Trump's collapse into total ‘F': Dem James Carville from ‘War Room' to MAGA (Melber x Cutler)
Award-winning filmmaker R.J. Cutler joins MSNBC's Ari Melber for an in-depth conversation spanning the 'discovery' of James Carville for The War Room, Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry, The September Issue, which captured the power dynamics inside Vogue, and Cutler's controversial portrait of Martha Stewart. Cutler reflects on storytelling, democracy, and what drives him to document people. His newest documentary, Fight for Glory, chronicling the drama of the 2024 World Series
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9 hours ago
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Jack Draper Says Tennis Makes It Hard to Have a Girlfriend
Tennis phenom Jack Draper has turned heads with his play at the French Open. The British No. 1 tennis player thrilled fans with a close battle against Gael Monfils of France on May 29, 2025. The victory propelled Draper into the third round and had some fans wondering about his relationship history and whether he has a wife or girlfriend. Advertisement No, Draper is not married. However, he has opened up about dating in interviews. He hasn't named a girlfriend, though. "He's single, and though he likes going on doesn't really party, preferring to spend time with friends," Vogue wrote of Draper in March 2025. "He is, conveniently, single; which means that Draper might be the most eligible bachelor in SW15," Tatler reported in May 2025. "I'm always on the road. Always playing, always training. It's tough to sustain any form of relationship," he told Tatler, which called him "an eligible bachelor perhaps, but Draper is more of a mummy's boy at heart. She's the first person he calls when he wins; 'a huge mentor' and a former junior tennis champion herself." Jack Draper of Great Britain celebrates defeating Andy Murray of Great brother Ben was described as his "wingman." Advertisement Draper opened up even more in an interview with The Times in January 2025, which reported that he doesn't consider "model looks" a "top priority in a potential partner." 'For me, it's more about someone who has got ambition, their own purpose in life, who's nonjudgmental, someone with good values," he told The Times, admitting he's used dating apps. He"finds them too time-consuming." 'The most important thing to me right now is becoming the best tennis player I can be, especially the way the world is at the moment with all that [app] stuff. I'd rather meet someone out of genuine, almost coincidence, or when I'm focused on something else," he told The Times. When the news site asked whether he has ever been in love, he said, "My mum." Advertisement According to Vogue, Draper "recently bought his first flat, a three-bedroom apartment in southwest London" where he lives with his brother and friend Paul Jubb, who is also a tennis player. In the Vogue interview, he explained the toll that playing professional tennis has taken on his life. In 2021, "when he first played Wimbledon as a wild was still living at home, making lonely rounds of Challenger tournaments," the site reported. 'You become very lost. Everyone else is going to university, everyone else is doing their thing," he told Vogue. Related: Sydney Sweeney Explains Why She's Selling Used Bath Water Soap Jack Draper Says Tennis Makes It Hard to Have a Girlfriend first appeared on Men's Journal on May 29, 2025
Yahoo
11 hours ago
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Money Is Ruining Television
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Watching Carrie Bradshaw—erstwhile sex columnist, intrepid singleton, striver—float down the majestic staircase of her new Gramercy townhouse on a recent episode of And Just Like That while wearing a transparent tulle gown, on an errand to mail a letter, is one of the most cognitively dissonant television experiences I've had recently. And Just Like That has never been a particularly imaginative show with regard to women in midlife, but there's still something fundamentally off about seeing one of the canonical female characters of our era transformed into a Gilded Age archetype, worrying about a garden renovation and choosing back-ordered fabric for a chaise. Carrie, suddenly, has many hats. She communicates with a lover via handwritten notes while she waits for his liberation from the home front in Virginia. What's happened to Carrie, truly, is money. Two decades after Sex and the City rolled to a televised close, acknowledging that its own cultural relevance was waning, its characters continue in zombified form on And Just Like That, pickled in a state of extreme privilege where nothing can touch them. The drama is lifeless, involving rehashed old storylines about beeping alarm systems and 'a woman's right to shoes' that serve mostly as a backdrop for clothes. Charlotte, in a questionable lace workout jacket, worries that her dog has been unfairly canceled. Miranda, in one of a series of patterned blouses, gets really into a Love Island–style reality show. (Remember Jules and Mimi?) Lisa wears feathers to a fundraiser for her husband's political campaign. Seema, in