America

The manager of the team that most needed Tarik Skubal sat in his office Sunday at Angel Stadium. The Milwaukee Brewers, the team that opened play Sunday with the best record in the major leagues, did not get Skubal.

The Dodgers did. Of course they did.

“L.A. is America’s team,” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said.

Not based on the cries from across America, from fans outraged that the Dodgers helped themselves to the best available talent yet again to baseball insiders mystified that the Detroit Tigers could not land a better return for Skubal than the three prospects the Dodgers swapped, or at least taken a couple more days to pursue a better return.

“Was I rooting for the Dodgers to get Skubal? Personally, no,” Angels pitcher Brent Suter said. “I was hoping another team that hadn’t won the World Series the past couple of years was going to get him.”

Suter pitched for the Brewers for seven years.

Pitcher Tarik Skubal walks to the dugout during a matchup between the Tigers and the Orioles Wednesday in Detroit.

(Paul Sancya / Associated Press)

“They have a loaded farm system,” he said. “I thought they were going to get him.”

The road to the World Series runs through Los Angeles. The Brewers also posted the best record in the majors last year, then the Dodgers swept them in the National League Championship Series.

In last year’s NLCS, the Brewers started an opener twice, Freddy Peralta once and José Quintana once. In a five- or seven-game series this October, the Brewers could have started Jacob Misiorowski twice and Skubal twice.

That could have mitigated the Dodgers’ huge advantage in slugging. The Dodgers have seven players in double digits in home runs. The Brewers have four.

But any and all statistics obscure the larger point: If you’re a Brewers fan, when is your year?

The Brewers never have won a World Series. They are in line for their eighth playoff appearance in nine years.

Sustainable success is nice, and difficult to achieve. Much credit to the Brewers, who play in baseball’s smallest market.

But the point of the game is to win the World Series. If you’re not going all in when you have the best record in the majors for the second consecutive year, when are you going all in?

If not now, when?

“I know we made our efforts, too,” Murphy said. “I trust the way we operate. I understand the way we operate.”

Milwaukee Brewers infield players celebrate after defeating the Angels Saturday at Angel Stadium.

(William Liang / Associated Press)

This is all the more maddening in Milwaukee because, in 2008, the Brewers tried their best. That July, they traded four prospects for Hall of Fame pitcher CC Sabathia. Only one, outfielder Michael Brantley, developed into a productive major leaguer. That’s the norm, not the exception, in multiprospect trade packages.

As it turned out, the Brewers lost in the first round of the playoffs, and Sabathia did not survive the fourth inning of his lone postseason start. Then he signed with the New York Yankees. So what? The Brewers went for it, and their fans believed.

After the trade for Skubal, Fangraphs increased the Dodgers’ chance to win the World Series from 25% to 31%. That still means a two out of three chance the Dodgers do not win.

“He’s an amazing player,” Suter said, “but it doesn’t mean a guaranteed World Series. It doesn’t guarantee anything.”

I could not believe the number of fans that reached out to say small-market teams could not match the Dodgers’ proposal because they had little chance to re-sign Skubal as a free agent.

Again, so what? We’re playing to win the World Series, not the Baseball America prospect rankings.

The Brewers, with small-market resources, touted former Angels infielder Luis Rengifo as a significant winter free-agent signing. The Dodgers countered with Edwin Díaz and Kyle Tucker.

“L.A. is America’s team and has all the big names,” Murphy said. “Now they just added to that, with maybe the best pitcher in the game, certainly one of the greats in this era.”

If the Brewers and Dodgers meet again in October, Murphy will only be too happy to tell us who the underdog is.

“It’s going to be David and Goliath,” Murphy said. “We haven’t earned that right yet. We haven’t got there yet.

“If we get there, I’m sure the narrative will be pretty similar: the haves and the have-nots.”

Murphy wanted to make one thing perfectly clear: Fans across America might despise the Dodgers, but he does not.

“They’ve got a bunch of great dudes,” he said. “Freddie Freeman, Mookie Betts, Teoscar [Hernández]. I don’t know [Shohei] Ohtani. He doesn’t even know who I am. But I feel like Ohtani is a great dude. I can just tell by his presence.

“How can you not love [Max] Muncy? Doc [manager Dave Roberts] is my good friend. [Coach Dino] Ebel, we’ve got his whole family playing for the Brewers.”

The Brewers made first-round picks of Ebel’s sons Brady and Trey over the past two years, paying $5.55 million in signing bonuses. The Ebel boys are top prospects. They can look forward to a long stay in Milwaukee.

The Trump administration just escalated restrictions on Havana warning that Cuba remains a ‘threat to national security’. A former US policy advisor told Al Jazeera’s ‘This is America’ that he agrees, with Cuban intelligence being among ‘the best’, there is reason for concern.

Ambitious Harper Beckham is aiming for world dominance with her fledgling make-up brand, we can reveal.

The Sun told earlier this month how the teenage daughter of David and Victoria planned to name the new line Harlo by Harper.

Now we can also reveal that 15-year-old Harper’s team has lodged papers with the US Patent and Trademark Office asking to be granted sole rights to use the name across the Atlantic.

Her representatives have filed documents with the UK’s Intellectual Property Office to trademark the brand.

It comes after The Sun told how the youngest Beckham child plans to start rolling out the brand next year.

A source said: “Harper has been working on a name with the team working on the brand for a while and came up with Harlo By Harper.

BLEND IT LIKE BECKHAM

Behind-the-scenes of Harper’s beauty brand with new name revealed

GOLDEN GIRL

Harper Beckham’s World Cup outfit makes clear who she backs at Spain v France

“The trademark applications are signed and sealed.

“Although there is no set date for a launch yet, the aim is to officially start the roll out at some point next year.

“Victoria has been guiding and supporting Harper every step of the way in this venture.

“Both Victoria and David couldn’t be more proud of Harper.”

The Sun first revealed how Harper was working on her own beauty empire last year.

She is following in the footsteps of fashion designer Victoria, whose own beauty range has proved hugely lucrative since she launched it in 2019.

Democratic socialists face mixed understanding, with 49 percent of Americans saying they grasp their policies, poll shows.

Leftist candidates in the United States aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) movement have been defeating centrist Democrats in primary elections this year. However, large swaths of the country still don’t know what ⁠the movement stands for, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll.

Members of the DSA, an activist organisation whose stated mission is to support workers gaining power through democratic means, feature prominent politicians such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Other Democratic Party DSA members have also won in recent political races across the US.

The three-day Reuters/Ipsos poll, which concluded on Sunday, found that 49 percent ‌of Americans say they understand democratic socialist policies while 47 percent say they do not, underscoring the challenges ahead for America’s anti-establishment left.

Asked if democratic socialists have good ideas or not, some 27 percent of respondents said they have at least some, while 51 percent said there were few, if any, and 20 percent said they weren’t sure.

People have a similar assessment of the ideas of MAGA Republicans, President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” political base. Some 27 percent of poll respondents said MAGA Republicans have at least some good ideas, while 57 percent saw few or no good ideas from ⁠MAGA and 13 percent weren’t sure.

Prominent DSA member Mamdani, who was elected in 2025, endorsed other DSA members in New York City who went on to win their respective primaries in June. Other wins by DSA members include races in Colorado and in California.

Trump has ‌seized on the movement’s rise to try to falsely paint all Democrats – including those unaffiliated with the democratic socialist movement – as “hardcore, godless communists”. The administration released a 100-page report earlier this month tying left-wing advocacy groups in the US to Cuba – often relying on circumstantial and ideological links, rather than direct connections.

Democratic socialists advocate pursuing progressive policies through elections. In contrast, communism seeks to abolish private ownership of property ‌and ‌create a classless society – ideas that the democratic socialists seeking election reject.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll, which was conducted online, surveyed 1,248 US adults nationwide and had a margin of error of three percentage points.

Paramount Skydance Chief Executive David Ellison isn’t waving a white flag.

