abbott

Justin Halpern had a best-selling nonfiction book, co-created “Harley Quinn,” is co-showrunner for “Abbott Elementary” and has recently published his first novel, “Get Lost.”

But today he wants to mostly talk baseball. He recalls rooting for the Mets as a child in San Diego because he was so enamored with Dwight Gooden’s “electric” fastball and his disappearing curve. He spills about the big game he blew as a tween when a simple throw to first went horribly awry, about the two no-hitters he threw at Point Loma High School, how his dreams of stardom went south while at San Diego State, about feeling bitter toward the game and then rediscovering his love for it.

This wasn’t just idle chatter. Baseball is integral to Halpern’s own character arc and to “Get Lost” both on the page and behind the scenes. Take that terrible error when Halpern was 12. Afterward, his father didn’t console him with platitudes. He told the boy to dismiss the “it’s just a game” pity from his coach and accept that for Justin it was a big deal and it made sense to feel awful, but that also meant he had something he felt passionate about.

That paternal talk helped less in the moment than down the road: Halpern’s struggling writing career exploded when he started tweeting his dad’s life advice and then, with his writing partner, Patrick Schumacker, turned those “S—My Dad Says” tweets into a best-selling book. (He’s acutely aware of how lucky he got but also says he and Schumacker were well prepared to capitalize on that opportunity.)

And that particular story, Halpern says, was “foundational” for “Get Lost.” The novel follows Lila Dixon, an acerbic, cynical baseball scout living a dreary and closed-off life in her 30s. When her mentally ill mother goes missing, yet again, Lila must return to the hometown she loathed to search for her, but this time she must also deal with her estranged father, John “Dix” Dixon. Dix was a baseball prodigy too cocky and flashy for his own good who now coasts through life on his long-ago heroics coupled with charm and an undeserved diet of luck.

Halpern’s father’s message resonated for this novel because Lila, who was neglected, abandoned and ultimately shuttled off to foster care as a kid, “has been wandering the planet without finding anything she gives a damn about. Now she needs to find something.”

Halpern quit baseball in college after an injury and the realization that he’d never make the majors. “Aside from talent, you have to be willing to do all these tiny little boring things every single day,” he says. “You have to be obsessive. I worked hard but I wasn’t willing to do that.”

The team’s assistant coach told Halpern it was the biggest mistake of his life and he’d “never make a penny writing” but writing was the one thing where he was willing to tackle the tiny little boring things needed to keep improving.

The adaptation of “S— My Dad Says” for television failed but he felt he improved with each successive show. He also didn’t give up when his first two attempts at novels were “terrible” with “nothing salvageable” in either attempt.

He learned to stop imitating his favorite writers. “I was trying to copy authors more skilled than I was and wasn’t taking the time to find my own voice.” And he strived to break the habits of writing for TV (although he’s quick to acknowledge that “Get Lost” remains dialogue heavy), including working alone. A perpetual collaborator who describes himself as “codependent,” going solo “was a huge challenge that almost shut down the novel a couple of times.”

He contemplated calling friends to run ideas by them when he got stuck but ultimately resisted. “If I didn’t figure out how to solve things myself I was never going to finish this novel anyway,” he says, adding with a laugh, “I’m definitely still codependent, but the novel forced me to venture into waters that I never would have gotten into on my own.”

The deepest of those waters came from learning he does not like exploring his emotions. “My wife probably learned this many years ago,” he says wryly. “Every time I need to sit in a feeling, I try to wiggle my way out of it and that’s probably really annoying for the people in my life. To make “Get Lost” work, he had to burrow into the “complex emotional stew” of Lila’s multiple traumas and make her journey feel earned. Each morning he’d take “epic walks” with his dog. “I’d just talk in the voice of the characters in my head, without it having anything to do with the plot.”

Creating Lila’s flippant father came easily, which is why Halpern refused to settle on Dix as the main character. He didn’t want to make Dix loathsome, but he also didn’t want to glamorize his behavior, thinking back to how he felt “The Wolf of Wall Street” made the sleazy finance bros seem too cool to many in the audience.