lingerie, nearly burns her apartment down when she falls asleep with a lit cigarette, but in the end, all she loses is an inch or so of hair. The point of the show is no longer what happens, because nothing does. The point is to set up a series of visual tableaus showcasing all the things money can buy, as though the show were an animated special issue of Vogue or Architectural Digest. What's stranger still is that a series that once celebrated women in the workplace has succumbed to financial ideals right out of Edith Wharton: The women who earned their money themselves (Miranda and Seema) somehow don't have enough of it (spoiler—they still seem to have a lot), while the ones who married money (Carrie, Charlotte, Lisa) breeze through life as an array of lunches, fundraisers, and glamping trips, with some creative work dotted into the mix for variety. The banal details of exorbitant wealth—well, it's all quite boring. [Read: We need to talk about Miranda] Lately, most of television seems stuck in the same mode. Virtually everything I've watched recently has been some variation of rich people pottering around in 'aspirational' compounds. On Sirens and The Better Sister, glossy scenes of sleek couture and property porn upstage the intrigue of the plot. On Mountainhead, tech billionaires tussle in a Utah mountain retreat featuring 21,000 square feet of customized bowling alleys and basketball courts. On Your Friends & Neighbors, a disgraced hedge-fund manager sneers at the vacuous wealth of his gated community (where houses cost seven to eight figures), but also goes to criminal lengths to maintain his own living standards rather than lower them by even a smidge. And on With Love, Meghan, the humble cooking show has gotten a Montecito-money glow-up. 'I miss TV without rich people,' the writer Emily J. Smith noted last month on Substack, observing that even supposedly normie shows such as Tina Fey's marital comedy The Four Seasons and Erin Foster's unconventional rom-com Nobody Wants This seem to be playing out in worlds where money is just not an issue for anyone. This is a new development: As Smith points out, sitcoms including Roseanne and Married … With Children have historically featured families with recognizable financial constraints, and the more recent dramedies of the 2010s were riddled with economic anxiety. Reality television, it's worth noting, has been fixated on the lifestyles of the rich and bored virtually since its inception, but as its biggest stars have grown their own fortunes exponentially, the genre has mostly stopped documenting anything other than wealth, which it fetishizes via the gaudy enclaves and private jets of Selling Sunset and Bling Empire. Serialized shows, too, no longer seem interested in considering the stakes and subtleties of most people's lives. Television is preoccupied with literary adaptations about troubled rich white women, barbed satires about absurdly wealthy people on vacation, thrillers about billionaire enclaves at the end of the world. Even our contemporary workplace series (Severance, Shrinking) play out in fictional realms where people work not for the humble paychecks that sustain their lives, but to escape the grief that might otherwise consume them. What does it mean that our predominant fictional landscapes are all so undeniably 'elevated,' to use a word cribbed from the Duchess of Sussex? And Just Like That is evidence of how hard it is for shows that take wealth for granted to have narrative stakes, and how stultifying they become as a result. But we also lose something vital when we no longer see 99 percent of American lives reflected on the small screen. Money isn't just making TV boring. It's also reshaping our collective psyche—building a shared sense of wealth as the only marker of a significant life, and rich people as the only people worthy of our gaze. We're not supposed to be able to empathize with the characters on-screen, these strutting zoo animals in $1,200 shoes and $30,000-a-night villas. But we're not being encouraged to empathize with any other kinds of characters, either—to see the full humanity and complexity of so many average people whose lives feel ever more precarious in this moment, and ever more in need of our awareness. On an episode in the final season of Sex and the City, a socialite named Lexi Featherston cracks a floor-to-ceiling window, lights a cigarette, and declares that New York is over, O-V-E-R. 'When did everybody stop smoking?' she sneers. 'When did everybody pair off?' As the hostess glares at her, she continues: 'No one's fun anymore. Whatever happened to fun? God, I'm so bored I could die.' Famous last words: Lexi, of course, promptly trips on her stiletto, falls out the absurdly dangerous glass panel, and plummets to her death. Her arc—from exalted '80s It Girl to coked-up aging party girl—was supposed to represent finality, the termination of the city's relevance as a cultural nexus. 'It's the end of an era,' Carrie says at Lexi's funeral, where Stanford is elated to have scored VIP seats next to Hugh Jackman. 