions of class, identity, and sexuality and offered a creative means of political protest,” Brantley writes.

While opposition to Coors began with a workers’ strike in 1957, it gained momentum as the emerging African American and Mexican American civil rights movement protested the company’s hiring discrimination. Mexican American activists, for example, cited underrepresentation in the Coors workforce relative to the population in the surrounding Denver area.

Coors Boycott posters and fact sheet. Click on the image to take a closer look.

In the early 1970s, diverse groups protesting Coors consolidated in Northern California. Brantley argues that this history challenges the conventional view of the decade as a period when leftist activism receded and conservative politics prevailed.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 888, a largely white union of truck drivers who delivered beer from warehouses to retailers, called for a boycott of Coors in June 1973 after failing to reach an agreement on wages and working conditions with distributors. Their efforts initially met only patchy success. For example, East Bay retailers “restocked Coors immediately after pickets left, and the beer sold well,” Brantley writes.

To shore up the boycott, the Teamsters had to look beyond their traditional support base. Local 888 called on Allan Baird, the president of the San Francisco newspaper drivers’ union and a resident of its working-class and predominantly gay Castro District.

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Baird and his fellow Teamster Andris Cirkelis were aware that communities of color viewed the disproportionately white and male union with what Brantley calls “widespread distrust.”

In reaching outside the labor movement to organizers like the Black Panther Party, they “emphasiz[ed] Coors’s discriminatory practices and history” and further vowed, albeit belatedly, to address the lack of Black and Chicano beer drivers in their own ranks.

The union also started to amplify Mexican Americans’ longstanding criticism against Coors’s hiring practices. This won Local 888 the backing of Chicanos, who were already proclaiming that “Coors beer was ‘fermentado con la sangre de Chicanos’” (brewed with their blood).

A story from El Diario de la Gente about the Teamsters strike against Coors. Click on the image to take a closer look.

Colorado community newspaper El Diario de la Gente, which was published in Boulder, carried a report in early 1976 that told its readers about budding sympathies between the striking Teamsters and the heavily Mexican American United Farm Workers movement.

“The message was simple: Local 888 was on the side of equity and workers’ rights; Coors was on the side of discrimination and union-busting,” Brantley explains. “But within this message lay a more gripping narrative, that of a Teamsters’ Local willing to reject its union’s history of exclusion, linking fights for labor and racial justice under the call to boycott.”

In addition, Local 888 pushed for not just the unprecedented hiring of openly gay beer delivery drivers, but also the inclusion of stronger anti-discrimination clauses in job contracts.

Recounting that “the lesbian and gay union group in San Francisco was responsible for getting the Coors boycott onto Castro Street,” another labor leader adds in an interview, “I understand that to this day you cannot buy Coors beer on Castro Street.”

Weekly Newsletter

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The political climate of the 1970s helped to spur the boycott, as Baird and Cirkelis linked a preference for Coors beer to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. “Coors was no longer just ‘the anti-union beer’; it was now also the beer of detested Presidents and the New Right,” writes Brantley, who notes the Coors family’s backing of conservative causes.

Teamster leadership axed Baird and Cirkelis from their roles in the boycott in 1975 over their ties to the United Farm Workers, and Local 888 was dissolved not long after. But the boycott had taken on a life of its own. “[B]y the eighties, the ‘boycott Coors’ refrain could be heard from coast to coast, only diminishing after the company signed high-profile, million-dollar settlements with protesters, in exchange for an end to the boycott,” Brantley observes.

“The simple act of rejecting beer,” Brantley writes, “can be a simultaneously radical and pragmatic step toward solidarity and political change.”

The post “Brewed with Blood”: The Coors Beercott of the 1970s appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

Could you count to a trillion? Oh, hell no.

I just timed myself counting to 100 as fast as I could. It took 38 seconds.

The higher you count, the longer the numbers get, and so the slower the count becomes, but let’s be ridiculously conservative and assume I could maintain that rapid counting pace. Counting to a trillion would then take 380 billion seconds.

That’s 12,050 years.

How high could a person count? Well, for the sake of argument, suppose I commenced counting immediately upon emerging from my mama’s vagina and kept at it for 100 years, before dying abruptly, because I hadn’t eaten, drank, nor slept during those 100 years.

I would have only made it to 8.3 billion.

A trillion is 1,000 billion. It’s an unfathomable number. As the Wall Street Journal noted yesterday, if you stack a trillion pennies one atop the other, they’ll stretch to the moon and back, twice.

Back in 2021, I published a book, Jackpot, about runaway wealth in America and its effects on those who come into it, and on society at large. One question that came up a lot was, well, should billionaires exist? Even some of my very wealthy sources felt there should perhaps be some upper limits placed on wealth accumulation.

Should billionaires exist? How quaint. What I can now say with authority is that nobody should have a trillion bucks, ever. It’s entirely absurd. Among the nearly 200 nations on earth, only about 20 have a GDP that big. Simply put, it’s way, way, way too much money for any individual to possess, not to mention that Musk didn’t earn it. We allowed him to accumulate it. That was a choice, a bad one, and also dangerous.

I will elaborate, but first let’s have a little fun.

I did some calculations a while back to demonstrate how egregiously rich the world’s richest guy was, and that was at a time when Musk’s net worth was only $200 billion. Here’s my update:

Suppose we wanted to have a game of Monopoly in which the amount of money each player starts with reflects their relative wealth in real life.

And suppose we want it to be Elon Musk vs. some guy with the average middle-class wealth of $453,300. (Economists define middle class as the 50th through 90th wealth percentiles, the “middle 40″, and this number comes from RealTimeInequality.org.)

So, normally, each player starts a Monopoly game with $1,500. In our rigged version, we want our middle-class player to have at least enough to buy a property or two, so we’ll let him start with $500. How much would Musk then get?

He gets $1.1 billion. (Actually more, since he’s now up to $1.1 trillion, per Forbes, but I’ll stick with $1 trillion for simplicity.)

You couldn’t realistically count that high, either, in your lifetime.

So now we’ve got a problem, because each Monopoly set only comes with $20,580. To play this game requires 53,597 sets, which at today’s low Amazon price of $11.99 will run you $643,162. Our middle-class player couldn’t cover that even if he sold his home and liquidated his other assets.

And also, where would you put the boxes? Each set comes in a box 0.19 cubic feet in volume. All told, they would consume 10,183 cubic feet. Assuming you have standard 9-foot ceilings, they would completely fill a 1,131-square-foot room from floor to ceiling.

Our middle-class player doesn’t have any rooms that big in his house, which he had to sell anyway to cover his half of the cost of the sets.

Suppose you took all Musk’s Monopoly money and spread it out on the ground? Turns out, it would paper over roughly 11 football fields, including the end zones. But as those bills are small and multiple denominations, let’s try this with real-life currency.

If you were to convert Musk’s trillion dollars into $100 bills, we’re talking about 10 billion Franklins. Those bills would paper over 1,112,875,000 square feet, just under 40 square miles, enough to cover Manhattan and then some. Put in World Cup terms, Musk’s wealth would cover 14,480 FIFA-approved soccer pitches with $100 bills. Fields of green, indeed.

Far more important than the physical magnitude of $1 trillion, of course, is the power it musters. With his ridiculous trove, Musk, already unaccountable, becomes even more so. Tax expert Bob Lord, who wrote for Mother Jones in 2024 on the coming of the world’s first trillionaire, had a more recent piece on the rise of American oligarchy and how it has infected our democracy. He wrote:

No person anywhere, in any era, has spent as much to sway election outcomes as Musk, the richest person in history who, according to Open Secrets, shelled out almost $292 million in 2024 helping get Trump and other Republican candidates elected. And that doesn’t count the value of harnessing his X platform to support a twice-impeached, felonious former president who openly promised to make the rich richer, and delivered.

Musk expended 0.1 percent of his wealth in the process and got far more in return. The Trump administration promptly shelved dozens of investigations into Musk’s companies, awarded him billions of dollars in new contracts, and sent his firms’ share prices soaring by placing him in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, an unsanctioned body that succeeded wildly, not in eliminating government fraud and waste as promised, but in gutting and disabling federal agencies, including the ones creating headaches for Musk’s companies.

Lord details policy choices that have enabled wealth to concentrate in an increasingly small number of hands, culminating in the rise of a hyper-privileged few with the undeserved power to sway public affairs in their interests. This oligarchic class, as Northwestern University scholar Jeffrey Winters demonstrates in a powerful recent book excerpt, is untaxable and untouchable. And none so much as the trillionaire Musk.

The oligarchs, as it were, paid off the government’s keeper, and now Musk has scored the winning goal.

It is, alas, an own-goal for America and her democratic experiment.

For cities like Pittsburgh and many others in the United States, population growth is actually unlikely. espiegle/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Few city planning concepts are as sacrosanct as the idea that growth is good and decline is bad.

