Introducing ‘Interesting Times'
Premiering April 10
There's a saying that comes to mind these days: May you live in interesting times. It's understood to be a curse, even though it sounds like a blessing.
'Interesting Times With Ross Douthat' is a new weekly podcast from New York Times Opinion. Every Thursday, he will map the new world order through interviews and conversations. Answering questions like: What does our new political era really look like? What is the future of democracy around the world, with American empire in retreat? What happens to movies and books — all of culture — in our digital and A.I.-dominated age?
Meet the Host Image
Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Opinion columnist in April 2009. His column appears every Sunday and his newsletter on Friday. He hosts the weekly Opinion podcast 'Interesting Times With Ross Douthat.' Previously he was a senior editor at The Atlantic.
He is the author of 'Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,' which was published in February 2025. His other books include 'The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery' (2021), 'The Decadent Society' (2020), 'To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism' (2018), 'Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics' (2012), 'Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class' (2005) and, with Reihan Salam, 'Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream' (2008). He is the film critic for National Review.
He lives with his wife and five children in New Haven, Conn.
Thoughts? Email us at interestingtimes@nytimes.com.
'Interesting Times' is produced by Andrea Betanzos, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Elisa Gutierrez and Katherine Sullivan. It's edited by Jordana Hochman and Annie-Rose Strasser. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Isaac Jones and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com .
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Wall Street Journal slams Vance's foreign student stance as ‘false choice'
The Wall Street Journal's editorial board on Friday slammed recent comments by Vice President Vance on foreign students as a 'false choice' amid tensions between the Trump administration and higher education institutions. In an interview on Newsmax's 'Greg Kelly Reports' late last month, Vance said that an 'idea that American citizens don't have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants and professors to do these things, I just reject that.' The Journal noted Vance's comments in a Friday opinion piece, alongside other comments in which he said 'we invest in our own people' and that he believes 'that's actually an opportunity for American citizens to really flourish' when it comes to international student visa restrictions. 'This is a classic false choice. Of course the U.S. has talent and should invest in it. But welcoming foreign students doesn't hinder Americans,' the editorial board said in their piece. 'The cold, hard numbers show that too few Americans are pursuing STEM fields to meet the future needs of business and government. Of all U.S. bachelor's degrees, biology and engineering fields make up about 13%,' they added. Earlier this week, limits were placed on foreign student visas at Harvard University by President Trump. 'Admission into the United States to attend, conduct research, or teach at our Nation's institutions of higher education is a privilege granted by our Government, not a guarantee,' Trump said in a Wednesday proclamation restricting the visas. In recent months, the Trump administration has targeted multiple higher education institutions over alleged inaction on campus antisemitism and policies around transgender athletes. 'Does the Trump Administration want to stop illegal immigration, or nearly all legal immigration, including foreign students? The evidence is growing that it wants the latter, which will sharply reduce the human capital the U.S. needs to prosper,' the Journal editorial board wrote. The Hill has reached out to Vance's office for comment.
Atlantic
44 minutes ago
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How I Accidentally Inspired a Major Chinese Motion Picture
In December, a friend sent me the trailer for a new Chinese movie called Clash. It's a sports comedy about a ragtag group of Chinese men who start an American-football team in the southwestern city of Chongqing. With the help of a foreign coach, the Chongqing Dockers learn to block and tackle, build camaraderie, and face off in the league championship against the evil Shanghai team. Funny, I thought. In 2014, I wrote an article for The New Republic about a ragtag group of Chinese men who'd started an American football team in the southwestern city of Chongqing. With the help of a foreign coach, the Chongqing Dockers learned to block and tackle, built camaraderie, and—yes—faced off in the league championship against the evil Shanghai team. The Chinese studio behind Clash, iQIYI, is not the first to take an interest in the Dockers' story. My article, titled 'Year of the Pigskin,' was natural Hollywood bait: a tale of cross-cultural teamwork featuring a fish-out-of-water American protagonist, published at a moment when Hollywood and China were in full-on courtship and the future of U.S.