'The party's officially over,' Samantha agrees. After six seasons of transforming how a generation of women dated, dressed, even drank, Sex and the City seemed to be acknowledging that its own moment had come to an end. The characters were undeniably older, no longer seeking anthropological meaning in a SoHo nightclub at 3 a.m. But the city that the show documented—and popular culture more broadly—had shifted, too: toward less spontaneity, less rebellion, and infinitely higher incomes. [Read: The ghost of a once era-defining show] The year that final season aired, 2004, is possibly when television's prurient obsession with rich people really kicked off, with the launch of shows including Desperate Housewives, Entourage, and, notably, The Apprentice. A year earlier, Fox had premiered a soapy drama called The O.C., which charted the rags–to–Range Rover adventures of a teen from Chino who ended up ensconced in the affluent coastal town of Newport Beach. Until then, it had never occurred to me that teenagers could wear Chanel or drive SUVs that cost six figures, although watching them rattle around in McMansions the size of the Met provided much of The O.C.'s visual thrill. In direct response to the show's success, MTV debuted the reality show Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County a year later, and in 2006, Bravo countered with its own voyeuristic peek into the lives of the rich and fabulous—The Real Housewives of Orange County. Documenting wealth enticingly on television is a difficult balancing act: You want to stoke enough envy that people are inspired to buy things (gratifying advertisers along the way), but not so much that you risk alienating the viewer. Reality TV pulled it off by starting small. The women on the first season of Real Housewives were well off, but not unimaginably so. They lived in high-end family homes, not sprawling temples of megawealth. Similarly, when Keeping Up With the Kardashians debuted in 2007, the family lived in a generous but chintzy bungalow, having not yet generated the billions of dollars that would later pay for their minimalist compounds in Calabasas and Hidden Hills. During the 2008 financial crisis, a critic for The New York Times wondered whether the tanking global economy might doom the prospects of shows such as The Real Housewives of Atlanta, which had just premiered, and turn them into 'a time capsule of the Bling Decade.' But the fragility of viewers' own finances, oddly, seemed to make them more eager to watch. Shows about money gratified both people's escapist impulses and the desire to critique those who didn't seem worthy of their blessings. As Jennifer O'Connell, a producer for The Real Housewives of New York City, put it to the Times a year later: 'Everyone likes to judge.' The toxic, unhappy, rich-people shows that have more recently proliferated on prestige TV—the Succession and White Lotus and Big Little Lies variation—cover their backs with cynicism. Money doesn't make you happy, they assert over and over, even though studies suggest otherwise. The documentation of extreme wealth on television with such clarifying bitterness, they imply, surely inoculates audiences from pernicious aspiration. Except it doesn't: The Four Seasons San Domenico Palace in Sicily was fully booked for a good six months following the second season of The White Lotus, despite the fictional bodies floating in the water. And a study conducted at the London School of Economics in 2018 found that a person's increased exposure to shows that regularly 'glamourize fame, luxury, and the accumulation of wealth' made them more inclined to support welfare cuts; it also noted other studies that found that the more people watched materialistic media, the more anxious and unhappy they were likely to be in their own lives. Watching shows about wealth does, however, seem to stimulate the desire to shop, which is maybe why this latest season of And Just Like That feels intended for an audience watching with a second screen in their hand—all the better to harvest the aspirational consumption the show's lifestyles might generate. Streaming services are already tapping into the reams of data they have on viewers by serving them customized ads related to the series they might be watching, and many are also experimenting with e-commerce. You could argue that And Just Like That is honoring the spirit of Sex and the City by putting fashion front and center. But the vacant dullness of the new season feels wholly of its time: This is television for the skin-deep influencer age, not the messy, pioneering drama it once was. More crucially, Carrie and company take up space that deprives us of more shows like The Pitt, one of a sparse handful of series documenting the workers trying to patch up the holes in an ever more unequal America. No one seems to have anticipated that the Max series would be such a success. As workers today are being squeezed 'for all their worth, no more chit-chatting at the water cooler, we've gotten to a point where reality for most people is quite unpleasant,' Smith writes on Substack. 'And executives are betting that we don't actually want to watch it.' The reality of the TV business also underscores why shows that sell us something—even if it's just the illusion of exceptional prosperity as a default—are easier to commission. But audiences will always be drawn to drama, and the stakes of defiantly deglamorized series such as The Bear and Slow Horses feel necessary in this moment, when the state of the future relies so much on the direction and quality of our attention. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