After Paramount agreed Friday to delay its proposed merger with Warner Bros. Discovery to battle a stiffer-than-anticipated antitrust challenge from California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and 11 other state attorneys general, Ellison is resetting expectations. In a Monday memo to employees, Ellison wrote that he still believes his mammoth merger will be consummated in the coming months.

Paramount stock has lost about 20% of its value since the beginning of July amid concerns that the company will have to shoulder higher costs to get its $111-billion Warner Bros. acquisition across the finish line. Friday’s agreement with the state attorneys general to delay the merger’s close until after an antitrust trial, which will likely be held in 2027, also was unsettling to shareholders and some employees.

Paramount Skydance shares closed at $8.03, down 2.19% Monday afternoon.

“Let me be clear: we remain highly confident that this transaction does not pose any legal issues, and we will complete it and bring these two companies together,” Ellison wrote in the memo shared with media outlets.

Paramount’s internal teams and Warner Bros. have been diligently working to lay the groundwork for the two rival companies to integrate their operations. The rush had been on because Ellison wanted to close the deal this week — or at least by the end of September — to avoid a higher payout to Warner shareholders.

However, Paramount suspended such ambitions on Friday, agreeing to delay the merger until after a trial to litigate the merits of the antitrust case brought by Bonta and the other Democrats. Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, New Jersey and New York are among the states joining California in the fight.

The Writers Guild of America separately sued this month, alleging the merger would harm writers. Over the weekend, SAG-AFTRA announced that it supports the state attorneys general as they try to beat back the merger.

“Our members have every right to expect that the government will do thorough regulatory oversight when a deal of this magnitude takes place,” SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin said in a statement.

“The workers in this industry should not have to rely on promises and aspirational statements,” he added. “This isn’t a conversation about shareholder value, it’s about the survival of the entertainment business in America.”

Teamsters already have spoken out against the deal.

Bonta and fellow attorneys general from Democrat-led states have argued the deal would violate the century-old Clayton Antitrust Act in three markets: wide-release theatrical films, potential blockbuster movies and cable television channel concentration.

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, who is overseeing the antitrust suit filed by Bonta two weeks ago, wrote in an order last week that the plaintiff states had presented “compelling evidence” that the proposed merger may violate U.S. antitrust law.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta is leading an effort of 12 state attorneys general attempting to block Paramount Skydance’s $111-billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Paramount disputes that. The firm, controlled by the Larry Ellison family, has pointed to regulatory approvals it has already garnered, including from the U.S. Department of Justice, which found its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery would not harm competition.

The deal also won clearances from regulators representing 65 jurisdictions, including Australia, China, the European Commission, Germany, France, Spain and Canada. Paramount has pointed to those approvals as proof that the law is on its side.

In his memo, Ellison said delaying the deal until after a trial before Martínez-Olguín made sense.

“We believe this is the right path because the facts and the law are on our side, and a full hearing will demonstrate why the plaintiffs’ arguments should not prevail,” Ellison wrote.

Eighty years ago, though the Arsenal of Democracy had vanquished the Axis and weathered a withering Depression, the recovering American people found themselves rich in bills but short on laughs. Enter Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, who debuted together on July 25, 1946.

Unlike Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, or Hope and Crosby, who relied on tightly scripted setups, this disparate yet kindred duo captured America’s heart by being viscerally, uproariously and unpredictably wild.

Martin and Lewis were the founding fathers of an anarchic, side-splitting brand of comedy that combined pratfalls, ad-libbed wordplay and a sustained demolition of the fourth floor. Orson Welles observed that the duo’s combustible zaniness was so hilarious that it made you wet your pants.

The boys cavorted about the stage, kibitzing with bandleaders and the audience alike. In between trading impromptu quips, Martin and Lewis overturned tables, cut ties, sheared suits and spritzed seltzer on one and all.

The suave, dashingly handsome Italian crooner clowning around with his gawky, rubbery Jewish buddy brought the house down every time. It was nonstop, jocular pandemonium: Commedia dell’arte 2.0.

“Saturday Night Live,” Second City, David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld and Adam Sandler all owe a debt to the artists who started life as Dino Crocetti and Joseph Levitch.

Martin and Lewis created a novus ordo seclorum, in its way innovating like America’s founders, spawning a new comedic order of the ages.

Their alchemy was as ineffable as it was infectious. Variety’s first review of the act noted, “All they do cannot be detailed, but virtually every bit of it is good for solid laughs.” Carl Reiner similarly declared: “I saw what I thought was the funniest ad-libbed thing I had ever seen. It was a riot, and we never stopped laughing.”

In their own madcap way, Dino and Jer epitomized Cicero’s notion that comedy is the imitation of life, the mirror of custom and the image of truth.

Martin and Lewis became the monarchs of all media, conquering radio, nightclubs, television and the silver screen. In 1948, they appeared on Ed Sullivan’s first television show, “Toast of the Town.” From 1950 to 1955, the Martin-and-Lewis-hosted “Colgate Comedy Hour” frequently bested Sullivan in the ratings.

When Hollywood beckoned, the boys answered the call, cavorting, cutting up and reconfiguring reality on the silver screen. They starred in 16 films, bringing their boisterous bromance to capacity-crowd movie theaters.

Though their big-screen adventures could not capture the comedic chaos of their stage act, Martin and Lewis transformed even the most pedestrian screenplay into box-office gold. As film critic Ciara Maloney explained, “Their brilliance shines through the weakest material: the ineffable, bewitching something between them — an intimacy, an immediacy, an ingenuity — frozen in amber for those of us who would never see it in the Copacabana.”

The essence of this duo was the outré interplay between the Prince and the Putz, the Leading Man and the Monkey. Though he was the comedian by trade, Lewis fully credited Martin as the “genius” of the pairing: “He kept the center. He was the spine of the act. And the monkey was constantly attached to that spine, on the spine, next to it.”

From “Sailor Beware” to “The Stooge,” “Living It Up” and “Artists and Models,” theirs was a comedy partnership that came to symbolize America. It is little wonder that presidential historian Tevi Troy called the 1950s “The Martin and Lewis Decade.”

However, many Americans didn’t see these two celebrities as distant icons. Film critic Jenna Ipcar has described how “a perfect comedy duo will make their audience feel like a lucky participant instead of just a passive observer, a welcome guest in a secret world.” Martin and Lewis embodied that ideal.

The boys’ bittersweet final performance took place at New York’s Copacabana on July 25, 1956. Exactly 10 years after their debut in Atlantic City, N.J., Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis had pioneered a new brand of comedy, soothed postwar America’s psyche and made a nation laugh again.

Rosario A. Iaconis, chairman of the Italic Institute of America, writes about Italy and its cultural influence. He is at work on a novel about Harry S. Truman.

Freelance writer and editor Lucy Schiller bumped up against the issues of aging, eldercare and loneliness through her grandmothers. When the family pulled her maternal grandmother, Mary Ann, from assisted living during the pandemic, Schiller became her primary caregiver. Her paternal grandmother, Anita, was less fortunate; she contracted COVID-19 from a home healthcare aide and died in a hospital.

As she relates in “Aging Out,” the shock of Anita’s death was a factor in Schiller’s abrupt relocation from a central New York college town to Pittsburgh, where she knew no one. Schiller calls the move “a half-desperate plan to simply change the background scenery of my life for the millionth time.”

While grieving, scrambling to make a living, taking long walks with her dog and wrestling with her chosen solitude, Schiller embarks on a quest to understand the institutions and attitudes that shape old age in America. “What was the relationship between personal fear of oldness and the ways in which oldness was structured in society?” she asks.

The resulting book, a deliberately meandering account of her Steel City sojourn, weds memoir, travelogue, philosophical rumination and journalistic investigation. Schiller, an MFA graduate of the University of Iowa and now an assistant professor of nonfiction at Texas Tech University, is a fluid writer. But most of what she covers is well-trod ground.

It’s worth asking whom she envisions as her audience. Most older readers know this territory; younger ones have other, more pressing concerns, including how to afford life in the here-and-now.

Perhaps Schiller, a millennial in her 30s, hopes they will identify with her personal struggles. But her loneliness seems largely self-imposed, perhaps compounded by what she describes as “a severe strain” of obsessive-compulsive disorder. “It turns out, laughably, that an interest in privacy, and staying quiet about internal feelings, are hallmarks of this condition,” she writes, offering a partial explanation for her wariness of company.