Writing a female protagonist, especially one who had so many reasons to be guarded, he didn’t want her to be too likable or to be sexualized or to have solutions come easily. “I didn’t want Lila to need to lower expectations of her father and just love the man for who he is but to realize the limitations of this man and not let that affect how she feels about herself.”

It’s easy to read “Get Lost” hearing Aubrey Plaza in Lila’s sardonic tone, and Halpern heard her voice, and others, while writing but kept reminding himself that he’d have no talented actress to add humanity to his dialogue.

“I knew there’d be no Aubrey Plaza here to save my ass,” he says, although he and Schumacker are now planning a movie adaptation. “I had to figure out how to create this complicated character myself,” Halpern tells me via video from the writers room in L.A. for “I Suck At Girls,” an upcoming Netflix series loosely based off another of his nonfiction books. Schumacker came in and dryly praised “Get Lost” by saying: “Justin knows words that I didn’t think he knew.”

Halpern is more self-aware than he lets on as becomes clear when analyzing his baseball journey — when he quit he admits he felt resentful. “I’d given so much time to the game and it owed me something, but hadn’t given me what I’d asked,” he reflects.

Several years later, he realized he needed to embrace the game for what it offered, not what he wanted. He started playing in adult leagues and became so invested that in his mid-30s, when a surgeon told him he’d torn his labrum, he said, “Is my career over?”

The surgeon asked, “Aren’t you a writer?”

Halpern recovered and, when he’s not joyfully coaching his kids’ Little League team, he’s still heading for the mound at age 45, thrilled with the challenges of outsmarting hitters and reveling in the social aspect of being on a team. “Even with a bunch of older people, there’s just something about sports that still really takes me to a higher place,” he says. “I’ve had a super blessed writing career, but the highest highs I’ve ever had are on a baseball field.”

Miller is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y., who frequently writes about movies.

For “Abbott Elementary” costume designer Hachy Mendez-Smith, the fifth season’s Halloween episode — in which Gregory (Tyler James Williams) and Janine (Quinta Brunson) dress up as “Sinners” filmmaker Ryan Coogler and an Imax screen, respectively — had to do more than deliver a punchline. It also had to reflect their characters. “Gregory has always been the more grounded, measured type. And then Janine is naturally more whimsical, optimistic and quirky, so she carried the bigger, more expressive visual in the moment,” she says. “And as his girlfriend, she’s always been supportive of him. So even in costume, it was like she was literally holding space for his story. It felt authentic, not just comedic.” The designer drew inspiration for Gregory’s burgundy coat from a Coogler red carpet moment, tailoring a clean, sophisticated silhouette while playing with the scale of Janine’s costume. “Quinta’s 4-11 in real life, so we had to be mindful yet over the top to land the visual right away,” she notes. The highlight for Mendez-Smith: Coogler’s reaction. “I was honored he even watched and loved that he talked about how much the show means to him,” she says. “And it was hilarious that initially he thought it was AI. He couldn’t believe how spot on it was.” How spot on? Even Janine’s screen matched the correct Imax aspect ratio: 1.43:1.

May 15 (UPI) — The Texas Supreme Court refused to remove state Rep. Gene Wu, D-Houston, from office, despite the efforts of Gov. Greg Abbott after the 2025 redistricting showdown.

Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock, who once worked as an Abbott aide, wrote that the courts “have uniformly recognized that it is not their role to resolve disputes between the other two branches that those branches can resolve for themselves.”

“The courts’ institutional ‘reluctance … to involve themselves in contests of factional political power,’ a reluctance we reiterate and reinforce today, is a check on the judicial power ‘of ancient standing,’ not an optional preference we are at liberty to discard,” Blacklock wrote.

The fight stems from August 2025 when Texas began an effort to redistrict the state’s congressional seats to create more Republican-leaning districts. Democrats in the state’s legislature fled Texas to prevent a quorum in the House. They eventually returned, and the measure passed.