13 hours ago
- Yahoo
TikTok influencer targeted with criticism after viral video about 'unchic' fashion choices sparks backlash
Lifestyle influencer Tara Langdale talked to Fox News Digital about how she received hurtful messages from critics after a not-so-serious fashion post describing what she views as "unchic" went viral, spawning a cascade of events that made her apolitical post a victim of attacks. The self-described stay-at-home working mom amassed some 250,000 views and found herself on the receiving end of some hate after an April 7 TikTok of her seated, drinking from a wine glass with nicely done hair, gold jewelry and manicured nails as she skimmed through a list of "unchic" fashion sins. Tattoos, Lululemon, baggy denim, camouflage and visible panty lines were just a few that made part one of Langdale's controversial "unchic" list, which drew backlash from seething critics who called her out with a political twist. "Voting for Trump is unchic," one said. Vogue Attacks Melania Trump's Official White House Portrait, Compares Her To 'Freelance Magician' "To her, privilege = chic. Hope this helps!" said another. Read On The Fox News App A third said, "just say you're a republican and go lmao," while a slew of commenters took exception to her tattoo stance and ranted about classism. The video even caught The Guardian's attention, prompting an article that coined "chic" as "a shorthand for a type of conservative-coded aesthetic" and spoke of the "rigid and airbrushed" looks of Trump allies, sch as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Though Langdale diddles cribe herself as conservative when speaking to Fox News Digital, she insists not everything is about politics. "When I get dressed in the morning, I'm not thinking about my political party and how I should dress to showcase that," Langdale said. "I think conservativism is more of culture, religion – all of those things go into your conservativist mindset. Now, if you're talking about conservative style of dress… that's also going to be more like religion and culture," she went on. "Of course, if I'm going to church on Sunday, I'm dressing very conservative. I'm going to keep it classy, but if you see me in the street in my regular day-to-day, I am not at all conservative. I would never consider my style to be conservative. But am I conservative? Absolutely, so I can differentiate the two. I know that the internet has a hard time doing that." Mom Living With Alopecia Reacts To Liberal Women Shaving Heads To Be 'Unattractive' After Donald Trump's Win Langdale addressed the politicized dogma, saying she doesn't understand why TikTok users jumped to conclusions about "conservative" or "Republican makeup" as they did. "Because I'm blonde, because I have more of a natural look about me, I'm not fully glammed all the time… I'm really not sure how that makes me appear conservative, but, again, I just think when people don't agree with what you say, they have to find a way to discredit you, and that's just an easy tactic," she continued. At the same time, Langdale pushed back against the idea of her video implying that people too poor to afford expensive items are automatically "unchic," and pointed to brand-name items like athletic apparel brand Lululemon, Apple Watches and Golden Goose sneakers – all of which can be pricey – as evidence pointing to the contrary. "Just keep in mind that money talks and wealth whispers, and I don't know any wealthy people that are wearing Gucci across their chest," she said in her original post. Langdale explained that the TikTok trend of users showcasing "things I find incredibly chic" grabbed her attention as they began circulating on the app. She found them "pretentious and off-putting," so she felt compelled to take her own stab at the video. New York Times Guest Essay Suggests Fashion Industry Has 'Given Up' On 'Woke' Values "Of course, my video came off as pretentious and off-putting as well, but it felt like a certain level of cringe for me, and I don't like to personally attack anybody on social media, so I wouldn't go after a specific creator. I just kind of wanted to hop on the trend… so that was my initial, 'Why I created the video.'" Langdale shared that her direct messages on the platform have been "insane" with threats and comments about her family since the video went viral. "It does make you step back and take a pause," she shared. "Like, is this really worth it for how crazy people react? And I would never want to put my family in danger, but I think a lot of it is just the keyboard pirates that are just back there behind their computer typing whatever they can to try to get more likes in the comments," Langdale article source: TikTok influencer targeted with criticism after viral video about 'unchic' fashion choices sparks backlash