For cities and counties, population growth is universally seen as a metric that defines success. Even stable population trends can be cast as stagnation to be avoided at all costs.

The Pittsburgh region illustrates the problem with that thinking. Between 2020 and 2025 the city of Pittsburgh added more than 4,500 residents, the highest numerical gain of any municipality in Pennsylvania, and its first sustained growth in roughly 70 years.

That’s a success story, if you keep your focus narrowed on Pittsburgh.

But that optimistic view falls apart if you zoom out to the eight-county metro area: The region lost nearly 35,000 residents over the same period. Growth concentrated in a few communities is complemented by declines elsewhere.

The painful demographic reality is that for an ever-growing number of places in the United States, population growth is slowing. Must that mean the region’s communities are failing to compete for residents and businesses?

I’m an economist at the University of Pittsburgh and author of the new book “Beyond Steel: Pittsburgh and the Economics of Transformation.” My research focuses on how cities adapt, or fail to, when population and economic growth no longer follow the patterns they once did.

When steel towns shrink

Two decades ago the mayor of Youngstown, Ohio, Jay Williams, garnered national attention by pushing policies that accepted the city’s population would never return to its former peak. He made that shift a quarter-century after Black Monday, when over 5,000 steelworkers were laid off on Sept. 19, 1977.

At the turn of the century, Youngstown was still experiencing ongoing deindustrialization and depopulation. Williams argued that facing that reality honestly was the only way to build a new future, a concept sometimes called managed decline.

Youngstown is one of the Rust Belt communities experiencing chronic population decline. AP Photo/Tony Dejak

Youngstown was simply ahead of a large group of Rust Belt communities that would experience chronic population declines over the next 25 years. Communities such as Braddock, Pennsylvania, where Andrew Carnegie built his first steel plant in the 1870s, went from a peak of more than 20,000 residents in the 1920s to less than 2,000 today. Despite such evidence that past population peaks are likely never to return for certain communities, the idea of a city planning for anything other than growth is almost unthinkable in public discourse.

Yet, there is no clear connection between growth and community prosperity.

Many places across the U.S. and the world sustain quality of life and attract new investment while experiencing little or no population growth. Burlington, Vermont, is slow-growing yet consistently ranks high for livability and attracts significant investment relative to its size. Globally, Zurich and Vienna are also slow-growing but perennially top quality-of-life and investment rankings.

It may even be that planning for growth that is unlikely to happen works against the goals of building a successful community.

Planning for the present

These ideas are not new. More than two decades ago, economist Paul Gottlieb articulated the case for “Growth Without Growth,” arguing that population growth is not a useful measure of community success. What was once a distant warning has become a present reality for a growing number of communities.

New census data estimates over 41% of the nation’s 3,144 counties experienced outright population declines between 2020 and 2025. Of the 485 municipalities across the Pittsburgh metro region, 71% lost residents over the same period. These losses were concentrated in the older industrial towns of the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio river valleys, where natural population decline, limited housing investment and decades of emigration continue to occur.

Meanwhile, what growth exists is clustered along the I-79 corridor in Butler and Washington counties, a geographic pattern that reflects suburban expansion more than regional resurgence.

Population growth in the Pittsburgh metro area can be attributed to suburban expansion. The Good Brigade/Digital Vision Collection via Getty Images

Communities can and, I believe, must adapt.

In his recent book, “Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World: Learning to Thrive Without Growth,” urbanist Alan Mallach examines the challenges facing places that can no longer count on growth. Planning and economic development will mean something different in that world.

For many communities, minimal growth or even modest decline will be the baseline. Mallach advocates for a shift in thinking about how local economies connect to the broader forces around them. He argues that declining population can also be an opportunity to green the urban environment and address housing shortages.

Global problem, local solutions

Managed decline is the honest recognition that a community’s best future may look different from its past. It shows that planning around realistic economic and population trends is the most sustainable path forward.

The United States is not alone in facing this reality. Germany, facing the rapid depopulation of its eastern states after reunification in 1990, became perhaps the world’s most deliberate laboratory for managed decline policy. Through the national Stadtumbau Ost program, launched in 2002, the federal government funded the systematic demolition of surplus housing and the conversion of vacated urban land into parks and green infrastructure, explicitly reshaping cities around actual population rather than projected future growth.

Despite clear demographic trends, it remains unheard of for most local U.S. leaders to advocate for policies that plan for managed decline. Any political leader who did would likely face backlash. But the public needs an honest picture of what future growth and decline will look like and how different it may be from the past. In many communities or regions, growth will be possible only at the expense of greater decline elsewhere. Communities that face these trends will need to work together rather than compete.

None of this is to argue that Pittsburgh and other communities should not work to improve the quality of life for their residents, which, if successful, can generate population gains in the future. But for an ever-larger number of regions, and especially for the bulk of communities across southwestern Pennsylvania, those potential population gains will be ever more constrained and harder to sustain.

Christopher Briem does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Hunter Biden said he would appear on a presidential ticket if he ran as California Governor Gavin Newsom’s vice president.

Biden made the comments during an appearance on Newsom’s podcast when asked if he would consider a potential presidential run. The younger Biden has been on a media tour in recent weeks, attempting to rehabilitate his image, prompting some Democrats to suggest he should run for president.

“Here’s the deal. I’ll run, but only as your VP, because the truth of the matter is the vice president’s residence is a lot cooler.
It’s a lot easier job too,” Biden told Newsom in an interview released Friday.

“The grandeur of the White House is, it never gets old,” Biden added. “But you really do feel like you’re in a gilded cage.”

In other podcast appearances, Biden has lashed out at the Democratic establishment.

“There is this very powerful group of people, and they all go to the same dinner parties and they are all part of the same financial ecosystem, that continues to fill their pockets in the Democratic Party, which I think is the one thing that makes it very, very, very difficult for the Democratic Party to ever actually achieve the real systemic change that we need in order to rehabilitate that brand,” he told Molly Jong-Fast.

Last week, President Donald Trump said that if the scandal-plagued Democrat Graham Platner could perform well in Maine, then maybe Biden could in a presidential race.

“Hey, if the guy from Maine can do well,” Trump said. “Well, I guess Hunter could do well, too, because the guy from Maine is a basket case.”

Biden defended Platner during his appearance on Newsom’s podcast, claiming it took “courage” for him to launch a Senate campaign after previous mistakes.

“He was a veteran, a combat veteran, and he came back. He had some real issues, and with PTSD, and, and that trauma, and whatever way that he was working it out, I think he had been really open about,” Biden said.

Biden, who was convicted on drug and gun charges, also defended his father’s decision to pardon him, claiming it was done to protect him from Trump.

“It would have been like having a gun to my family for the next four years at least, and so that’s why he pardoned me,” he said. “It’s a really incredibly rational decision, and it was a really difficult decision, and you know how proud of my dad I am. The fact of the matter is, he chose me over his legacy, because no matter what you say, that’s going to be one of the first things that is written about.”

Biden’s pardon covered a sweeping time for crimes “committed or may have committed” for an 11-year period dating back to 2014. That protected the younger Biden from outstanding scrutiny on his questionable business dealings in Ukraine and China.

Before the pardon, Biden was offered what Republicans called a sweetheart deal because it would likely have allowed him to avoid prison time. A judge later declined to approve the deal, citing concerns over its constitutionality and the scope of immunity it offered. The Biden family complained that the deal was axed due to unfair “political pressure.”

His case then went to trial. A Delaware jury convicted him in June 2024 on three felony counts of lying on paperwork for a revolver and owning a firearm while being a drug addict in 2018.

Earlier this week, Biden admitted that his father had “lost a step” due to his age despite the Democratic Party’s insistence for much of his presidency.

“It was not like a surprise that people, as they get old, particularly at that age, they literally lose a step. Like, my dad lost a step,” he said. “That does not mean, per se, that there is a cognitive decline, but instead of embracing it, I think that they tried to kind of obfuscate it.”

After over 80 years, a team of marine archeologists and historians believe that they’ve uncovered a lost piece of World War II history. The remains of the Japanese freighter Hōfuku Maru were spotted off of the western coast of the Philippines. But the Hōfuku Maru was not just a run of the mill military vessel. The freighter was called a Hellship.

Hellships were requisitioned merchant ships that the Japanese Navy used to transport prisoners of war during WWII in horrific conditions. Inmates died from thirst, heat, beatings, and executions, as well as inadvertent Allied attacks. Hellships traveled within military convoys, and the Allies didn’t know they were transporting prisoners of war. Historians estimate that 20,000 of the over 125,000 Allied prisoners that traveled on Hellships died onboard.

Plaque dedicated to the POWs who died aboard the Hōfuku Maru from the Hellships Memorial, Subic Bay, Philippines. Image: Discovery’s Expedition Unknown.