Texas House Democratic Caucus Chairman Gene Wu led the charge during the exodus of his party members, drawing the ire of Abbott. The governor had threatened to expel any Texas House members who fled the state, of whom there were more than 50.

Wu posted on X Friday: “Texas House Democrats refused to be complicit as Texas Republicans delivered Donald Trump the extra congressional seats he begged for, and now, Gov. Abbott’s final attempt at revenge has been put to rest.”

Texas House Democrats posted: “Today, we won. We’re not going anywhere.”

Republicans hold 24 of Texas’ 38 seats in the U.S. House, with one vacancy. The new map is expected to add five Republican representatives from the state.

Blacklock indicated the matter could be considered in the future.

“Whatever wrong may have been committed by the absent House members, the Texas Constitution’s internal political remedies, none of which involve the judicial branch, were sufficient to the task of restoring the House’s ability to do business,” Blacklock wrote. “Should those remedies unexpectedly prove inadequate in a future case, we might have occasion to consider whether any judicial remedy could ever be available in circumstances such as these.”

AUSTIN, Texas — The Texas Supreme Court on Friday refused to declare that Democratic lawmakers who briefly fled the state in 2025 to block a vote on new congressional voting maps pushed by President Trump had vacated their office.

The all-Republican court dealt a blow to Gov. Greg Abbott and state Republicans in their efforts to severely punish the more than 50 Democrats who bolted for New York, Illinois and Massachusetts in a bid to stop a vote on the maps during a special session. State Republicans had sought their arrest and threatened fines to bring them back to the state Capitol.

Abbott had argued in a lawsuit filed directly to the state’s highest civil court that state Rep. Gene Wu, the leader of the House Democratic caucus, and others had effectively abandoned their office.

Wu had argued that he was not abandoning his office in the quorum break, but was exercising a right to dissent.

In denying Abbott’s request, the court opinion written by Justice James Blacklock noted that the Republican-majority Legislature had adequately resolved the problem itself through measures such as fines against the missing lawmakers, and that they eventually returned on their own within a few weeks.

“In the end, a quorum was restored in two weeks’ time, without judicial intervention, by the interplay of political and practical forces,” Blacklock wrote.

“Courts have uniformly recognized that it is not their role to resolve disputes between the other two branches that those branches can resolve for themselves,” the opinion said.

If the issue rises again and the Legislature cannot effectively compel lawmakers to return, the court may someday consider whether the courts should step in, the opinion said.

“When Greg Abbott threatened to arrest and expel us for denying him a quorum, we told him he should ‘come and take it.’ He tried!” Wu said in a statement Friday. “Abbott was wrong, weak, and after all his bluster, he couldn’t come and take a damn thing.”

Wu and the other lawmakers eventually returned to Texas, and the new map was passed and signed into law by Abbott.

Wu had argued that because he had returned to the Capitol and the map was eventually signed into law, there was no longer any reason for the court to weigh in.

“Their return is robust proof that they never intended to abandon their offices,” Wu argued in legal briefs. “Despite the overheated rhetoric, this quorum break was always understood to be temporary.”

The Texas walkout intensified into a high-stakes national drama as Trump urged Texas and other GOP-controlled states to redraw their congressional districts to help Republicans maintain control of the U.S. House. The Texas map effort set off a wave of similar efforts across several states as governors from both parties pledged to redraw maps with the goal of giving their political candidates a leg up in the 2026 midterm elections.

The state constitution requires that at least 100 of the 150 House members be present to conduct business, and the quorum break effectively shut down a special legislative session Abbott had called to address redistricting and other issues, including aid to communities hit by the devastating July Fourth floods that killed more than 100 people.

In 2021, the court ruled that the Texas Constitution enables the possibility of a quorum break but also allows for consequences to bring members back.

Last year’s Democratic walkout was the third since 2003, when lawmakers bolted to stop a vote on a redistricting bill. They did it again in 2021 over an elections bill. In both cases, they were temporary victories as Democrats eventually returned and the Republican majority in the Legislature ultimately passed both measures into law.