-China relations looked bright. It didn't take much imagination to see Ryan Reynolds or Michael B. Jordan playing the coach—a former University of Michigan tight end who'd missed his shot at a pro career because of a shoulder injury—with Chinese stars filling the supporting roles. Sony bought the option to the article, as well as the coach's life rights. When that project fizzled a few years later, Paramount scooped up the rights but never made anything. Now a Chinese studio appeared to have simply lifted the idea. I texted Chris McLaurin, the former Dockers coach who now works at a fancy law firm in London. (Since my original article published, we have become good friends.) Should we say something? Should we sue? At the very least, one of us had to see the movie. Fortunately, it was premiering in February at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. I booked a flight to the Netherlands. The movie I saw, which came out in Chinese theaters last month, did not alleviate my concerns. But the film, along with the conversations I had with its producer and director, provided a glimpse into the cultural and political forces that led to Clash 's creation. Indeed, the trajectory of the IP itself—from the original article to the Hollywood screenplays to the final Chinese production—says a lot about how the relationship between the United States and China has evolved, or devolved, over the past decade. What began as a story about transcending cultural boundaries through sports has turned into a symbol of just how little China and the U.S. understand each other—and how little interest they have in trying. I went to China in 2011 because I had a vague sense that something important was happening there. I moved to Beijing, with funding from a Luce scholarship, and started looking for stories. They weren't hard to find. The years after the 2008 Beijing Olympics turned out to be a remarkable era of relative openness. Many international observers saw Xi Jinping's rise in 2012 as the beginning of a period of liberalization, the inevitable political outcome of the country's growing prosperity. For journalists, China was a playground and a gold mine at once. We could travel (mostly) freely and talk to (almost) anyone. Along with the wealth of narrative material came a sense of purpose: We felt as though we were writing the story of the New China—a country opening up to the rest of the world, trying on identities, experimenting with new ways of thinking and living. The story that captivated me most was that of the Chongqing Dockers. It was one of those article ideas that miraculously fall in your lap, and in retrospect feel like fate. I'd heard that McLaurin, another Luce Scholar, had started coaching a football team in Chongqing, so I flew down to visit him. The first practice I attended was barely controlled chaos: The team didn't have proper equipment, no one wanted to hit one another, and they kept taking cigarette breaks. 'It was like 'Little Giants,' except with adult Chinese men,' I wrote to my editor at The New Republic. He green-lighted the story, and I spent the next year following the team, as well as McLaurin's efforts to create a nationwide league. The movie analogy was fortuitous. Just before the article was published, Sony bought the IP rights, as well as the rights to McLaurin's life story. The project would be developed by Escape Artists, the production company co-founded by Steve Tisch, a co-owner of the New York Giants. Maybe the NFL, struggling to break into the Chinese market, would even get involved. The deal changed McLaurin's life. Sony flew him and his mom out to Los Angeles, where a limo picked them up at the airport. He met with Tisch and the other producers. They floated Chris Pratt for the role of the coach. One executive asked McLaurin if he'd considered acting. McLaurin also met with high-level executives at the NFL interested in helping establish American football in China. He'd been planning to apply to law school, but now he decided to stay in Chongqing and keep developing the league. In retrospect, the China-Hollywood love affair was at that point in its wildest throes. As the reporter Erich Schwartzel recounts in his 2022 book, Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy, China spent the late 2000s and 2010s learning the craft of blockbusting by partnering with Hollywood filmmakers and executives. Hollywood studios, meanwhile, got access to the growing market of Chinese moviegoers. (In 2012, then–Vice President Joe Biden negotiated an agreement to raise the quota of U.S. films allowed to screen in China.) It was, in effect, a classic technology transfer, much like General Motors setting up factories in China in exchange for teaching Chinese workers how to build cars. Erich Schwartzel: How China captured Hollywood With a potential audience of 1.4 billion, every U.S. studio was trying to make movies that would appeal to the Chinese market. This led to some ham-fisted creative choices. The filmmakers behind Iron Man 3 added a scene in which a Chinese doctor saves Tony Stark's life, though it wasn't included in the U.S. cut. The Chinese release of Rian Johnson's time-travel thriller, Looper, contained a gratuitous sequence in which Bruce Willis and Xu Qing gallivant around Shanghai. In the same film, Jeff Daniels's character tells Joseph Gordon-Levitt's, 'I'm from the future—you should go to China.' The threat of being denied a Chinese release also resulted in countless acts of self-censorship by Hollywood studios. Sony changed the villains of its Red Dawn remake from Chinese to North Korean in postproduction, and removed a scene showing the destruction of the Great Wall of China from the Adam Sandler film Pixels. In this environment, Hollywood put a premium on stories that could appeal equally to American and Chinese audiences. That usually meant going as broad as possible and leaning away from cultural specifics, as in the Transformers and Marvel movies. But in theory, another, more difficult path existed, the Hollywood equivalent of the Northwest Passage: a movie that incorporated Chinese and American cultures equally. This could be a breakthrough not only in the box office but also in storytelling. It could even map a future for the two countries, offering proof that we have more in common than we might think. The producers at Sony apparently hoped that a 'Year of the Pigskin' adaptation could pull off that trick. 