The remains of Hōfuku Maru were discovered off the coast of the Philippines’ Zambales province. On September 21, 1944, more than 1,000 Allied servicemen died aboard the Hōfuku Maru, when it sank in less than three minutes.The ship had up to 1,000 British and Dutch prisoners in its holds, but the shipwrecks’ identity and location was forgotten.

In both American and Japanese military archives, the Hellships Memorial Foundation found documents claiming that the Hōfuku Maru sank over 30 miles away from where it was assumed to have gone down..

“We were absolutely stunned that Japanese sources had information on where the convoy was attacked and what ships were hit, this was a smoking gun,” retired Naval Officer Randy Anderson and Hellships Memorial Foundation founder, said in a statement.

Photogrammetry of the wreck newly identified as the Hōfuku Maru. Image: Evan Kovacs, Marine Imaging Technologies, LLC

Thus a team, including imaging specialist Evan Kovacs, maritime archaeologist Calvin Mires, and TV presenter/explorer Josh Gates, came together to track down the mysterious shipwreck. Sonar imaging verified the presence of an uncharted wreck in the area they were investigating, and then identified the wreck during deepwater dives. The team also found human remains.

The available evidence points to the Hōfuku Maru. Various elements align perfectly with the vessel’s blueprints, and the wreck is broken into two parts, which matches descriptions by both Americans and Japanese. The remains of the vessel lay beneath over 160 feet of water.

“The pieces all fit,” said Tim Beckensall, a researcher at the Hellships Memorial Foundation, “the vessel is the right size, in the right place and from the correct period. I am convinced this is the Hōfuku Maru.”

The findings will feature in the two-part premiere of Discovery’s Expedition Unknown airing on June 24th.

“The story of the Hellships is a chapter in the history of WWII that demands to be brought to light,” highlighted Gates. “The research and dives that led to this groundbreaking discovery can hopefully offer closure to the families of more than a thousand servicemen who made the ultimate sacrifice. It’s a privilege to work alongside the Hellships Memorial Foundation to honor their memories; they are lost no more.”

The post Long-lost World War II ‘Hellship’ may have finally been found appeared first on Popular Science.

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On Monday, Apple announced a new slate of updates coming sometime this fall, among them, iOS 27, macOS 27, and watchOS 27. During the keynote, the company enthusiastically shared that iOS 27 would be available to all iPhones compatible with iOS 26. If your iPhone is currently getting the latest updates from Apple, it will continue to do so for another year. Unfortunately, some of the company's other products weren't so lucky.

As expected, macOS 27 Golden Gate marks the end of the line for Intel Macs. Unless you have an Apple silicon Mac, you won't be able to update this fall. It's a similar story for iPadOS 27: Apple is dropping a number of iPads this year, mostly from 2018 and 2019. But the real shock came with watchOS 27: Apple's lineup is now limited to just six Apple Watches, which means there's a decent chance your watch isn't supported this year. While the company developed watchOS 27 for the Series 6, 7, 8, first-gen Ultra and second-gen SE, none of those watches will get the new update in the fall.

I'm an update guy; I love installing the latest OS version on each of my devices and exploring what's changed since the last update. While I can look forward to that on my iPhone, my Mac, and my iPad this year, my Apple Watch is a different story. I have a Series 6, which means that watchOS 26 is the end of the road for my wearable. If I want to try watchOS 27, I'll need to bite the bullet and upgrade my watch for a Series 9 or newer. The thing is, I'm not going to do that, not yet, anyway.

Why watchOS 27 isn't worth buying an Apple Watch for

Here's my take: While watchOS 27 seems like a great update, it isn't worth dropping some serious cash on a new Apple Watch. Despite how many Apple Watches didn't make the cut this year, the update doesn't include enough captivating features to make me want to ditch my aging Series 6.

Like Apple's other flagship updates this year, watchOS 27 is all about AI. There's Siri AI, of course, which, taking Apple at its word, transforms the company's assistant into something more like ChatGPT or Gemini. If I bought a new Apple Watch, I'd be able to ask Siri complex, open-ended questions that it would apparently be able to answer beyond the usual "I don't see 'taco bowl recipes' in your contacts." I could ask it to pull up photos from a trip I took last year, or pick up conversations I had with the assistant on my other Apple devices through the new Siri app. I'm not saying I wouldn't try the new Siri if I had a newer Apple Watch, but as someone who doesn't really use chatbots outside of my reporting, I'm just not enticed by the upgrade here.

Workout Buddy also gets upgrades this year, tapping into Apple Intelligence to offer new insights about your fitness based on your history. The AI coach now supports Spanish, and you don't even need your iPhone nearby to use it anymore. Unfortunately, my Series 6 never supported Workout Buddy to begin with, so this is a case of not missing what I never had.

There are some miscellaneous upgrades across the board, too: There's now a new dynamic app grid that might make it easier to find the app you're looking for; watchOS will surface relevant info when on a phone call; there's now perimenopause and menopause support; indoor walks and runs are tracked more accurately; a new single-tap gesture lets you select widgets in Smart Stacks, which also comes with upgraded suggestions. And Apple upgraded Liquid Glass to be a bit more legible across the board. None of these features is bad; they just aren't worth $399 or more to pick up a brand new watch.

Really, my main temptation here would be the only non-feature Apple is rolling out this year: performance upgrades. The company is taking 2026 as an opportunity to refine its OSes across the board, and on watchOS, the company made improvements to battery life, sleep tracking, media playback, and wifi connectivity, among other boosts. But if I'm buying a new Apple Watch, I expect it to be faster and longer-lasting than my old one anyway, so performance increases in and of themselves aren't necessarily convincing either.

My Apple Watch still works great

Is my Apple Watch about five years old? Yes. Is the microphone a bit "hard of hearing" these days? Yes. Does the battery last as long as it did when I got it? Absolutely not. Does it do just about everything I need it to? You betcha.

In recent years, the Apple Watch achieved something similar to the iPhone: The improvements year-over-year are so slight that there's little reason to upgrade on a frequent basis. Apple released the Series 6 back in 2020, and yet, it does everything I expect an Apple Watch to do; I can track my workouts indoors and out; I can keep tabs on my sleep habits, and evaluate health trends over time; I can quickly respond to texts from friends on my wrist (even if the interface is starting to slow down); and I can check on simple stats without taking out my iPhone, like the weather, my upcoming schedule, or, of course, the time.

I'm sure I'd get a kick out of a faster watch with a better battery life, but that wouldn't really make a difference for me day-to-day. Unfortunately for Apple, my Series 6 is too good to give up, even for watchOS 27.

My Apple Watch will still get security updates

The most important updates in my book are security patches. While I have no hesitation in keeping a device once it stops receiving new features, I stop using it once it no longer gets the latest security updates. Internet-connected devices need the latest patches or else they're vulnerable to hackers armed with the latest exploits.

Luckily, Apple continues to issue security patches for devices after it drops official software support. There's no guarantee how long that'll last, but back in May, the company seeded a security update for iOS 15, which covers devices as old as the iPhone 6S. Apple originally released that back in 2015, and while I don't necessarily expect the company to release a watchOS 26 security patch in 2031, I feel pretty confident my Series 6 will be protected from vulnerabilities for the foreseeable future.

Apple's other updates aren't worth upgrading for either

My Apple Watch is my only Apple device that isn't getting an update this year, but I'm not sure I'd be tempted to upgrade my iPhone, iPad, or Mac if any of them were getting the OS axe as well. On each, Siri AI, Apple Intelligence, and performance upgrades are the headliners, with smaller features and changes accompanying the updates, too. It's great that macOS has ultrawide display support, or that all three updates will update compromised passwords on your behalf. But if my "outdated" iPhone, iPad, or Mac still does all the things I need it to do, none of these updates are worth the cost of upgrading.

That's not to say it's a bad thing to upgrade. Some of Apple's current devices are the best they've ever made. You cannot go wrong with an Apple silicon Mac, and my iPhone 17 Pro Max is the most durable Apple product I've ever owned. Still, I wouldn't make a decision purely based on this year's updates. If it's time for a new phone or computer, of course upgrade. If yours is trucking along just fine, consider keeping it for the time being.

Jun 12, 2026; Cleveland, Ohio, USA; Cleveland Guardians starting pitcher Tanner Bibee (28) starts the game with the first pitch against the Detroit Tigers at Progressive Field. Mandatory Credit: Scott Galvin-Imagn Images | Scott Galvin-Imagn Images

After a series victory at home against the Twins, the Tigers headed around the corner of Lake Erie to take on another division rival in Cleveland for a three-game weekend series. The Detroiters could only manage a pair of solo home runs in a losing effort, dropping the opener 3-2 on Friday night.

Jack Flaherty made his fifteenth start for the Tigers, and much has been said about his inconsistency. The good news coming into tonight was that, in his previous three starts, he hadn’t been that bad, pitched into the sixth, gave up a maximum of three runs, struck out at least six each time. With some starting pitchers due to come back from the Injured List soon, you have to wonder if Flaherty stays in the rotation with some of the young kids doing well.