Pondering the American way of aging, Schiller initially adopts a posture of ignorance and naivete so extreme that it seems like a pose. She puzzles out the distinctions among nursing homes, assisted living facilities and continuing care retirement communities, as well as home healthcare. And she underlines the fact that, when it comes to long-term care in the United States, only the relatively well-off have good choices. This isn’t exactly news.

Another Schiller inquiry involves the familiar complexities of Medicare. She notes that, as a public program for seniors, it is so inadequate that it requires private options, such as Medigap and Medicare Advantage, to paper over coverage gaps. Picking the best plan for one’s needs can be a daunting option, requiring trained help or careful study. Schiller attends an informational seminar by a broker for Medicare Advantage plans and decides, unhelpfully, that they are neither “a solution or a problem.”

Schiller’s reporting methods rely, to some extent, on serendipity. “I tended toward … a kind of diffuse sallying through the world, staying open to the coincidence, digression, and movement,” she writes. She calls the method “antinarrative.”

All that sallying takes her down some unexpected byways. She returns to a western Pennsylvania town called Harmony, where she once had “a horrible, endless date over crepes,” to investigate a strike over pay and working conditions at a troubled nursing home. That leads to a long discussion of the use of restraints on the elderly.

At one point, Schiller finds a company called Papa that employs younger “Pals” to assist older adults. With the backing of health insurance companies, the Pals provide companionship, transportation, housecleaning services and more. Schiller tries something similar as a volunteer for a health insurance company, reaching out to an elderly Black woman by phone. They stumble over time into an unlikely friendship.

One problem with all these efforts to mitigate old-age loneliness, Schiller notes, is that the loneliest generation is actually Gen Z. And the loneliness surveys themselves, she suggests, may be suspect.

Schiller delves, inevitably, into the history of AARP, an organization that even in its earliest days was entangled with the health insurance industry. And consumer advocate Ralph Nader, for whom she does some editing work, tips her to the story of activist Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers.

Kuhn, Schiller writes, understood “the tension between the social so-called nothingness of old age and its vibrant realities.” Which brings Schiller to the intersection of aging and disability, and to Programs for All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE), which provide community-based care as an alternative to nursing homes.

In the end, Schiller has a go at parsing her own motivations. “I had descended into the strange subterranean structures of aging, almost as a way to avoid the contemporary world … ,” she writes. “Age … was a helpful distancing tool: older people’s vulnerabilities, including those of my own grandparents, helped to distract me from my own present and future. … I still did not know how to seal over the gaping wound of the pandemic, how to move forward.”

For all her verbiage, she can find no easy fix, nor even a complicated one. “It was not possible for me to imagine a solution to the level of fragmentation, pain, and dysfunction I saw,” she writes, leaving readers without much justification for having followed her rambling, idiosyncratic quest.

Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia, has been a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Second Lady Usha Vance, announced the birth of their fourth child, the first born to a sitting vice president in more than 150 years.

Born Sunday, Alec Neel Vance joins older siblings Ewan, 9; Vivek, 6; and Mirabel, 4.

Vance announced the birth Sunday on social media with a statement signed by him and his wife.

“We are excited to announce that our baby boy, Alec Neel Vance, was born this morning. Usha and the baby are happy and healthy, and our kids are overjoyed to meet their little brother,” the statement said.

They thanked doctors and staff at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and with the White House medical team.

The Republican vice president’s growing family is in keeping with his passionate advocacy for Americans to have more children. He has also suggested that the 2025 killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was his friend, factored into the decision to have another child.

Vance, a former U.S. Marine, repeatedly expressed alarm about declining birth rates in America as he launched his political career in 2021 with a bid for a U.S. Senate seat from Ohio. As vice president, he said in Washington at the 2025 March for Life anti-abortion rally, “I want more babies in the United States of America.”

The vice president, who’s 41, has been accompanied on overseas trips by Usha Vance, 40, and their children, with the kids often pajama-clad as they board Air Force Two for the overnight flights.

Usha Vance, the daughter of immigrants from India, had already been the subject of some public fascination because of her husband. Her pregnancy, which was announced in January, amplified that spotlight since it is rare for occupants of the United States’ highest public offices to add to their families while serving.

The last time a sitting vice president became a new father was in the 1800s.

Schuyler Colfax and his second wife, Ellen Wade, had a son, Schuyler Colfax III, in 1870 when Colfax was serving as vice president, according to the White House Historical Assn. Decades before that, John C. Calhoun and his wife, Floride Bonneau, had a son, William, in 1829 when Calhoun was vice president, the association said.

Usha Vance recently came under scrutiny after The New York Times’ fashion critic called attention to the stomach-hugging, coral maternity dress she wore for a Father’s Day episode of “Storytime with the Second Lady,” a video podcast she launched during the pregnancy.

The Times wrote that the attention that Vance, Miller and Leavitt had put on their pregnancies offered “an image of idealized womanhood that gives literal shape to the pronatalist movement,” which encourages couples to have as many children as possible to counter declining birth rates.

The second lady responded on social media, writing, “Now that we know the political significance of my $8.75 coral maternity dress from Old Navy, can’t wait to hear what the New York Times has to say about my elastic-waistband pants and compression socks! In the meantime, enjoy my pregnancy fashion (or lack thereof) and a good story with your kids on Storytime with the Second Lady.” She later shared the receipt for the dress, and her husband applauded her frugality.

“She bought a $50 dress for $8.75. America: meet your next director of the federal budget!” the vice president wrote on social media.

Superville writes for the Associated Press.

While Latin Americans have traditionally rallied behind football teams from the region who advance deep into the FIFA World Cup, a flood of memes, jokes and criticism has made it clear there is one exception: Argentina.

In one photoshopped image that went viral, Lamine Yamal — who stars for Argentina’s final opponents Spain — is wearing a Brazilian jersey. The snarky caption? “The hope of the Brazilian people.”

The fervour goes beyond the historic rivalry between Pele’s Brazil and Diego Maradona’s Argentina: Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and others are all hoping Lionel Messi’s Albiceleste bite the dust on Sunday.

A similar phenomenon occurred before Argentina won their third World Cup title in Qatar in 2022.

Colombian sociologist German Gomez believes the “dynamic of solidarity … has been broken” with Argentina.

He said the digital era and social networks have fuelled “narratives” that the team is a darling of FIFA and Gianni Infantino, president of football’s world governing body.

“Argentina has had help from referees,” said Francisco Santos, a Brazilian fan trading World Cup stickers at a shopping centre in Sao Paulo, where cheers rang out when England scored first against Argentina in the semifinal.

If Brazil could not become six-time champions, “I would rather see Spain become two-time champions than Argentina become four-time champions,” the 42-year-old said.

Critics say Argentina have received more favourable calls such as penalties and yellow or red cards against opponents, even when such decisions have been backed by FIFA and experts.

“We’re going to cheer for Spain,” said Juan Camilo Abusaid, a 28-year-old finance worker in Bogota, Colombia’s capital.

‘Very political’

Antonio Lopez, 51, a police officer in Mexico City, described Messi as a “legend”.

But he added: “If you’re going to sweat and break your back on the pitch to become champions twice, I accept that. If referees are going to help you, I don’t”.

At a media conference, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum jokingly asked journalists which team they were supporting in the final.

“Spain! Spain!” they replied.

For Mexican anthropology professor Jorge Negroe, a specialist in social studies of sport, “this World Cup has proven to be very political”.

Colombian sociologist Gomez added that while Maradona was seen as a revolutionary who confronted FIFA’s power, current narratives perceive Messi as FIFA’s “golden boy”.

National politics has also created resentment.

“I really don’t like Javier Milei (Argentina’s president) at all!” said Rachid Sjoberg, a 29-year-old agricultural laboratory operator in Santiago.

“The idea that he would then boast about having won the World Cup if they win does not sit well with me.”