'The movie we want to develop is JERRY MAGUIRE meets THE BAD NEWS BEARS set in China,' Tisch wrote in an email to Sony's then-chairman and CEO, Michael Lynton. 'This is the perfect movie to film in China.' But there was a puzzle built into the project. 'The struggle for me was trying to figure out who the movie was for,' Ian Helfer, who was hired to write the screenplay, told me recently. His task was to create a comedy that would be a vehicle for a big American star while appealing to Chinese audiences. But nobody in Hollywood really knew what Chinese audiences wanted, aside from tentpole action movies. They seemed happy to watch Tom Cruise save the world, but would they pay to see Chris Pratt teach them how to play an obscure foreign sport? Helfer's vision mostly tracked the original article: An American former college-football star goes to China and teaches the locals to play football. Everyone learns some important lessons about teamwork, brotherhood, and cultural differences along the way. He turned in a draft and hoped for the best. Most Hollywood projects die in development, and the autopsy is rarely conclusive. Exactly why the Sony project fizzled is not clear. Helfer said he'd heard that Sony's China office had objected to the project because it didn't feature a Chinese protagonist. Whatever the reason, when the 'Pigskin' option came up for renewal in 2017, Sony passed. By then, the China-Hollywood wave was cresting. The Zhang Yimou–directed co-production The Great Wall, released in 2017 and starring Matt Damon, flopped in the United States. That same year, the agreement that had raised the quota of U.S. films in China expired. Xi Jinping, who was turning out not to be the liberal reformer many Westerners had hoped for, railed against foreign cultural influence and encouraged homegrown art. His plan worked: Although China had depended on the U.S. for both entertainment and training earlier in the decade, it was now producing its own big-budget triumphs. In 2017, the jingoistic action flick Wolf Warrior 2 broke Chinese box-office records and ushered in a new era of nationalist blockbusters. At the same time, however, U.S. box-office revenues had plateaued, making the Chinese market even more important for Hollywood profits. After Sony declined to renew, Paramount optioned the rights to 'Year of the Pigskin,' and the development gears ground back into motion. This time, there was apparent interest from John Cena, who was in the midst of a full-on pivot to China, which included studying Mandarin. (He hadn't yet torpedoed his career there by referring to Taiwan as a 'country' in an interview, after which he apologized profusely in a much-mocked video.) The Paramount version of 'Pigskin' died when the studio discovered belatedly that football wasn't big in China, according to Toby Jaffe, the producer who'd arranged the deal. 'They realized that it wasn't well-suited for the Chinese market,' he told me recently. 'So the reason they bought it for maybe wasn't the most logical analysis.' The option expired once again in 2019. The coronavirus pandemic snuffed out whatever flame still burned in the China-Hollywood romance. McLaurin's China dreams were fading too. His hopes for a broad expansion of American football in China—he had started working for the NFL in Shanghai—seemed out of reach. He left China and went to law school. I figured we'd never hear about a 'Pigskin' adaptation again. When I met the Clash producer and screenwriter Wu Tao outside a hotel in Rotterdam in February, he greeted me with a hug. He told me he couldn't believe we were finally meeting after all these years, given how our lives were both intertwined with the Dockers. 'It's fate,' he said. Wu has spiky hair, a goatee, and an energy that belies his 51 years. He was wearing a bright-green sweater covered with black hearts with the words THANKYOUIDON'TCARE spelled backwards. We sat down at a coffee table in the hotel lobby alongside the director of Clash, Jiang Jiachen. Jiang was wearing computer-teacher glasses and a ribbed gray sweater. Wu, who'd produced and written the script for Clash, right away called out the elephant in the room with a joke. He had stolen one line from my article, he said with a chuckle—a character saying, 'Welcome to Chongqing'—but hadn't paid me for the IP. (This line does not actually appear in the article.) 'Next time,' I said. Wu said he'd been working as a producer at the Chinese media giant Wanda in Beijing when, in 2018, he came across an old article in the Chinese magazine Sanlian Lifeweek about the Dockers. He'd already produced a couple of modest hits, including the superhero satire Jian Bing Man, but he wanted to write his own feature. He was immediately taken with the Dockers' story, and a few days later, he flew to Chongqing to meet the players. They mentioned that Paramount was already working on a movie about the team, but Wu told them that an American filmmaker wouldn't do their story justice. 