Like Flaherty, Cleveland’s starting pitcher had a 1-7 record coming into tonight’s game, being one Tanner Bibee. But Bibee’s peripheral numbers look a lot better than Flaherty’s: ERA (4.09 vs. 5.31), WHIP (1.234 vs. 1.580), BB/9 (4.8 vs. 2.8). He’s in his fourth year with the Guardians, and he’s been a good, reliable part of their rotation since coming up in 2023, not to mention a sensational start against Detroit in May. But these are the June Tigers, though, right?

The Tigers had an early squander: with one out in the top of the first, Bibee walked a pair of batters… and then both Dillon Dingler and Kerry Carpenter struck out, stranding a pair. As it turns out, that would be about as close to a sustained threat they’d have all night.

Cleveland got on the board first in the bottom of the second: Rhys Hoskins led off with a double, and Flaherty got the next two batters to fly out harmlessly. Up to the plate stepped a sub-.160 hitter, Patrick Bailey, great defensive catcher, not a world-beater in the batter’s box by any means, and he dumped a liner into left field to score Hoskins. Brayan Rocchio followed with a triple to right to score Bailey and put Cleveland up 2-0. By the end of the second, Flaherty had thrown 49 pitches, suggesting he might not go too deep in this game for any reason. But hey, Newest Tiger™ James Outman made a nice sliding catch.

View Link

Naturally, leading off the third, Outman, not known for his bat the past couple of years, crushed a no-doubter to right-centre to narrow the score to 2-1.

Flaherty’s night was shortened by injury, coming out after three innings, he grimaced while fielding a grounder to end the third with “left leg discomfort.” Other Newest Tiger™, Jacob Waguespack, started the fourth. He pitched in Toronto in 2019-20, pitched a couple of years in Japan, then spent a couple of years mostly at Triple-A, before being added to the Tigers today out of Milwaukee’s Triple-A affiliate in Nashville. He gave up a single and a walk but ended up getting three outs without any damage.

Drew Sommers took over for Waguespack in the fifth to face a few fellow lefties, and he gave up a harmless single but nothing more. Meanwhile, Bibee was cruising pretty easily: through six innings he’d only thrown 79 pitches, and Outman’s home run was the only hit he’d surrendered.

Drew Number Two (i.e., Anderson) relieved Sommers in the sixth and it didn’t go as well: with one out Angel Martínez doubled, and Steven Kwan, who’s lousy this year against everyone except us, singled to score Martínez and push the lead back up to two runs. Bailey legged-out an infield single (of course) to put a pair on, but a strikeout and a flyout prevented further damage.

The reliever parade continued with Ty Madden for the seventh, and he gave up a one-out double but the runner was stranded and the game carried on with a two-run gap ‘twixt the squadrons.

Spencer Torkelson had something to say about that, though, leading off the eighth:

View Link

That was the end of Bibee’s day; giving up two solo home runs as your only hits in seven-plus innings is a weird final line.

Cade Smith was brought in to nail down the save for Cleveland in the ninth; with two out Dingler made a bid for a game-tying home run but unfortunately the fly ball fell short of the fence, and that was the game.

Final score: Guardians 3, Tigers 2

Notes and Observances

Tarik Skubal’s starting on Saturday.

Casey Mize is starting on Sunday.

Who goes to the bullpen? Toledo? Trading block? Released?

Apparently it’s okay to have two Drews in the bullpen, but not two Zachs/Zacks on the field. Got it.

Marv Albert, Chick Corea and Roy Harper were all born on this day in 1941. Neat!

Summer is here, sort of, and it is everyone’s favorite time of the year, scouting time. Every year, we do Summer Scouting to preview college football for Bucs fans, but also give them an idea of names to follow and watch in the fall as needs pop up for Tampa Bay.

Are we going to write about quarterbacks? Offensive tackles? Edge rushers? You know it, but why? Because other NFL teams will draft them, just as they will draft every other position. It all matters whether these players end up on the Bucs, the Bears, or the Steelers. We write these so Bucs fans can be the most informed fans.

So if you are still with us, enjoy our latest Summer Scouting report as we prepare you for the Fall.

Film

Kent State

Missouri

Background Info

Listed at 6-3/310lbs.

3-Star prospect according to 247 Sports

Under Armour All-American in high school

The Oklahoman’s All-City First Team in 2021

Competed in track and field in high school

Notable career stats heading into 2026

48 Tackles

10 Tackles for a Loss

3 Sacks

Notable numbers from PFF heading into 2026

25 QB Hurries

0 Passes batted at the line of scrimmage

30 Defensive stops

Pass Rush Win Rate of 12%

Strengths

Sheds blockers effortlessly

Has NFL-size and then some

Strength for days to bring down ball carriers and bull rush

Not much pass-rush production, but lives in backfields

Showcases athleticism with his speed and size

Player Summary

David Stone does not have a lot of production in the box score, but the film is hilarious to watch unfold for him. He sheds blockers with ease, he showcases his strength, and has leverage on most players he engages with. He could be in the NFL today, and I would think he would find success. He has a chance to produce much more in the NFL than he has in college at either the nose tackle spot or outside.

This article originally appeared on Bucs Wire: 2027 NFL Draft Summer Scouting Report on Oklahoma's David Stone

The Yankees' outfield depth is about to be tested after Trent Grisham had to exit Friday's game against the Blue Jays with an apparent injury.

While the nature of Grisham's injury isn't yet known, it seemed that the veteran outfielder pulled up lame rounding first and made an awkward slide into second on a throw home after he hit a two-run single in the sixth inning. Grisham finished 1-for-4, but that single cut Toronto's lead to 7-5 at the time.

A 2-run hit for Trent Grisham, but he’s coming out of the game after advancing to second base on the throw home pic.twitter.com/PeizHZm3ma

, SNY Yankees (@snyyankees) June 13, 2026

This is not the first time Grisham has had to exit a game against the Blue Jays this season. Back on May 20, Grisham had left knee discomfort legging out a double. The injury didn't land Grisham on the IL, but it's unclear if the same will happen this time around.

Grisham was replaced in the outfield by Max Schuemann, who moved to right field to allow Spencer Jones to man center.

The Yankees already have Aaron Judge and Jasson Dominguez on the IL, with the latter close to returning. Yankees manager Aaron Boone said the plan was for Dominguez to get a couple of more rehab games this weekend with Triple-A before they decide on whether to activate him. If Grisham needs an IL stint, the Yankees may be forced to bring Dominguez back sooner than they originally planned.

Grisham is having a solid season. He's batting .232 with eight home runs with an OPS of .747 while playing great defense in center every day for the Yankees.

SAN FRANCISCO, Almost four months since pitchers and catchers reported for spring training, there are still plenty of firsts for the Giants’ rookie manager.

An easy one he waited until Friday to knock out: Naming a closer.

“[Caleb] Kilian will close for us,” Tony Vitello declared before the Giants opened a three-game series against the Cubs, departing from their previous by-committee approach.

“We talked to several of those guys about just getting more organized. …The bullpen’s all about chaos, but the more you can have a baseline, I think it brings out the best in the group.”

“[Caleb] Kilian will close for us,” Tony Vitello declared before the Giants opened a three-game series against the Cubs, departing from their previous by-committee approach. Tannen Maury/UPI/Shutterstock

The news also coincides with the return of the last pitcher to formally hold the closer’s title in San Francisco, Ryan Walker, who was called up from a month-long assignment in the minor leagues. IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

The decision represents a quick about-face from Vitello, who as recently as this past Sunday commended the group for “being so great all year long” even though “we haven’t really had defined roles. It’s kind of been organized chaos.”

The news also coincides with the return of the last pitcher to formally hold the closer’s title in San Francisco, Ryan Walker, who was called up from a month-long assignment in the minor leagues.

Walker saved 30 games over the past three seasons but struggled last year and never reclaimed the role in spring training. He is 3-for-6 in save situations this season, one of eight pitchers Vitello has turned to in the Giants’ 21 save opportunities, including two on their last road trip who weren’t Kilian.

Keaton Winn, with his devastating splitter, seemed to be being primed to take over the role after receiving four recent late-inning opportunities. But he allowed the tying or go-ahead runs in two of those chances, including one on his third straight day of action that went awry.

Kilian is second to Walker with five save opportunities, converting four of them with a 3.34 ERA.

Vitello hasn’t had many reliable options, adding an extra wrinkle to his duties managing a major league bullpen for the first time Benny Sieu-Imagn Images

“I just think he’s done well in that spot,” Vitello said. “It also is a combination of what other guys need to do or can do for us. He wants the ball in that situation.”

Vitello hasn’t had many reliable options, adding an extra wrinkle to his duties managing a major league bullpen for the first time. Since the end of April, the Giants’ ragtag group of relievers have posted a 5.35 ERA that ranks third worst in the majors.

As the skipper attempts to instill some more order, Walker has a new role, too: fireman.