Argentine fans and some players have also faced accusations of racism — such as a chant sung by the team in the past mocking the black players in the French team as not being really French.

There is also a long history of club-level fans throwing bananas on the field or making monkey gestures at Brazilian fans or black players.

During this World Cup, FIFA condemned racism in a statement after an Argentinian supporter told a black US influencer known as IShowSpeed to go “cry at the zoo” during a livestream.

‘We are unbearable’

Messi himself has acknowledged the strong feelings surrounding whether the team wins or loses.

“Four years ago, we achieved what we wanted: to play the final and be the best for four years. Once again, we have shown that nobody gives us anything for free, and we have put ourselves among the two best again,” he said.

“Let it hurt whoever it hurts.”

A brand of fernet, an alcoholic drink which is hugely popular in Argentina, has taken advantage of the anti-Argentine sentiment with humour.

Under the slogan “We are unbearable,” it launched an advert showing fans from different teams sitting in a therapy circle complaining about Argentina’s unbridled passion for football.

While many in Latin America are rooting against Argentina, the team has received a rapturous response at training camps in the US, with fans chanting “Messi! Messi!”

But some still embrace regional solidarity.

“I’m going to support Argentina because it’s a South American country,” said Valentino Tocto, a 20-year-old student in Lima.

NEW YORK — Former President Biden will publish a memoir, “Promise Me, America,” which he says will touch upon everything from the economy to his decision to drop his bid for reelection.

The memoir is scheduled to come out Nov. 17, publisher Little, Brown and Company told The Associated Press. The timing of the book — two weeks after midterm elections in which Democrats seek to regain control of Congress — could raise concerns within Biden’s party by putting him back into the spotlight.

Democrats remain divided on Biden’s legacy, with many blaming his ill-fated determination to seek a second term for Republican President Trump’s return to the White House. Leaders hope to keep the fall campaign focused on Trump and his record, and any leaks or promotional efforts before votes are cast could draw frustration.

“‘Promise Me, America’ is about the challenges we faced as a nation. It’s about the decisions I made and why I made them,” Biden said in a video statement accompanying Wednesday’s announcement. “It’s about why I chose to run for reelection and why I chose to step aside.”

Reports of Biden’s book have circulated for more than a year, and the former president himself has referred to it during public remarks, appearing to suggest it would be released before November’s election.

Biden, who will turn 84 three days after the publication of “Promise Me, America,” has long presented himself as an upholder of standards and traditions; presidential memoirs are one of them. With a handful of exceptions, modern presidents since Harry Truman in the 1950s have published books about their White House years. Little, Brown declined to release financial details for ”Promise Me, America,” although presidents have usually reached deals worth at least seven figures.

The book’s title echoes a 2017 memoir by Biden, “Promise Me, Dad,” which centered on the death of his son, Beau Biden.

Vowing as a candidate to “restore the soul” of his country, Biden was sworn into office in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters seeking to stop his certification as president. Biden’s term was defined by a wide range of conflicts and achievements, from his handling of wars in Ukraine and the Middle East to the passage of ambitious infrastructure and economic aid bills. But many readers will likely want to know more about his health while president, including the disastrous debate in June 2024 against Trump that led to his giving up his reelection bid. Then-Vice President Kamala Harris, who ran instead, lost decisively to Trump.

Former first lady Jill Biden wrote in her own book that her husband seemed so weak and disoriented during the debate that she feared he was having a stroke. In “View from the East Wing,” published in June, she noted that the White House had initially said he was suffering from a cold.

“The biggest lesson for us, I think, was that if you don’t explain something well enough then the question won’t go away,” she wrote. “There was never a satisfying enough explanation offered for Joe’s debate performance, and a lot of people never got over it.”

Biden was the oldest man to serve as president and his health was a source of speculation for much of his term; Biden and his White House advisers have faced intense criticism from Democrats and Republicans for allegedly concealing the extent of his problems. A notable book release from 2025, Jake Tapper’s and Alex Thompson’s “Original Sin,” was subtitled “President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”

That year, Biden announced he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Biden’s previous books also include “Promises to Keep,” a campaign work published to boost his run for president in 2008, when Barack Obama was the eventual nominee and Biden his running mate. ”Promise Me, America” comes out during a year when nonfiction sales have declined and few political books have caught on, although recent bestsellers have included Vice President JD Vance’s “Communion” and an inside account of Trump’s second term, by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, “Regime Change.”

A Little, Brown spokesperson said that Biden plans to tour on behalf of the book and give interviews. In his video announcement, Biden said that many people had been asking him how he was doing.

“I’ve been spending a lot of time with my family. I’m dealing with a cancer diagnosis, been getting treatment, and it’s going really well,” he said. “I want to thank all those who have offered their prayers and support and well-wishes. It’s meant the world to me and to Jill.”

Italie writes for the Associated Press.

The Writers Guild of America sued Paramount on Tuesday, alleging that the company’s planned $111-billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery violates federal antitrust law.
The union said that with fewer competitors, the merged Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery business would be able to lower costs by reducing writers’ wages and work.

“Writers will be paid less and have fewer employment opportunities,” the WGA said in its lawsuit.

The move comes a day after California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta led a coalition of 12 Democratic state attorneys general who filed a federal lawsuit to block Paramount Skydance’s $111-billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.

Bonta has separately asked a judge in San Francisco for a temporary restraining order to hold up the deal while his case is pending in court.

“We feel we have a very strong case,” Bonta said Tuesday during a town hall meeting. “This proposed merger will raise prices. It will lower quality. It will reduce output. It will hurt the American people, and it’ll hurt the the economy and competition.”

The writers guild’s missive creates a second line of attack against tech scion David Ellison’s industry-reshaping deal.

Ellison’s proposed merger has been moving closer to the finish line after securing approvals from the U.S. Justice Department and numerous other foreign governments. President Trump, an ally of Ellison’s billionaire father Larry Ellison, favors the deal.

David Ellison wants to close the deal by September to avoid a higher payout to Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders.

A Paramount spokeswoman said the company is reviewing the lawsuit.

The proposed merger has sparked fears in Hollywood that it would bring thousands of job losses — similar to past consolidations, including Walt Disney Co.’s 2019 takeover of Fox entertainment properties.

“The Writers Guild of America will not stand idly by as Paramount attempts to violate our country’s antitrust laws and deepen the contraction entertainment workers already feel,” said Writers Guild of America East President Tom Fontana in a statement. “This proposed combined entity would be the largest employer of writers, with tremendous power to suppress our wages, eliminate opportunities for emerging writers, cut jobs across the industry, and produce less programming, affecting the range of storytelling. This merger is not inevitable and we are fighting to stop it.”

US President Donald Trump welcomed Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi to the White House. Trump praised the ‘tremendous chemistry’ between him and the PM and said the countries will be announcing a new ‘massive’ oil partnership.

They came for the soccer.

We gave them Americana.

Their tickets entitled them to World Cup games.

We threw in an education in United States history, geography, and the economics of the $20 baseball cap.

They expected an athletic tournament.

We staged a county fair, featuring nine exhibits stretched across 3,000 miles, with people and surroundings as varied as our twangs.

Visitors to the Boston venue will remember the success of the Soccer Train, a commuter rail and site of opposing pep rallies on the 50-minute trip to Foxboro Stadium.

Classic stories from the Los Angeles Times’ 143-year archive

Imagine that, longtime Bostonians said. A culture clash where nobody gets hurt.

Visitors to the Dallas venue will remember our failures: the blight around the aging Cotton Bowl, the empty seats inside, the construction-hampered traffic flow that turned game days into nightmares.

For nearly a month, in nine locations, the world has applauded our wonders, cringed at our bruises, and, in some places, even felt our embrace.

So how did we do?

Sometimes, we shined. Other times, we stumbled.

Sometimes we yelled too much, pushed too much. When the rest of the world was rushing joyfully out of a subway or dancing through an alley, often we put up our dukes and played the frightened bullies.

But we also smiled a lot, and listened a lot, and sometimes accepted that which we did not understand.

Like those hourlong postgame fan celebrations that forced stadium police to work overtime. We eventually realized something could not be so bad if it made so many people so happy.

