Donald Trump’s relationship with Elon Musk appeared on the precipice of devolving into bitter personal acrimony on Thursday as the onetime special adviser publicly assailed the president for being ungrateful for the millions he spent to get him elected.
In a show that recently opened at the LaMaMa Experimental Theater Club in the East Village, a group of actors led by a young, ambitious, charmingly naïve director are almost finished rehearsing Chekhov’s “The Seagull” at the famed Moscow Art Theater when Russia invades Ukraine. Thanks to social media, they can hear the sirens and see the bombs falling on Kharkiv and Kyiv.
We witness the shock and disbelief, the feeling of utter impossibility of staying in one’s country, one’s city, one’s skin that so many people in Moscow experienced in the days after the full-scale invasion. They cry. They shout at one another. One of them frantically packs a suitcase.
And then the show goes on. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/
There is an 80% chance that global temperatures will break at least one annual heat record in the next five years, raising the risk of extreme droughts, floods and forest fires, a new report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has shown.
For the first time, the data also indicated a small likelihood that before 2030, the world could experience a year that is 2C hotter than the preindustrial era, a possibility scientists described as “shocking”.
Coming after the hottest 10 years ever measured, the latest medium-term global climate update highlights the growing threat to human health, national economies and natural landscapes unless people stop burning oil, gas, coal and trees.
The update, which synthesises short-term weather observations and long-term climate projections, said there was a 70% chance that five-year average warming for 2025-2029 will be more than 1.5C above preindustrial levels. https://www.theguardian.com/
Daniel Janzen only began watching the insects – truly watching them – when his ribcage was shattered. Nearly half a century ago, the young ecologist had been out documenting fruit crops in a dense stretch of Costa Rican forest when he fell in a ravine, landing on his back. The long lens of his camera punched up through three ribs, snapping the bones into his thorax.
Slowly, he dragged himself out, crawling nearly two miles back to the research hut. There were no immediate neighbours, no good roads, no simple solutions for getting to a hospital.
Selecting a rocking chair on the porch, Janzen used a bedsheet to strap his torso tightly to the frame. For a month, he sat, barely moving, waiting for his bones to knit back together. And he watched.
What I’m talking about here is the rise of greedy oligarchs who are driven by an identifiable mental illness, what’s either a subset of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) or a defect in impulse control called Hoarding Syndrome. https://hartmannreport.com/p/
Millions of legal immigrants may be left unable to work after the US Social Security Administration quietly instituted a rule change to stop automatically issuing them social security numbers.
The Enumeration Beyond Entry program is an agreement between the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security, where US Citizenship and Immigration Services would provide social security with information from applicants for work authorization or naturalization.
The program began in 2017 under the first Trump administration.
Without any public notice, on 19 March, the program was halted, affecting millions of immigrants every year and burdening Social Security Administration offices, as those applicants will now have to visit a Social Security Administration office and apply separately to receive a social security number. https://www.theguardian.com/
In November, when the “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong got the idea for his caustic new movie, “Mountainhead,” he knew he wanted to do it fast. He wrote the script, about grandiose, nihilistic tech oligarchs holed up in a mountain mansion in Utah, in January and February, as a very similar set of oligarchs was coalescing behind Donald Trump’s inauguration. Then he shot the film, his first, over five weeks this spring. It premieres on Saturday on HBO — an astonishingly compressed timeline. With events cascading so quickly that last year often feels like another era, Armstrong wanted to create what he called, when I spoke to him last week, “a feeling of nowness.”
Jimmy Donaldson, the 27-year-old online content creator and entrepreneur known as MrBeast, is by any reasonable metric one of the most popular entertainers on the planet. His YouTube channel, to which he posts his increasingly elaborate and expensively produced videos, has 400 million subscribers – more than the population of the United States of America and equivalent to the total number of native English speakers currently alive. It’s close to twice as many subscribers as Elon Musk has X followers, and over 100 million more than Taylor Swift has Instagram followers. And that number, 400 million, does not account for the people who watch MrBeast’s videos in passing, or who are aware of his cultural presence because of their children, or who just sort of know who he is but don’t have any intricate awareness as to why he is famous. https://www.theguardian.com/
“You think you’re better than us.”
I get this e-mail on a regular basis. Now I’m wondering if it’s antisemitism.
That’s what resonated most with me in “The Brutalist.” The subtle antisemitism. It’s one thing if someone calls you a “kike.” Says grossly antisemitic things to your face. But oftentimes there are comments that only a Jew can really decode.
You’re too loud. You’re not one of us.
That scene in “Radio Days,” where everybody’s talking over one another at the dinner table… That’s how it is with Jews. Can sometimes be that way with non-Jews, but if you’re a Jew at a Christian table and you don’t know your place, know not to talk too loudly or too often, you’re going to be bad-vibed.
Which is why the characters in “The Brutalist” want to move to Israel. To be with their own.
It must be so galling for an actor to be blessed with just the right face for one kind of part. Galling for good actors anyway. Pretty sweet for the others – “You need a face someone would definitely kill for? Put this useless hunk/babe in there and just move the scenery round them.”
Matthew Goode is, nomenclaturally and otherwise, one of the former, but cursed with a face best described as “modern patrician” and has therefore been the first port of call for just about every period drama there has been for the last 20 years. He’s been in everything from Brideshead Revisited (as Charles Ryder) on the big screen, to Downton Abbey (Henry Talbot) and The Crown (where at least he got to play that bounder Lord Snowdon) on the small one. Judging by the relish with which he seizes the chance to play contemporary and ignoble in his new outing, the psychological thriller Dept. Q, he must have been going quietly mad with frustration throughout.
The Norwegian dramedy “Pernille” (in Norwegian, with subtitles, or dubbed), on Netflix, is about as lovely as shows get, endearing but mercifully resistant to treacle.
Henriette Steenstrup created and stars in the show as Pernille, a single mom to two of the most ungrateful — realistic — teens on TV. She is reeling from her sister’s death six months earlier, and she still leaves her sister voice mails, sometimes chatty and sometimes wrenching.
Pernille’s older daughter, Hanna (Vivild Falk Berg), is histrionic and capricious and suddenly dragging her feet about a long-planned gap year in Argentina. The younger, Sigrid (Ebba Jacobsen Oberg), is a ball of rage, surly beyond measure but still young enough to be read to at night and get tucked in sometimes. Pernille’s nephew, Leo (Jon Ranes), is also living with them while his father recovers from the accident that killed his mother. The show kicks off with Pernille’s widower dad (Nils Ole Oftebro) announcing that he is gay and ready to live his truth.
A New York attorney representing a wealthy art collector called his client."I have some good news, and I have some bad news."The art collector replied, "I've had an awful day. Give me the good news first."The lawyer said, "Well, I met with your wife today, and she informed me that she just invested $5,000 in two pictures that she thinks will bring a minimum of $15 million to $20 million, and I think she could be right."Saul replied enthusiastically, "Well done! My wife is a brilliant businesswoman! You've just made my day. Now I know I can handle the bad news. What is it?"The lawyer replied, "The pictures are of you and your secretary."
I invented a sandal for people with one leg. It was a flop.
You’re fat. Don’t sugarcoat it because you will eat that too.
I like to practice my knock-knock jokes, I just adoor them.
When people ask me if I have fun washing clothes I have to be honest and say loads.
What do you call a president that has to do a lot of laundry? Washing-ton.
I was going to tell you a joke about a blunt arrow but really there is no point.
Thieves broke into my house and stole everything except my soap, shower gel, towels and deodorant. Dirty crooks.
I used to go out with a girl the was secretly obsessed with graphs. She was always plotting behind my back.