“Obviously he’s been in as big of a situation as you can imagine,” Vitello said. “A big thing for Walk is being able to come in and be the fireman in particular situations that might pop up really anytime after the starter leaves the game.”

In other words, the Giants will trust Walker to handle the biggest situations before the ninth inning. Winn and J.T. Brubaker can both handle multiple innings in the middle, and Vitello has been impressed with Dylan Smith since he was called up last week.

Once it gets to the ninth, the inning belongs to Kilian.

In other words, the Giants will trust Walker to handle the biggest situations before the ninth inning. IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

At least for now.

“Right now, I’m here to get my job done, whatever that job is,” Walker said. “But my ultimate goal is definitely to get back into those high-leverage positions and eventually climb my way back into that closer role.”

Walker was 3-for-4 in save opportunities with a 3.00 ERA on April 25 but allowed runs in each of his final five outings, blowing two saves, before being optioned back to the minors.

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It was the first time Walker had been sent back to the minors since he got his initial callup in May 2023, on the same day as former catcher Patrick Bailey.

“It didn’t really surprise me in a way,” he said. “I knew at some point it was probably going to happen. When it did happen, I didn’t hang my head. I was very positive. I told myself, OK, this is going to be a great time to work on your craft.”

Walker first went to the Giants’ facilities in Arizona for about a week, where he worked with Matt Yourkin, their pitching rehab coordinator, to sort through his issues before reporting to Triple-A Sacramento. He had issued 10 walks in 15 ⅓ innings at the time of his demotion.

The two made some small changes to his hyper-rotational cross-fire delivery that appear to have helped him regain his command. Besides one subpar outing, Walker issued only one walk over seven other appearances, including two that spanned multiple innings.

Rather than trying to stay parallel to the rubber in his motion, he’s now at a slight angle.

“Now I can almost have a straight shot to where my landing spot is. It became a lot more consistent,” Walker said. “Once the mechanics kind of cleared up, I noticed the bounce-back was so much easier. Things were moving the way they should.”

Photo by Omar Vega/Getty Images

Jesse Marsch sparked controversy before Canada even kicked a ball at the World Cup, and it did not take long for Clint Dempsey to respond.

The Canada head coach praised his current squad’s passion but contrasted it with his experience around the United States setup.

Marsch said that, during his time with the USMNT, they sometimes had to “beg” American players to sing the national anthem.

That comment landed badly because of who heard it. Dempsey, who played under Bob Bradley at the 2010 World Cup and became a national icon, had no interest in letting Marsch’s words pass quietly.

Clint Dempsey fires back at Jesse Marsch over USMNT anthem claim

Photo by Indrawan Kumala/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Speaking on Fox before Canada’s opener against Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dempsey made it clear he did not appreciate Marsch questioning the pride of American players.

The former Fulham star said: “Man, I can’t take this guy too seriously. I mean, it was an honor for me growing up and representing my country. When the National Anthem happened, I wasn’t someone who normally would sing. I put my hand over my heart and I prayed to the good man upstairs.”

Dempsey’s response carried weight because his USMNT career was defined by commitment. He scored at three World Cups, finished tied for the programme’s all-time scoring record and returned from serious physical setbacks to keep playing for his country.

“I’m someone who’s bled for this country. I broke my nose playing for this country. I’ve come back from two heart procedures and played for this country. So, I’m not going to take advice from someone who switched to the other side and is singing another country’s National Anthem.

“And as my boy Titi would say, ‘stay in your own lane.’ It looks like he’s on a moped, so worry about your own team,” he concluded.

Marsch and Dempsey were both part of the USMNT setup at the 2010 World Cup, with Marsch serving as an assistant coach under Bob Bradley, adding another layer to their disagreement.

Read more:

What Donald Trump said to USMNT the night before their World Cup debut

Why Alphonso Davies is not playing for Canada vs Bosnia in FIFA World Cup 2026 opener

Who are Dan + Shay? The Grammy winners singing US national anthem at the World Cup

Everything changed when Victor Wembanyama’s right elbow caught Karl-Anthony Towns’ chin in Game 4. The NBA Finals were never the same.

Wembanyama’s dangerous elbow during a swim move at the 9:27 mark of the third quarter resulted in a Flagrant 1 penalty and two trips to the free-throw line for Towns with possession. It was a costly play in the immediate term, but the damage to the Spurs’ title chances has yet to be seen.

More importantly, the play pushed Wembanyama to the brink of suspension.

Wembanyama’s emotions and violent physicality have gotten him in trouble. Wednesday’s foul on Towns added another flagrant-foul point to his postseason ledger. A round earlier in the Western Conference finals, Wembanyama, with the same right elbow, connected with Naz Reid’s head and was assessed a Flagrant 2 foul, forcing him to be ejected. So now, Wembanyama has three flagrant points heading into Game 5 (8:30 p.m. ET Saturday, ABC).

Under league rules, four flagrant points in one playoff run create an automatic suspension for the following game. That’s right, with one more flagrant foul, Wembanyama will be in street clothes for the following game, that is, if the series isn’t already over by then. (For those wondering, he’d still be able to finish out the game if it’s a Flagrant 1.)

But physicality is an essential part of Wembanyama’s game and a principal reason why Game 4 ended the way it did. It’s wrong to say the Spurs’ epic Game 4 collapse began immediately after halftime. In reality, the Spurs were still getting the looks they wanted, generating paint touches in the opening three possessions of the third quarter and putting the Knicks’ defense in a blender.

Wembanyama himself earned a paint touch (missing the layup) and then made a wide-open 3-pointer from the corner off of a Stephon Castle drive with two feet in the paint. Following the string of downhill attacks, the Spurs widened the lead to a game-high 29 points with under 10 minutes to go in the frame. Everything was going the Spurs’ way.

And then the elbow happened.

The elbow that sparked the Knicks’ comeback

When Wembanyama delivered the elbow that put him one flagrant foul away from an automatic suspension, the Spurs felt an immediate impact. Towns knocked down both free throws and the Knicks promptly went on a 13-0 Knicks run. The rest, as they say, is history. The Knicks completed the greatest comeback the Finals stage has ever seen and now hold a 3-1 lead going to San Antonio.

The boneheaded plays in the final moments of Game 4 understandably captured most of the conversation in the aftermath of the Knicks 107-106 win, but the flagrant foul early in the third quarter impacted the game in subtle ways and still looms large.

After that point, Wembanyama wasn’t nearly as forceful and effective in getting into the paint. His layup attempt just moments before the elbow to Towns was the only shot he took in the painted area for the rest of the third quarter. In fact, the next time the 7-foot-4 superstar registered a paint touch at all came at the 11:50 mark in the fourth quarter. That’s right: 11 minutes of game action went by before Wembanyama got the ball anywhere near the basket. And he played almost the entirety of the third quarter.

The damning result is that the Spurs didn’t score a single point in the paint for the entire third quarter, marking the first time this postseason that the Spurs, or any team for that matter, went scoreless in the paint for an entire quarter.

Defensively, Wembanyama wasn’t as impactful as the Knicks got just about everything they wanted. The most glaring example of Wembanyama’s ineffectiveness came midway through the fourth quarter when Towns drove baseline into the Defensive Player of the Year’s chest for a point-blank bucket at the rim. Towns’ fearlessness facing Wembanyama is a big reason why he leads all players in this series in plus-minus.

For Wembanyama, a guy who demonstrably pointed at his temple in the first half to taunt the Knicks that he was in their head, the tables have certainly turned. Are the flagrant points now in Wembanyama’s head? Is he able to still play with his normal physicality in Game 5 or will he purposely avoid contact?

It’s the biggest question that hangs over the series. A Finals suspension for Wembanyama wouldn’t be totally unprecedented. Observers will quickly recall that Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green was suspended for Game 5 of the 2016 Finals after he had accumulated too many flagrant points in that run. The Warriors blew that game without Green, and the series.

The Spurs will need Wembanyama to be otherworldly if they want to make the necessary 3-0 run to win the 2026 Larry O’Brien trophy. Wembanyama has averaged 27.8 points, 10.5 rebounds and 3.3 blocks in his first trip to the NBA Finals, but he’ll almost certainly have to reach another level to keep the magical Knicks away from the title.

The physicality data shows Wembanyama’s impact

Looking at the underlying physicality data, the odds are not in Wembanyama’s favor. At least not if he plays like he did after the flagrant foul at the 9:27 mark.

The aforementioned data comes from Roland Beech, the longtime VP of basketball operations for the Dallas Mavericks and the analytical guru who worked on Rick Carlisle’s coaching staff during the 2011 NBA Finals win. Beech vividly remembers the many times when Carlisle would preach the importance of physicality and instruct his players to play with a “hit-first mentality.”