We hollered and hugged, we were impatient and helpful. In other words, we were ourselves.

Sometimes we thrilled. But other times, we disappointed.

Visitors to the New York venue will remember what Dublin sales representative Gerry Taylor remembers.

Nothing.

Taylor learned on the first weekend that despite slick World Cup advertisements, New York was not New York.

Just as Boston was not Boston, but Foxboro. And Detroit was not Detroit, but Pontiac. And Los Angeles was Pasadena.

And New York was actually a smelly, industrial area in northern New Jersey.

Taylor left his Manhattan room early one Saturday morning, four hours before the opener between Italy and Ireland.

He wrapped himself in an Irish flag and planned on a making a pregame stop in a pub next door to Giants Stadium.

“Do this all the time in Dublin,” he said. “Pop a few Guinness at the pub, talk to other fans, get ready for the game.”

But upon arriving in East Rutherford, N.J., he realized the only thing he could drink next door to the stadium was toxic waste.

There wasn’t a pub in sight. Or a store. Or a house. Or even a street that wasn’t an expressway.

He spent the next three hours sitting with two friends on a curb, cursing his introduction to sports in America.

“Are all stadiums like this, away from cities, in the middle of nothing?” he asked. “Seems to me it must be hard to have good sports in places like this, isn’t it? We are let down.”

The only thing we can assure him, and others as disillusioned as Taylor, is it wasn’t because we didn’t try.

Rating the 1994 World Cup venues, best and worst of show:

Chicago

BEST: We knew this would be a great spot from the moment we first bit into something called “the Belly Buster,” sold at a hot dog stand near Soldier Field.

Ingredients: Polish beef dog, relish, ketchup, mustard, onions and jalapeno peppers. It lived up to its billing. Trust us.

And so did everything else.

Soldier Field is the perfect location for an international event, being just a short cab ride from one of America’s great downtowns.

Michigan Avenue has been buzzing for a month, what with German tourists in Bermuda shorts buying black patent leather shoes to accompany their white socks. At night, horse-drawn carriages fought with taxis for street space in some of the best action since Ben Hur.

Bolivian Marco Etcheverry tackles German captain Lothar Matthaeus from behind in Chicago, Ill. (AP Photo/Santiago Lyon)

(Santiago Lyon / Ap)

WORST: The only people who didn’t enjoy themselves here were the Greeks, both the national soccer players and the large Chicago-area community that gathered to watch them one Sunday morning against Bulgaria.

Greece lost that game, 4-0. In the process, the teams drove Greek fans so crazy they started seeing things.

At one point during the game, a Greek tossed a smoke bomb on the field, later claiming it was tradition to do so after his team scored.

His team is back in Athens, and it still hasn’t scored.

IMPRESSIONS: The World Cup’s kind of town, Chicago is. Not only were the streets brimming with international flavor, the shuttle system to Soldier Field was so efficient that cabbies complained about not getting enough chances to rip people off.

Now that’s a venue.

YOU HAD TO BE HERE: During a bachelor party held on the 36th floor of a prominent local hotel, somebody poured beer down the elevator shaft. By morning, the ale had dripped to ground floor and short-circuited the electrical system.

Many hotel guests–some checking out with reams of World Cup-related luggage–were forced to carry everything down 20 flights of stairs.

Once at the bottom, they had to tip valet-parking drivers for walking 10 steps to pick up their cars.

Boston

BEST: We marveled not at a city’s effect upon a World Cup, but vice versa.

“What has happened to a town divided along ethnic lines has been remarkable,” said E.J. Kahn of the Boston Host Committee.

By order of Mayor Tom Menino, the historic City Hall area was turned over to foreigners of every imaginable color and tongue.

Old-timers who never thought they would see an African soccer team playing at the home of the New England Patriots also never thought they would see people dancing on their cobblestone streets in tribal costumes.

Police were particularly worried the night after Argentina had defeated Greece in a first-round game. While the Greeks partied in front of City Hall, the Argentines celebrated eight blocks away in Copley Square.

The fiestas drew closer and closer until five Argentine fans wearing blue-and-white uniform shorts stood directly behind a dozen Greeks dancing in a circle.

Just as security guards prepared to move in, the circle slowly opened, and the Greeks motioned for the Argentines to join them. The Argentines did.

The hardened city sighed.

WORST: Many fans apparently didn’t realize that the game would be played about 45 minutes south of Boston in the desolate suburb of Foxboro.

And nobody knew that once they arrived at the stadium, in a forested area where parking availability seemed unlimited, parking spaces would cost $20 each.

Visitors got even with the World Cup Organizing Committee, though, by leaving their hotels in Boston and staying closer to the stadium in places such as Providence, R.I.

Our smallest state as a World Cup host? Not quite what organizers had in mind.

IMPRESSIONS: The Northeast may have tried harder than any other area, and it showed.

The normally reserved Bostonians, ranked 28th out of 36 U.S. city residents in a recent survey rating kindness to strangers, discovered warmth and tolerance.

When dozens of Irish tourists were swindled out of tickets, Bostonians found them more. When foreigners didn’t understand those distinct accents, Bostonians spoke more slowly.

YOU HAD TO BE HERE: For an hour after Argentina’s victory over Greece, more than a hundred Argentine fans remained at Foxboro Stadium, dancing and singing.

Police politely asked them to leave their seats, but the group only moved as far as the lower concourse. Thirty minutes later, police finally escorted them down the concourse and out the front gates, where they continued to party.

Was the game that exciting? Well, yes and no. With this stadium being 20 miles from the nearest decent-sized city, they had nowhere else to go.

Dallas

BEST: From the World Cup volunteers to city cab drivers, we appreciated the people. Amid bleak surroundings and uncomfortable temperatures, they provided the venue with some badly needed touches of humanity.

One hero was Laura Addington, a schoolteacher from Louisiana. She served as an interpreter for everyone. Well, at least everyone who spoke English, French, Spanish, Italian, German or Arabic.

Other stars were the African taxi drivers. They knew the roads, and they knew soccer, which is the only reason we were able to find Maradona during rush hour.

WORST: Some nights were almost cool enough to hold a sporting event. Yet most of the games were held in the blazing afternoon or early evening sun to accommodate European television.

Those brave enough to attend games suffered through stifling heat. Don’t buy those happy expressions you saw on ESPN. It was torture.

IMPRESSIONS: Dallas is a Cowboy town. And not the Germans, Argentines or any of the soccer fanatics who came through here changed that.

With poor attendance and a distinct lack of any electricity other than that generated by the Cowboys’ new set of uniforms, this proves there are about a thousand better places in this country to hold an international event.

Not that Dallas is a bad place–it’s merely the wrong place.

We have learned that events such as the World Cup require diversity of thought and appreciation of differences. Dallas is just too danged American for any of that.

What Dallas’ failure here portends for the 1996 Olympics in another southern town called Atlanta, well, that’s for another story.

YOU HAD TO BE HERE: By some estimates, the World Cup games here were outdrawn even by the demolition of the Cotton Exchange building downtown one Saturday morning. But at least at the soccer games, nobody was treated for smoke inhalation.

New York-New Jersey

BEST: With the melting pot of New York City nearby, this was the only truly international venue.

The stadium rocked with the sounds, colors and even smells of those countries competing.

Except for its location in New Jersey, Giants Stadium was also the perfect World Cup facility, with a beautiful field and gleaming facilities that had foreigners gawking.

WORST: The only Cup fever to hit New York City involved the Stanley Cup.

Maybe it was because of the Rangers. Or Knicks. Or Gay Games. It certainly wasn’t the Yankees, whose attendance was routinely tripled by the World Cup games.

Maybe it was because every day in New York City feels like an international festival. Or maybe it was because New York City simply didn’t have the time.

Whatever, the city that doesn’t sleep also didn’t care. It was interesting to drive to the stadium listening to New York City sports-talk radio hosts rip soccer, then arrive to discover mile-long lines at the front gates.

New Jersey license plates, all of them.

IMPRESSIONS: Organizers could save tourists and taxi fare by dropping all pretenses that the game is being played in New York City.