'In the end, Hollywood cares about the Chinese market,' Wu told me. 'They don't understand China's culture and its people.' He paid a handful of the players about $2,750 each for their life rights, and bought the rights to the team's name for about $16,500. Wu also met up with McLaurin in Shanghai, but they didn't ultimately sign an agreement. 'I understood that, in his head, this was his movie,' Wu said. But Wu had his own vision. Shirley Li: How Hollywood sold out to China Wu got to work writing a script. By 2022, he'd persuaded iQIYI to make the movie and gotten his script past the government censorship bureau with minimal changes. In summer 2023, they began shooting in Chongqing. Wu told me that he'd set out to tell the Dockers' story from a Chinese perspective. 'It's easy to imagine the Hollywood version, like Lawrence of Arabia,' he said. 'A white Westerner saves a group of uncivilized Chinese people.' Even if he'd wanted to tell that kind of story, Wu knew it wouldn't fly in the domestic market. 'We're not even talking about politics; that's just reality,' Wu said. Jiang added, 'It's a postcolonial context.' This argument made sense to me in theory, but I was curious to see what it meant in practice. That evening, I sat in a packed theater and took in the film. Clash opens with a flashback of Yonggan, the hero, running away from a bully as a kid—behavior that gets him mocked as a coward. (His name translates to 'brave.') It then cuts to adult Yonggan, who works as a deliveryman for his family's tofu shop, sprinting and careening his scooter through Chongqing's windy roads, bridges, and back alleys. When Yonggan gets an urgent delivery order from an athletic field where a football team happens to be practicing, the team captain watches in awe as Yonggan sprints down the sideline, takeout bag in hand, faster than the football players. He gets recruited on the spot. Although Clash has the same basic framing as the American film treatments—an underdog team struggling against the odds—the details are original, and telling. Instead of focusing on the coach, the story centers on Yonggan and his teammates, each of whom is dealing with his own middle-class problems: Yonggan's father wants him to give up his football dreams and work at the tofu shop; the war veteran Rock struggles to connect with his daughter; the model office-worker Wang Peixun can't satisfy his wife. The coach, meanwhile, is not an American former college-football star, but rather a Mexican former water boy named Sanchez. He wanted to play in the NFL, he tells the players, but in the U.S., they let Mexicans have only subordinate jobs. The sole American character is, naturally, the captain of the evil Shanghai team. Notably, there's no mention of 'American football' at all; they simply call the sport 'football,' which in Mandarin is the same as the word for 'rugby.' As for the tone, it's hyperlocal in a way that feels authentic to the material. Characters trade quips in rat-a-tat Chongqing dialect. Jokes and references are not overexplained. The film has a catchy hip-hop soundtrack featuring local artists. It also embraces tropes of Chinese comedy that might feel cringey to American audiences: abrupt tonal shifts, fourth-wall breaks, and flashes of the surreal, including an impromptu musical number and a surprisingly moving moment of fantasy at the end. (There are also the predictable gay-panic jokes.) I had been dreading a lazy rip-off, but this felt like its own thing. To my surprise, the audience—which was primarily European, not Chinese—loved it. At both screenings I attended, it got big cheers. When festival attendees voted on their favorite films, Clash ranked 37th out of 188 titles. (The Brutalist came in 50th.) After watching the film, my griping about the IP rights felt petty. Sure, Wu had blatantly lifted the premise of my article. (I looked up the Chinese article that Wu claimed first inspired him and saw that it explicitly mentioned my New Republic article, and the Sony movie deal, in the first paragraph.) But he'd done something original with it. It occurred to me that even if Wu had taken the story and reframed it to please a domestic audience, I was arguably guilty of the same crime. Just like Wu, I had been writing for a market, namely the American magazine reader of 2014. American narratives about China tend to be simplistic and self-serving. During the Cold War, China was foreign and scary. In the 1980s, as it began to reform its economy, American reporters focused on the green shoots of capitalism and the budding pro-democracy movement. In the post-Olympics glow of the 2010s, American readers were interested in stories about how the Chinese aren't all that different from us: See, they play football too! Or go on cruises, or follow motivational speakers, or do stand-up comedy. I was writing at a cultural and political moment when American audiences—and I myself—felt a self-satisfied comfort in the idea that China might follow in our footsteps. What Hollywood didn't realize is that Chinese viewers weren't interested in that kind of story—not then, and certainly not now. Part of me still wishes that a filmmaker had managed to tell the Dockers story in a way that emphasized international cooperation, especially now that our countries feel further apart than ever. But the liberal-fantasy version was probably never going to work. I'm glad someone made a version that does.