Internally, Beech tracked physicality variables that were left out of the box score. How many times did a player initiate contact on a drive? How many times was a player hit to the ground? How many times did a defender cause that knockdown? How many times did a player dive for a loose ball? How many times did a player make a hard cut that maybe others wouldn’t make?

During the 2012 preseason, he asked Carlisle and his coaching staffers to fill out questionnaires that helped Beech create his “physicality and playing hard” tracking system that he uses to this day.

(Roland Beech photo)

Since the 2024 playoffs, Beech has been hand-charting that data for 82games.com, a revolutionary statistical outpost that helped him land the job with the Mavericks in the first place. Beech, now a Silicon Valley tech consultant who hasn’t closed the door on working for an NBA team again, typically spends four hours hand-charting each playoff game, but high-intensity feuds, like the ones we’re seeing in the NBA Finals, have taken longer.

With Wembanyama’s physicality becoming a focal point in the series as he faces a potential suspension, I asked Beech to run the numbers on the Spurs big man.

The conclusion? Wembanyama was by far the most “physical” player of the NBA Finals, until the elbow in Game 4. After that, Wembanyama didn’t play with nearly as much force, and the Spurs let the 29-point lead slip away.

Whether it’s due to fatigue or fear of suspension, Wembanyama wasn’t the same player before and after the whistle. Two of the top measures that Beech tracks are “Physicality Net Wins” and “Playing Hard Wins.” Physicality wins include any head-to-head interaction with contact that has a decisive event (boxing out, screening, shouldering a player on a drive, etc.). When a player logs more physicality wins than his opponent on those interactions that would be a positive “Physicality Net Win,” and a negative figure if he tallies fewer. A “Playing Hard Win” would include instances of notable non-contact movement (sprinting toward a loose ball, cutting to the rim, jumping for rebound, etc.).

According to Beech’s tracking, Wembanyama, in 24 minutes up until the flagrant call in Game 4, was a plus-7 in “Physicality Net Wins” and had registered 20 of what he calls “Playing Hard Wins.” He was winning those battles. After the flagrant, in a 20-minute span of action, Wembanyama’s ledger flipped the other way, tallying minus-5 “Physicality Net Wins” and just 11 “Playing Hard Wins.”

“Definitely seemed a lot more passive,” Beech emailed Yahoo Sports. “I think the flagrant did rattle him a bit.”

One particular sequence of plays stood out to Beech while he tracked the game. Late in the third quarter, OG Anunoby decked Wembanyama in the paint as the Spurs center tried to roll to the rim. On the ensuing offensive rebounds, instead of remaining in the basket area and muscling with the Knicks’ interior defenders, Wembanyama retreated to the perimeter. There, he took a pair of 3-pointers on Mitchell Robinson instead of driving or pounding the paint. Neither cashed.

Throughout the second half, Beech also noted Wembanyama was unusually absent at the rim and did so enough that he lost his overall head-to-head battles with Towns (minus-5 in H2H physicality), Jalen Brunson (minus-3) and Anunoby (minus-2). In other words, the DPOY winner was getting pushed around.

And that typically hasn’t been the case in this series. Beech’s tracking shows that Wembanyama on the whole has been the single-most physical player in this series. He has doled out more bumps and grabs (plus-12) than any other player and won the overall battle at the rim, earning a plus-25 figure in that category. He also leads all players in the NBA Finals in “Playing Hard” score, anchored by his monstrous 10.33 rim deters per 36 minutes.

The optical tracking cameras the NBA utilizes in every arena would automate much of what Beech does by hand, but his years working in the league and championship experience has informed Beech to identify which variables hold meaning.

After games, coaches and players talk ad nauseam about the importance of physicality, but it’s hardly tracked in the public domain. Without Beech’s data, pundits can only point to statistics like free throws, rebounds and blocks as proxies for physicality, and they only go so far.

Beech is a firm believer that physicality remains one of the most predictive variables of wins and losses. As of Friday, he has tracked over half of this year’s playoff games, and the results are astounding. Beech estimates that, this postseason, the team that wins in his physicality measure has won approximately 80% of its games. His “Playing Hard” score shows an even stronger relationship, with 88% of the teams who play harder than their opponent, by his multi-level measure, winning the game.

In Beech’s view, if the public could follow these “intangibles,” the Knicks’ historic run, the Spurs’ rise and the Indiana Pacers’ Cinderella run last year would all be less of a surprise.

Like the entire basketball universe, Beech is eager to see which version of Wembanyama emerges in Game 5. He thinks Wembanyama’s flagrant point situation could affect his approach in the win-or-go-home matchup. Scoring is one thing, but exerting his impact on the defensive end will draw Beech’s focus on Saturday.

“Wemby’s defensive force is something that the league is going to have to reckon with for years to come,” Beech wrote.

For Wembanyama, the long term will have to wait. Game 5 is all that matters now. With Wembanyama and the Spurs’ backs against the wall, the series will be largely dictated by Wembanyama’s ability to play with the utmost level of physicality, within league rules.

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Gay marriage was legalized in Massachusetts just over two decades ago and has been the law of the land in the U.S. since 2015, yet somehow, queer movies are still feel relatively rare. Despite a string of critically acclaimed entries over the last couple of years (The History of Sound, Pillion, Queer, I Saw the TV Glow, Ponyboi, Blue Moon, etc.), 2025 was a low-point for queer representation onscreen.

But that doesn't mean no one is gay in the movies, you might just need to look a little harder to find them. After all, Hollywood has been making gay movies since the advent of film, albeit with plausible deniability. The late 1920s and early 1930s were a golden age for movies that explicitly (or nearly so) dealt with queer characters (Garbo, Dietrich, and Hepburn were bisexual icons before that term was commonly used); the same can be said of the independent-minded 1970s. At other times, representation was all about subtext, the filmmakers sneaking in themes that would go over the heads of the censors but land with the right audiences, or arising as unintended subtext. Which is to say, sometimes even the straightest movies are gay as hell, the inevitable result of straightness trying too hard.

Rope (1948)

In 1924, Leopold and Loeb, two wealthy University of Chicago boyfriends, kidnapped and murdered a 14-year-old largely to prove that they could, the pair having read just enough Nietzsche to convince themselves that they were the Übermensch of whom he wrote. They weren’t, of course, but they wouldn’t be the first rich white boys to believe themselves inherently superior.

The murder was a tragedy, but for someone with Alfred Hitchcock’s sensibilities, it was also too juicy a story to pass up. Rope is most famous because of its unique filming technique: it’s presented as one continuous take, though in reality the takes were about ten minutes long, limited by the film technology of the era. But Rope is based on a play loosely inspired by the Leopold and Loeb murders, and in the play, the pair are explicitly gay. The movie, being a product of its time, obscures that without really suggesting anything else. These effete and sassy “roommates”, played by Farley Granger (who came out late in life) and John Dall (who is widely believed to have been gay, though he never came out publicly), hold a party at which the body of their murder victim has been concealed. Screenwriter Arthur Laurents, who was gay, was an expert at dodging the restrictions of the Hays code in order to sneak in subtext that was just subtextual enough, a trick Hitchcock likewise excelled at.

Was it truly lost on 1940s audiences that these characters were more than friends? Apparently, Laurents and company didn’t clue in Jimmy Stewart about his character, and the actor never caught on. You can rent Rope from Prime Video.

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Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Following the events of Frankenstein, the eponymous doctor is all ready to settle down with his fiancée when his old college mentor shows up: Dr. Septimus Pretorius, who lures Henry away from the arms of his promised in favor of the two of them getting together after hours and building more bodies. Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger), given to sassy retorts and chain-smoking in mausoleums, was high-camp before the notion was codified. Although there’s nothing explicit here, there’s no real queer-coding, either: the fascinating Thesiger never made any effort whatsoever to hide his queerness, nor to accommodate anyone’s ideas of masculinity, and he certainly doesn’t in this role. Following an injury while serving in World War I, he took up needlework and passed the skills on to other injured soldiers, despite formal warnings that the work was too “effeminate.” Later, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for both his embroidery skills and his acting career. Even with all that, he remains most famous for luring Colin Clive’s Frankenstein out of retirement.

This movie is so gay it inspired 1998's Gods and Monsters, a super queer biopic of its director, James Whale, played by Ian McKellen, who came out publicly in 1988. Rent Bride of Frankenstein from Prime Video.

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The Matrix (1999)

Beloved by cinema kids and dudebros alike, The Matrix broke ground back in 1999 for its blend of trippy philosophizing and fast-paced (and sometimes veeeery slow-paced) action, but there was something else going on under the surface, with themes speaking to the experience of trans people who saw in its fable of transformation from an artificial outward image (life in the Matrix) to one that's truly authentic (awakenening in the real world) as a mirror for the challenges of gender dysphoria. Its story of breaking free from societal constraints has inspired thoughtful analysis and appealed to some of the worst people imaginable (when Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump invoked the film's "red pill" imagery, co-director Lilly Wachowski famously responded with a hearty "Fuck both of you"). Sometimes queer themes emerge from art without much conscious thought on the parts of the creators, but Lily Wachowski has been clear that the trans allegory was always part of this very dense soup. Rent The Matrix from Prime Video.