The success of this venue proves it is time to start celebrating the ethnic charms and splendid facilities of northern New Jersey . . . and leave New York to worry about the Mets.

YOU HAD TO BE HERE: The location for the World Cup host committee in this country’s largest city? New Brunswick, N.J., 90 minutes from Manhattan.

The location of these New Jersey-played games as listed on commemorative postal stamps? New York.

Detroit

BEST: Do not underestimate the accomplishment of organizers who ran the Detroit venue by avoiding all traces of Detroit.

Games were staged an hour’s drive north in the suburb of Pontiac, a bedroom community dominated by large front lawns and strip malls. If Detroit street gangs possess missiles that can fly that far, we didn’t see them.

The venue MVP (Most Valuable Professor) was Trey Rogers, the god of sod. The assistant prof of turf-grass science at Michigan State actually made grass grow inside the Silverdome.

After three years of experiments, at a cost of $2.4 million, the indoor stuff held up admirably and was hailed by all but the most serious allergy sufferers.

The crowd cheers at the Pontiac, Mich., Silverdome as the United States and Switzerland play. (AP Photo/Bill Waugh)

(Bill Waugh/AP)

WORST: Much like East Rutherford and Foxboro, there was no there there. The venue lacked big-city energy and a pulse.

The streets emptied at 10 p.m. After night games, if you hadn’t paid someone to hold a spot in line at Herschel’s Deli, the happening spot was a Taco Bell drive-through.

Of course, after a game in the non-air-conditioned Silverdome, all anybody wanted to do was lie down in a nice comfortable meat locker.

IMPRESSIONS: Smiling faces, helpful people, but mostly sweat. Three-alarm, two-shirt sweat.

YOU HAD TO BE HERE: After the June 24 game between Brazil and Sweden, a thunderstorm passed directly over the media tent as hundreds of journalists were filing their stories. The thunder was deafening and the tent shook as if it were going to break.

Lightning threatened to knock out the power. The lights flickered, World Cup officials implored reporters to save their files or risk losing them.

This scene was repeated at media and hospitality tents in most of the venues. But aside from the Mexican team, nothing in the tournament has collapsed.

Washington

BEST: We never thought we’d say this, but we liked the subways.

The blue line, which stopped three blocks from RFK stadium, was a shoulder-to-shoulder mass of international passion.

The Dutch fans made their mark by pounding on the ceilings. The Swiss, by chanting through the underground terminals.

The Mexicans demonstrated their presence with songs, singing loud even though they could barely breathe while crushed in overloaded cars during the final 10 minutes of the trip.

It was all underground, but it was true democracy, rare even for our nation’s capital.

WORST: Everything was wonderful until you actually walked inside RFK.

The stadium is falling apart. The Mexican fans literally caused it to rock with their constant bouncing during Mexico’s emotional tie with Italy.

The stadium security officials were surly and overbearing. Maybe it was those horrible purple berets that made them so mad.

The stadium media-tent volunteers, mostly of college age, were the worst. This would be of no interest to the public, except many worldwide impressions of this country are created by foreign journalists.

And those foreign journalists were treated horribly. Little attempt was made to understand or deal with them.

Tickets were refused with no explanation given. Attempts to talk with media coordinators were denied. Questions about the facility were greeted with shrugs.

Translators working player interviews refused to even offer translated quotes until they had been typed and apparently approved by supervisors, which often took two or three hours.

When one Middle Eastern journalist complained about discrimination, one college girl working as a volunteer laughed in his face and replied, “I don’t think so.”

IMPRESSIONS: Sports organizers beware. Any further events staged here should not involve any local volunteers or officials from this World Cup.

This is a wonderful city, and as our capital, it should be the one of the first places promoters go for big events. But now we wonder if haughty attitudes and low-rent facilities haven’t kept the big games away.

The pre-game show at RFK Stadium prior to the Norway v Mexico group stage match of 1994 FIFA World Cup. (Photo by David Caban/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

(David Caban/David Caban)

YOU HAD TO BE HERE: A local activist hung a “Save Bosnia” sign in the stands during the opening game here between Mexico and Norway. It was taken down by local officials. He sued for the right to display it. He won.

Not that the guy wanted to rub it in, but visible the next game were two “Save Bosnia” signs.

San Fransisco-Palo Alto

BEST: We love Los Gatos. This mountain town of 28,000 near San Jose has adopted–and been adopted by–the Brazilians.

After Brazil’s games at Stanford Stadium in Palo Alto, Los Gatos became Little Rio, complete with samba music, incessant drumbeats and conga lines through Town Plaza Park.

“This is very exciting,” local resident Judy VanKampen said. “It is totally different than what you normally see in Los Gatos, which is people walking down the street with dogs and strollers.”

Even though crowds were lively, they were orderly. Some of the women might have strained the city’s public decency codes with their skimpy bikinis, but city officials, to their credit, looked the other way.

Sure they did.

Brazilian forward Romario beats United States defender Alexi Lalas at Stanford Stadium, July 4, 1994 in Stanford, Calif. (AP Photo/Thomas Kienzle)

(Thomas Kienzle / Associated Press)

WORST: The whining of Palo Alto politicians because World Cup organizers identified the venue as San Francisco.

But unless we are missing something, nobody has written a song called, “I Left My Heart in Palo Alto.”

IMPRESSIONS: Of all the venues, Stanford University was the worst in creating obstacles for World Cup organizers.

University officials were in position to drive a hard bargain because FIFA, soccer’s organizing body, wanted a presence in San Francisco but did not want to use Candlestick Park because of its smaller size.

Thus, Stanford Stadium is by far the least modern of the venues. Even though some improvements were made, World Cup organizers did not get all of their demands met.

Yet those academics learned that the World Cup is just the type of event that educational institutions should be encouraging.

The excellent soccer is the least of its legacies. Teams from four continents played here, and the visitors who followed those teams to Palo Alto left something of themselves behind.

Unfortunately for the merchants, it was not money. They were disappointed in their take.

But the visitors contributed something more valuable, their cultures. Los Gatos, one feels, will never be the same.

YOU HAD TO BE HERE: A Brazilian woman walked into an ice cream store in Los Gatos one hot day and ordered a beer.

Los Angeles-Pasadena

BEST: My, but the old lady still can sing. Our Rose Bowl looked wonderful with its face lift and colorful frills.

When the air is clear and the heat isn’t oppressive, there is no better view in this World Cup than that of the San Gabriel mountains looming behind the Rose Bowl scoreboard.

Well, OK, the view of that scoreboard after the United States played Columbia was pretty nice too.

Soccer fans inside the Rose Bowl stadium in Pasadena, Calif., prior to World Cup Final match between Brazil and Italy, Sunday July 17, 1994. (AP Photo/Lois Bernstein)

(Lois Bernstein / Associated Press)

WORST: That World Cup chief Alan Rothenberg would allow his hometown facility to rip off hungry and thirsty soccer fans–many of them his neighbors–with inflated prices is inexcusable. Two dollars and fifty cents for a Sno-cone? Fish and chips for $7.50?

IMPRESSIONS: The scene reminds us of the 1984 Olympics, causing emotions we never thought we would feel again. Traffic flowing smoothly, the city clean and pressed, citizens talking about something fun.

Surveys say that many people here couldn’t care less about the event, but the ones who do have made it memorable.

YOU HAD TO BE HERE: With so many men ignoring the “Women” signs on the portable toilets outside the Rose Bowl, officials placed “Out of Order” signs on several working potties and secretly passed around the word that women should use those.

Orlando

BEST: Quick, somebody get this town an NFL team. There was no better stadium-area atmosphere than here, where fans congregated less than a mile from the Florida Citrus Bowl at a trendy shopping and dining area called Church Street Station.

One night the Dutch fans were having so much fun, they started stealing baseball caps from policemen. Another night, the Mexicans were having so much fun they lay down on the railroad tracks upon hearing an oncoming train.

OK, so maybe we don’t all have the same kinds of fun.

Expensive restaurants became rollicking pubs. Thousands of foreigners became wailing, wandering messes.