Atlantic
44 minutes ago
- Atlantic
Musk and Trump Still Agree on One Thing
Far be it from me to judge anyone enjoying the feud between Donald Trump and his benefactor Elon Musk over Trump's signature legislation, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act. But in the conflict between the president and the world's richest man, the public is the most likely loser. Four days ago, Musk described the bill as 'disgusting,' 'pork-filled,' and an 'abomination.' He also suggested that Trump was ungrateful, claiming that Republicans would have lost the 2024 election without all the money he had spent supporting GOP candidates. Trump fired back in a post on his network, Truth Social, saying, 'The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon's Governmental Subsidies and Contracts.' Musk then accused Trump of being in 'the Epstein files,' referring to the late financier and sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, whom both men have ties to. Musk later deleted that post, as well as another calling for Trump's impeachment. If all this seems painfully stupid, it is, and it was all made possible by the erosion of American democracy. The underlying issues, however, are significant despite the surreal nature of the exchange. As it happens, Trump and Musk's dueling criticisms are each, in their own ways, at least partially valid. The bill is an abomination, although not because it's 'pork-filled.' And much of Musk's wealth does come from the federal government, which he has spent the past few months trying to dismantle while preserving his own subsidies. According to Axios, among other things, Musk was angry that the bill cuts the electric-vehicle tax credit, which will hurt the bottom line of his electric-car company, Tesla. But neither billionaire—one the president of the United States and the other a major financial benefactor to the president's party—opposes the bill for what makes it a monstrosity: that it redistributes taxpayer dollars to the richest people in the country by slashing benefits for the middle class, the poor, and everyone in between. The ability of a few wealthy people to manipulate the system to this extent—leaving two tycoons who possess the emotional register of toddlers with the power to impoverish most of the country, to their own benefit, speaks ill of the health of American democracy, regardless of the outcome. Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' would make the largest cuts to food assistance for the poor in history, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, eliminating $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program at a time when inflation is still straining family budgets. Some 15 million Americans would become uninsured because of the bill's cuts to Medicaid, also the largest reductions to that program in history, and because of cuts to the Affordable Care Act. The CBPP estimates that about '22 million people, including 3 million small business owners and self-employed workers, will see their health coverage costs skyrocket or lose coverage altogether.' Not everyone would suffer, however, as the bill does offer significant tax cuts to the wealthiest people in America while adding trillions of dollars to the national debt. Whatever meager benefits there are to everyone else would likely be eaten up by the increase in the cost of food and health care caused by the benefit cuts. Charlie Warzel: The Super Bowl of internet beefs For all the insults flying between Trump and Musk, they are both fine with taking from those who have little and giving generously to those who have more than they could ever need. For years, commentators have talked about how Trump reshaped the Republican Party in the populist mold. Indeed, Trumpism has seen Republicans abandon many of their publicly held commitments. The GOP says it champions fiscal discipline while growing the debt at every opportunity. It talks about individual merit while endorsing discrimination against groups based on gender, race, national origin, and sexual orientation. It blathers about free speech while using state power to engage in the most sweeping national-censorship campaign since the Red Scare. Republicans warn us about the 'weaponization' of the legal system while seeking to prosecute critics for political crimes and deporting apparently innocent people to Gulags without a shred of due process. The GOP venerates Christianity while engaging in the kind of performative cruelty early Christians associated with paganism. It preaches family values while destroying families it refuses to recognize as such.