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Cat People (1942)

Directed by Jacques Tourneur and, crucially, produced by the unconventionally highbrow Val Lewton, Cat People stars Simone Simon as Irena Dubrovna, who believes that she's descended from a line of, well...cat people. Convinced that she'll shape-shift into a panther if she ever allows her true and repressed sexuality to come out, she avoids engaging sexually with her new husband. The metaphors involving otherness work on multiple levels, but seeing Irena as a woman stuck in a straight marriage that she was never meant for is the reading that sticks. Stream Cat People on the Criterion Channel or rent it from Prime Video.

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Johnny Guitar (1954)

This low-budget Nicholas Ray film isn’t one of Joan Crawford’s better known movies, but it is one of her best and most fascinating, earning its entry into the vaunted Criterion Collection. Playing a saloonkeeper in the wilds of old-west Arizona, Crawford’s character is introduced by one of her employees just so: “I never met a woman who was more man.” Her arch-nemesis is a “cattle baron” played by Mercedes McCambridge, a straight (as far as we know) actress who became a gay icon for her portrayals of strong, queer-coded women. There are male love interests here, but they’re largely incidental. It’s the seething energy between the two leading women, frequently facing off while decked out in black leather that borders on the fetishistic, where the film’s true heart lies. Stream Johnny Guitar on Kanopy or rent it from Prime Video.

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Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

Moody, sensitive teen Jim Stark (James Dean) meets Plato Crawford (Sal Mineo) and Judy (Natalie Wood) at the police station, and one of cinema's great emo love triangles was born. Though restrained in the finished film, it's impossible not to see the attraction that Plato has for Jim, nor was it unintentional, worried censors told director Nicholas Ray during production that “It is of course vital that there be no inference of a questionable or homosexual relationship between Plato and Jim.” Still, Mineo spoke later about how Dean instructed him to "Look at me the way I look at Natalie...” None of it is terribly ambiguous in retrospect, and the pin-up of then-heartthrob Alan Ladd in Plato's locker is just one of the many winks to a savvy audience. Rent Rebel Without a Cause from Prime Video.

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Ben-Hur (1959)

Don’t tell Charlton Heston, but everyone else involved in crafting Judah Ben-Hur’s relationship with his old friend Messala was down with the idea that the two were lovers. Script doctor Gore Vidal claims to have convinced the producer, director William Wyler, and actor Stephen Boyd that none of the rest of the film’s high drama involving the relationship would make any sense if there weren’t strong hints that the two had been knocking sandals. Everyone was in on the bit, except for Heston (who, being an enormous baby, was pissed when he found out about it decades later, calling the suggestion an insult to the director). Rent Ben-Hur from Prime Video.

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Red River (1948)

Nobody tell John Wayne, but the queer subtext of Red River has been discussed for decades, which makes a special kind of sense given that it provided a breakthrough for gay actor Montgomery Clift, who plays Matt, the more sensitive ward of a typically butch Wayne. Complicating life during the film's core cattle drive is the introduction of John Ireland as Cherry Valance, the scene during which Matt and Cherry compare guns is justifiably memorable as euphemism, and even characters in the movie seem not unaware of what's going on: Wayne describes them as pawing at each other, and Walter Brennan's old-timer character describes them as "...having some fun. A peculiar kind of fun." Which I think is a Grindr filter. Stream Red River on Prime Video.

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The Haunting (1963)

The more recent Haunting of Hill House Netflix series, also based on the Shirley Jackson novel, made the subtext text, but the gay vibes between chic and sassy Theo (Claire Bloom) and repressed, mousy Eleanor (Julie Harris) radiate through the early ‘60s original. Theo rebuffs the men who flirt with her in favor of making eyes at shy Eleanor, the two forming a charmingly traditional idea of a lesbian couple: one glamorous and fashion-conscious, the other more of an awkward tomboy. Rent The Haunting from Prime Video.

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A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985)

The subtext here comes through so strongly that it can hardly even be considered subtext, but back in 1985, plenty of straight audiences still missed it. There’s a role-reversal in the film’s basic premise, which puts Jesse (Mark Patton) in the position that would be taken up by the “final girl” in most slasher films of the era. Freddy toys with Jesse, at one point caressing his lips with those finger blades; Jesse flees from danger and his girlfriend in equal distress, and nearly always half-clothed. He runs into his gym teacher in a leather bar, and that same jerk later gets bare-ass spanked to death in a locker room. As a metaphor for the torments of being a closeted teen, you could do a lot worse (you could do a lot better...but you could do a lot worse). Rent Freddy's Revenge from Prime Video.

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Top Gun (1986)

Coming out in the military in 1986 would have seen one dishonorably discharged, which is surely why Top Gun takes a time out, every so often, to reinforce the fact that Tom Cruise really, really likes kissing Kelly McGillis, even though the movie’s central relationship, and heat, is found between Cruise’s Maverick and Val Kilmer’s Iceman. The rest of the movie? Frequently shirtless, often sweaty (well, oiled) Navy boys do things like play volleyball to Kenny Loggins’ “Playing with the Boys,” with sample dialogue including lines like: “I want somebody’s butt! I want it now!” and “I’d like to bust your butt, but I can’t!” Late director Tony Scott copped to using books of gay beefcake photography as his primary reference for how to photograph the movie’s man meat, which probably explains the proliferation of slightly porny mustaches. Stream Top Gun on Paramount+ or rent it from Prime Video.

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The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Most of these movies have queer themes running throughout; I'm not sure that's the case here, although I'd be thrilled to be proven wrong. Still, I'm going to let Peter Lorre’s Joel Cairo speak for all of the many queer-coded villains in classic Hollywood. It wasn't always a great trope, but audiences have always been open to spinning straw into gold by giving extra love to the meager, often problematic representations of LGBTQ+ characters in classic films. Characters made to be mocked or hated become appreciated figures, and that's the case here. Overtly gay in Dashiell Hammett's novel, Hollywood censors of 1941 of course wouldn't allow Joel Cairo to be explicit in a film version. So Petter Lorre sashays his way into Sam Spade's office with pretty clothes, fancy gloves, a cane that he can hardly stop from fondling and, of course, gardenia-scented calling cards...because the planned lavender cards were seen as too on-the-nose by censors. Rent The Maltese Falcon from Prime Video.

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Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

Fans felt a great disturbance in the Force around the release of The Force Awakens in 2015, but the millions of voices that were set to applaud the acknowledgement that gay people might exist in Star Wars were slowly, agonizingly silenced. The chemistry between then-new characters Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) and Finn (John Boyega) seemed to go well beyond friendship, and the movie (and it's direct sequel, The Last Jedi) left open the possibility that there might be more. Alas, the final film in the trilogy introduced heterosexual love interests for both the men, despite both actors strongly suggesting that they would have preferred to play a romantic relationship; given that The Rise of Skywalker almost entirely wrote out Kelly Marie Tran's Rose following "fan" resistance to the franchise's first woman of color and targeted harassment of the actress, the sudden appearance of girlfriends for Poe and Finn feels...very convenient. Bones thrown to the very worst type of SW fan. Still, if one ignores that last movie (not the worst idea), it's still possible to see the seeds of what might have been a groundbreaking moment for the franchise. Stream The Force Awakens on Disney+ and Starz or rent it from Prime Video.

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Brief Encounter (1945)

Two strangers, each in an unfulfilling marriage, meet by chance at a train station, kicking off a relationship that starts as one of convenience and evolves into an intense emotional affair, complicated by their personal lives and the ever-present danger of discovery. A 2015 staging of the original Noël Coward play (called Still Life) put two men in the lead roles, making clear that while the story works beautifully with a straight couple, it’s also a brilliant encapsulation of the particular challenges facing same-sex encounters. I’m not sure what director David Lean had in mind, but I shouldn’t be at all surprised if Coward wasn’t thinking, at least in part, of the inherently fraught, dangerous, thrilling nature of chance queer meetings. Stream Brief Encounter on HBO Max and The Criterion Channel or rent it from Prime Video.

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Strangers on a Train (1951)

Lesbian writer Patricia Highsmith wasn't afraid of gay subtext (see: The Talented Mr. Ripley), nor text-text, for that matter (see: The Price of Salt); neither was director Alfred Hitchcock afraid to inject queerness into his films, as we learned from Rope and Rebecca (among others). Given all that (as well as the presence of Farley Granger), it's not surprising that Strangers on a Train is rather delicious in its preoccupations. Granger's Guy Haines has a kind of meet-cute with Bruno Antony (Robert Walker) on a train (obvi), and they have a rather intense conversation about dual murders: Guy should kill Bruno's hated father, and Bruno will kill Guy's wife. Fun hypothetical, except that Bruno is absolutely serious and follows through with his part of the deal. The whole thing plays a bit like a straight man's fever dream, even giving into a momentary dalliance with another man could ruin one's life. Or get you out of a crap marriage... Stream Strangers on a Train on Kanopy or rent it from Prime Video.