Did we mention that the Irish were also in town?

WORST: This was soccer in a sauna. Every team that played under the unforgiving midday sun recorded a triumph of spirit.

For fans, merely getting to the games was a similar triumph. Ten dollars to ride a parking lot shuttle? Fifteen dollars to park at a local school, with the money being handed to a member of the PTA?

This was central Florida hucksterism at its worst. But then, they learned from the experts down the street, those guys wearing the ears.

IMPRESSIONS: With the Dutch and Belgians in town, this was supposed to be the site of hooliganism. Police from around the state were summoned for 12-hour shifts. But nothing happened. The most serious crime involved people refusing to leave bars at closing time.

Already our vacation capital, Orlando proved that it deserves to become a sports capital as well. It knows how to turn a game into an event without anybody getting hurt.

After existing for so long in the shadow of fantasyland, it acts as if it loves this real stuff.

YOU HAD TO BE HERE: In the downtown area on July 4, fans from everywhere joined to sing “Happy Birthday.”

To whom? To the United States, of course. Considering how we came of age in yet another international sporting scene this summer, it was a happy birthday indeed.

Times staff writers Elliott Almond, Julie Cart, Lisa Dillman, Chris Dufresne, Helene Elliott, Randy Harvey, Mike Penner and Times Sports Editor Bill Dwyre contributed to this story.

Rebekah sold her car and put all her clothes on Vinted to raise enough for an open-ended trip

A woman saved £18,000 in just seven months to travel the world – by selling her wardrobe on Vinted. Rebekah Swatton, 26, has spent the past seven months aggressively saving for an open-ended trip abroad after a previous journey forced her to rethink her relationship with money and possessions.

Her outlook on life changed dramatically after the sudden death of her boyfriend from a cardiac arrest five years ago, an experience she says made her realise that “nothing in life is certain”. Last March, she embarked on a six-month backpacking adventure across Australia, Africa, and Asia, taking a sabbatical from her job at Lloyds Banking Group.

But when she returned to the UK in September, she says she was struck by how little she actually needed the possessions waiting for her at home. That realisation sparked a drastic lifestyle change.

Rebekah sold her car, worked up to 20 hours of overtime each week and cleared out the majority of her wardrobe on Vinted – ultimately building up savings of £18,000 for her next trip to South America. Rebekah, from Powick, Worcestershire, said: “I had been away for so long that when I came back I realised I had been living without any of these extra material things happier than I was living with them.”

Rebekah began saving in 2022 following the sudden death of her boyfriend of six months, who passed away from an undiagnosed underlying heart condition. Rebekah said: “It really made me wake up and I felt that nothing is certain going forwards. I’d gone straight from college into career mode without thinking.

“I’d always said I wanted to travel and this really catalysed my first trip, as I want to live my life to the fullest.”

Last March, Rebekah set off on a six-month backpacking adventure, travelling through Australia, the Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam, Kenya, and Tanzania. When she returned, Rebekah decided to completely change the direction of her life and pursue travelling full time.

She said: “It was such an amazing time. I really enjoyed feeling free and experiencing new things each day. But once I got back and realised I wanted a change, I decided next time I left I would leave my job permanently and not return to the UK for at least a few years.”

With that commitment in mind, Rebekah knew she would need to build up substantial savings to support herself on an open-ended trip with no fixed return date. Rebekah said: “Since I’ve been back, I’ve been living with my parents, which of course helps keep outgoings down.

“I have been working my £30,000 banking job full time plus an extra 15 to 20 hours over time each week. I sold over 200 items on Vinted, from clothing to accessories to random trinkets and also sold my car for £2,500.

“This, plus working 60 hour weeks and living with my parents, meant I saved nearly £20k for the next time I leave the country.”

Rebekah has booked a flight to Guatemala for the first week of May, with plans to travel through South America from there. She said: “I’ve planned out the first couple months of my trip with flights and loose accommodation.

“But I know over the next six months I want to travel through Guatemala, Columbia, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile.”

America’s semiquincentennial came and went, and the Disneyland Resort marked the occasion with a transformation of its now-classic Soarin’ ride. Gone, for now, is Soarin’ Over California and Soarin’ Around the World. In their place is Soarin’ Across America, a lightly patriotic-themed journey from coast to coast.

There are flyovers of nationalistic symbols such as the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore National Monument and the Washington Monument, but the majority of its dozen locations are national parks, making Soarin’ Across America a love letter to America’s natural and diverse beauty. And it felt like a four-and-a-half-minute celebration.

Soarin’ Across America has the strongest scene of any of the three attraction films, which envelop riders as they ascend in the sky on a hang glider simulator. That’s its opening, a shot of a rocket launch at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. We start level with the spacecraft, and then follow its journey into the clouds. Being this close to a liftoff, and feeling the sensation of rising with it, creates an inspiring, rousing moment. As in any Soarin’ film, we are promised the great outdoors, but here we get magnificent ingenuity.

Is it the best Soarin’? I’d still rank Soarin’ Over California as No. 1, as it has a sort of goofball charm, such as tumbling skiers or a golf ball flying toward the audience. But Soarin’ Across America is a worthy successor. It takes a more patient approach, as the ride now seems to linger longer over certain locales, allowing us to take in the majesty of the Grand Canyon West or vibrancy of the Louisiana bayou without distraction. I appreciated the tonal shift, which makes it stand on its own and doesn’t try to force itself to capture the original’s whimsy.

A coastal scene from Soarin’ Across America.

(Disney Parks)

I also enjoyed the new smells. When hovering near the Hawaii coast, for instance, the tropical fragrances that wafted over guests seemed to reflect the gummy fruitiness of a mai tai. (No, that wasn’t just me longing for an afternoon break at Trader Sam’s.)

I went in with a bit of skepticism, and I’m relieved to say my fears weren’t realized. Well, fully realized. This is a divisive time in American history, and cultural works are increasingly viewed through a political lens. When announcing the attraction, Disney did so with symbolism of the American flag, a bald eagle and the Statue of Liberty, art that was admittedly bright and welcoming, but also could be read as giving it an uncomfortable, chauvinistic sheen.

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Not everyone in 2026 may be excited with a flight simulator that serves as a cheerleader for America. And I still question the inclusion of Mount Rushmore, which has a long, controversial history, and has been a fascination of President Trump’s. But aside from that scene, and some odd red, white and blue sparkler-like fireworks visible in the New York Harbor, which curiously distract from a view of the Statue of Liberty, Soarin’ Across America doesn’t lay on the jingoism. At least until the final moments, when we see an American flag in the sky above Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty Castle.

I’ll take it. The vibe throughout is one of restraint. When we glide near a Maine lighthouse, the film seems to pause, allowing the rocky coast and long-standing structure to be the stars. A dip across the American plains takes us above a herd of bison, but by and large movement is kept to a minimum (here the scent is of grassy freshness, which I’m betting is not what a bison smells like). A train in the Ozarks, for instance, comes to us rather than the film rushing to trace its path.

Filmed primarily with helicopters and drone shots, Soarin’ Across America utilizes CGI, courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic, less than Soarin’ Around the World, and primarily on scene transitions when we appear to fly next to a bird. This is an attraction that leans more National Geographic, that is it is unobtrusive and unstaged, than past iterations of Soarin’. While some may miss more active visuals, I appreciate that each Soarin’ film takes a different approach. Long term, it will allow Soarin’ Across America to serve as a snapshot in time, of an America at a certain point in history.

Soarin’ Across America shows aerial vistas across the United States, and it’s arriving at a divisive moment in our nation’s political history.

(Disney Parks)

And that’s already true. For when the film takes us down in front of the Washington Monument, we can off in the distance ever-so-slightly glance at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, caught before its current Trump adminstration remodeling. Depending on your point of view, it can be unintentionally uncomfortable or amusing to see a locale before it became a political lightning rod. But that’s sort of the appeal of the Soarin’ films. They’re glimpses of not just a moment in time, but of a constantly changing world.