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Diabolique (1955)

One of the essential thrillers of the 1950s, the film version of Boileau-Narcejac’s novel removes the explicit lesbian relationship between the two women at the plot’s center, the wife and mistress of a man whom they team up to murder, radically altering the ending in the process. Much of that relationship remains regardless; the closeness between Nicole and Christina is remarked upon by the students and faculty of the boarding school where the two live. They travel together, sharing rooms and even a bed. A climactic moment is played very much as a breakup scene. Simone Signoret and Véra Clouzot are one of French cinema’s most memorable couples, even if their romantic pairing is never made explicit. Stream Diabolique on HBO Max and The Criterion Channel or rent it from Prime Video.

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2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)

I'm cautious about reading queer themes into any given male-male bromance, men can just be friends (or so I'm told), and there aren't exactly a ton of great cultural models for healthy male intimacy. But then something like 2 Fast 2 Furious zooms along, with its two leads displaying such sweaty, sassy chemistry alongside Eva Mendes' Agent Monica Fuentes (she refers to them as "girlies") that the whole thing plays like a bisexual fever dream. Paul Walker is Brian O'Conner, returning from the first movie as a disgraced LAPD officer tasked with teaming up with his old friend (or more than friend?) Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson). The two spend the entire movie bickering, wrestling, and putting each other in ostensibly no-homo headlocks while Brian struggles with his attraction to Agent Fuentes, knowing that it will hurt Roman. A key moment comes when Brian does that stare-and-drive flirt thing that we see in car movies; he drives at top speed while never taking his eyes off of Monica. When it's all done, Roman cattily pronounces: "he got that from me." Stream 2 Fast 2 Furious on Peacock of rent it from Prime Video.

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Scream (1996)

As with Hitchcock’s Rope, Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson was inspired, in part, by murderous couple Leopold and Loeb when he created the movies-and-murder-obsessed duo of Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) and Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard). Even before he spoke about it explicitly in interviews, however, queer fans got it; at the very least, Stu is obviously way into Billy. You can stream Scream on Paramount+ rent it from Prime Video.

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The Babadook (2014)

The Babadook became a gay icon quite by accident. Though there had been a bit of social media discourse on the topic previously, it all exploded when Netflix lumped the movie into its LGBTQ category for no particular reason. Queer readings were suddenly validated, and fairly, I think. Though on the surface, The Babadook represents grief and the dangers of trying to sweep trauma under the rug, he works every bit as well as a metaphor for closeting. With flawlessly goth style, he torments a mother and young son who try to ignore him and pretend he isn’t real. The more mom tries to shove him back into the metaphorical closet, the more horror he inflicts. It’s only through acceptance that their small family has any hope at all of moving forward. Stream The Babadook on Disney+ and Hulu or rent it from Prime Video.

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Venom (2018)

Tom Hardy broods his way through Venom, the story of a couple of "roommates" who happen to share a body. Possessed by an alien symbiote, Eddie Brock bickers incessantly with his newfound partner before the two start to learn to appreciate, and maybe even love each other. Just a couple of bros out to fight crime? Maybe, but the chemistry is real, and, when Venom takes over the body of Eddie's girlfriend Annie (Michelle Williams) in the final act, it's unclear who exactly is kissing who. Real throuple energy there. Stream Venom on Disney+ or rent it from Prime Video.

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Fear No Evil (1981)

A low-budget cult classic with a tone that’s absolutely all over the place, Fear No Evil follows a somewhat effete young man (Stefan Arngrim) who slowly comes to learn that he’s the literal antichrist. He’s bullied relentlessly by the middle-aged actors playing high school jocks, who love nothing more than to strip down to their buff, bare asses and case him around locker rooms (so many male butts on display!). When he finally comes into his own as a Satan figure, our hero announces it by throwing on some make-up and getting revenge. The movie muddles its message; we’re not necessarily meant to cheer for gay Satan climactic rampage, but plenty of viewers have. Stream Fear No Evil on Prime Video.

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Fight Club (1999)

There’s a point at which hyper-masculinity starts to look an awful lot like homoeroticism, and you have to wonder how many sweaty, shirtless men you can literally toss together in a space that excludes women entirely before it starts to look like a gay club. Oh, and let’s make sure not to mention anything that goes on here to our wives, girlfriends, or co-workers. Rent Fight Club from Prime Video.

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Batman & Robin (1997)

Start with the generally camp sensibilities of gay director Joel Schumacher (who once claimed to have had sex with tens of thousands of men during his life; not that queer cred is a function of mathematics...but damn), and throw in a batsuit with pronounced nipples, a massive codpiece, and deeper-than-strictly-necessary ass cleavage, and you’ve got a recipe for the gayest superhero epic ever. And that’s all before George Clooney’s Batman adopts a nearly grown man only nine years his junior. Stream Batman & Robin on HBO Max or rent it from Prime Video.

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Frozen (2013)

Let it go, Elsa. It’s partly that Elsa is hiding a secret about which she’s terrified that people will discover, and the subsequently joyous sense of liberation that she experiences when she finally does own her power. That all speaks to queer people, but there’s also the fact that there’s no love interest for Elsa in Frozen, when the story of pretty much every other Disney princess has been centered around getting a boyfriend. Frozen 2 left the question of Elsa’s romantic interests open, which feels like a teeny-tiny step forward for a company that’s notoriously desperate not to offend its straight audience. Plus, that climax where she races across the sea on her magic horse is super gay. Stream Frozen on Disney+ or rent it from Prime Video.

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Fright Night (1985)

When Chris Sarandon and Jonathan Stark move in next door, it’s the usual formula: “I did hear he’s got a live-in carpenter. With my luck, he’s probably gay,” says the main character’s mom. It’s usually “friends” or “roommates,” so “live-in carpenter” is an innovation, but it’s not hard to see what’s really going on. The two turn out to be vampire and familiar, but they share an easy rapport and a genuine concern for each other, a picture of a healthy, supportive relationship, even if they are evil vampires. Rent Fright Night from Prime Video.

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Red Heat (1988)

Writer/director Walter Hiller described Red Heat as a “love story” between devoted cops played by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jim Belushi, and though I’m not sure he meant it literally, you wouldn’t have to alter much of the screenplay to make their relationship explicit. This one serves as a stand-in for a lot of hyper-violent, hyper-masculine movies of the 1980s (many of them featuring Schwarzenegger): full of the kind of sweaty man-on-man action that you’d expect, with an entire opening sequence that takes place at a bath house. It’s co-ed, but the male characters are overwhelmingly the focus, fighting in coverings that could barely be described as loincloths. Rent Red Heat from Prime Video.

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Bend It Like Beckham (2002)

Rumor has long held that, as originally conceived, football teammates Jess (Parminder Nagra) and Jules (Keira Knightley) were intended to end up together in a romantic sense, but that changes were made in deference to more conservative American and Indian audiences. Even without that, though, the chemistry between the two star players is palpable, and the moments of hand-holding and even kissing allow for more romantic readings of this above-average entry in the underdogs-win-at-sports genre. Stream Bend It Like Beckham on Disney+ or rent it from Prime Video.

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Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

If the characters of Sam and Frodo were of different genders, it would be almost impossible not to view their relationship through a romantic lens. Even if we dodge queer readings, though, it’s certainly the case that their story (as in the novels) is a model of male intimacy rare enough in film as to be almost nonexistent. The trilogy is full of male relationships that are almost shockingly supportive and healthy, Sam and Frodo hold hands, cuddle, and literally carry each other at various points. The wise old drag-queen-as-mentor is an age-old trope of explicitly gay movies, and, though his wardrobe is limited, Ian McKellen’s Gandalf, with his luxuriant hair and mid-trilogy glow-up, fits the role flawlessly. Stream Return of the King on HBO Max or rent it from Prime Video.

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300 (2006)

300 practically screams “no homo!” whenever Leonidas or some other nearly naked character talks about the general hardness of the Spartans, but Zack Snyder’s comic book-based breakthrough is also literally every fetish party I’ve ever been to. There's nothing new in the queer-coding of the heavily made-up and bejeweled Persians (the orientalist stereotypes about easterners and their decadent, feminine ways wouldn't surprise the ancient Greeks), but that feels like a movie missing its own point, while also wildly overestimating the heterosexuality of the ancient Spartans. Rent 300 from Prime Video.

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RRR (2022)

You’ll never convince me that the story of two men who meet-cute during an impromptu coordinated bridge rescue and then proceed to spend every waking minute together except for the ones they spend agonizing over the secrets that might tear them apart is not an action-packed rom-com. These guys love three things: taking off their shirts, fighting colonialism with tigers, and each other. Stream RRR on Netflix.

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