In that sense, there’s something relatively quaint about Soarin’, especially for our fast-paced, thrill-focused world. Soarin’ was groundbreaking when it debuted in 2001, but today we have venues like Las Vegas’ Sphere and Inglewood’s Cosm, whose spherical screens are higher definition and can even create the illusion of movement. Soarin’ Across America charms — all four of my rides last week ended in audience applause — by simply being a calming, relaxed journey that stokes our sense of adventure.

This week in SoCal theme parks

Disneyland Park has now welcomed more than 1 billion guests.

(Christian Thompson / Disneyland Resort)

• Disneyland: More than 1 billion served. The Disneyland Resort over the weekend welcomed its 1 billionth guest. The distinction went to 8-year-old Andres Robles, who with his family was treated to a VIP tour of the park. Disneyland has updated its population sign atop the Disneyland Railroad’s Main Street Station. To help put into context how unfathomably large 1 billion is, it’s worth noting that it took Disneyland, which in recent years has been drawing around 17 million attendees, nearly 71 years to reach that number.
• The Cenobites are coming to Universal Studios Hollywood. The latest addition to this year’s Halloween Horror Nights has been revealed, and it’s a haunted house based on the “Hellraiser” franchise. Pinhead actor Doug Bradley will reprise his role for the walkthrough attraction by voicing the character’s representation in the house. Halloween Horror Nights is set to launch Sept. 3.
• Don’t miss this look into Disney history. PBS SoCal will on Friday, July 17, show the documentary, “Bob Gurr: Living by Design.” It’s a revealing look into the life of a key early Disneyland designer, as Gurr created the look and feel of the Haunted Mansion “Doombuggies,” the original Autopia cars, the bobsleds of the Matterhorn and, of course, the first Disneyland Monorail. Before you watch, get to know the colorful, outspoken Disney legend.
• A Disneyland deal for Anaheim residents. Good news for those who live near the Disneyland Resort. For a limited time from July 20 through Aug. 8, Anaheim residents will have access to a locals-only deal. Adult one-day tickets will start at $71, while child tickets will be $50. Park-hoppers for adults will sell for $104 while child tickets will remain $50. It’s a significant savings and a great way to see the start of the park’s Halloween season. The tickets go on sale July 16.

The best thing I ate at the parks

The al pastor pork chop at Lamplight Lounge.

(Todd Martens / Los Angeles Times)

One of Disneyland’s best dishes is currently available at Disney California Adventure’s Lamplight Lounge, its Pixar-decorated pub-like outpost. It’s a sliced al pastor pork chop served with cheese polenta, pineapple relish and a spicy red chili butter sauce ($32). The pork is soft, the polenta creamy and it carries just enough heat to give it a bit of an edge. While filling, it’s surprisingly not too heavy, and Lamplight is always a lively spot to take a break from the parks. I only wish the place had a non-hazy IPA.

Your questions answered

Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty Castle on a crowded 2019 day.

(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

Hi Todd, we went to the park [Sunday] and it was empty: walk on to Cars, walk on to Indy. Thirty minutes for Guardians. Everything else was down to about 5 [minutes] besides Tiki Room because it’s a 15 min show. Are they struggling this summer? I haven’t seen a day like that at Disney since I was a kid.
— Jake from Riverside

Disneyland has been unseasonably comfortable this summer (read: less people). And the Fourth of July holiday week was kind of a breeze, with low wait times at most attractions at both parks.

But I wouldn’t says struggling, as I have seen busy days in recent weeks and Sunday was particularly unique. Mexico and England were playing a much-buzzed-about World Cup match, which no doubt kept crowds at bay. But it’s true that Disneyland this summer has, on a whole, been more pleasant, crowd-wise, than in year’s past.

Ultimately, I attribute the potentially lighter attendance to a combination of factors. One, the park has likely hit the peak price it can currently offer guests (fingers crossed this is true, as I don’t think most Disneyland fans can absorb another yearly price hike right now). Two, the aforementioned World Cup is drawing away potential attendees. And three, everything is more expensive today, forcing families to choose between, say, an afternoon at Dodger Stadium or a day at Disneyland. It’s increasingly untenable to do both.

And people are hungry for different, approachable ticket options. Last week, for instance, Disneyland unveiled a new evening ticket deal for all guests. The $59 offer allows attendees to enter either Disney California Adventure at 5 p.m. or Disneyland at 7 p.m. Available Sundays to Wednesdays through Aug. 5, all dates sold out in six days, unless Disneyland allots more tickets for the deal.

Tell us your stories. Ask us your questions.

Have a theme park tale to share? Whether it was a good day or less-than-perfect day, I would love to hear about it. Have a question? A tip? A fun photo from the parks to share? Email me at todd.martens@latimes.com. I may feature your note in an upcoming newsletter.

Ride on,

Todd Martens

P.S.

Universal Studios Hollywood first began exploring a high-speed coaster more than a decade ago.

(Todd Martens / Los Angeles Times)

Universal Studios Hollywood’s new Fast & Furious: Hollywood Drift is set to open soon, and while many are excited, I’m curious to hear from those who live near the theme park. Universal has emphasized how it has instituted a number of noise-mitigating factors, from placing pea gravel in the tracks to building sound walls and creating shields designed to capture rider screams.

Theme park rides, however, can still be loud. If you’re in one of the neighborhoods surrounding the park, drop a line at todd.martens@latimes.com and let me know if Universal’s efforts have been enough, or if the coaster is a disruptive presence.

Once again, Walker Kessler sat hunched forward, ears and eyes intently locked onto the person whose words would change his life.

This wasn’t his bewildering 2022 NBA draft day experience captured on video that began with him hearing commissioner Adam Silver announce he had been chosen by the Memphis Grizzlies only to learn moments later that he had been traded to the Minnesota Timberwolves, only to learn two weeks after that he’d been dealt to the Utah Jazz.

No, this time it was about the love of his life, Abbie Stockard. Glued to a screen, Kessler reacted to the words, “Your new Miss America is … Alabama!” as if he’d been electrocuted. He jumped from his chair and put his hands over his mouth, speechless as Stockard was crowned.

Nineteen months later, Kessler — now the Lakers center — found his voice while on a Fourth of July outing at Lake Martin, Ala., and asked Stockard to marry him. She said yes.

The Lakers obtained the 7-foot-2 Kessler from the Jazz on July 1 in exchange for 2031 and 2033 first-round picks and 2028 and 2030 pick swaps, bringing to L.A. a strong defensive presence to accompany offensive-first star guards Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves.

Kessler, 24, agreed to a four-year, $130 million contract, not a bad nest egg for newlyweds. The Instagram story of the two sharing their engagement was captioned: “The future Kessler’s. Let’s get y’all married!!!”

Kessler’s mother, Andrea, played matchmaker two years ago, taking a photo of Stockard during an Auburn basketball game and sending it to her son. He messaged her on Instagram.

Stockard was on the dance team at Auburn, where she studied pediatric nursing. Now she is a former Miss America engaged to the Lakers’ newest star.

“I get to marry Walker Kessler — my best friend!,” she wrote on social media. “Our story is truly one that only the Lord could have written. So many things I once thought were coincidences were really His perfect plan unfolding, and our story is greater than anything I could have imagined.

“There’s no one else I’d rather spend the rest of my life with, doing life together and cheering each other on!”

In 201 games with the Jazz, Kessler averaged 9.5 points, 9.3 rebounds and 2.4 blocks across 25.3 minutes. He played only five games last season while recovering from a shoulder injury.

In New York, the Brooklyn Bridge went up in flames briefly during a fireworks display. In Washington D.C., stormy weather delayed a grievance-filled speech by President Trump.

And here in Los Angeles? On Saturday night, tens of thousands of Angelenos joined voices peacefully at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum to sing along with Chris Stapleton as the country star compared a lover to Tennessee whiskey.

A unifying cultural figure beloved by both liberals and conservatives, Stapleton was the headlining act at a Fourth of July benefit concert that also featured Smashing Pumpkins, Chaka Khan, Maren Morris and Queen Latifah. (I’d be surprised if those five names had previously appeared together in the same sentence.) The show, with tickets priced at $17.76, was presented by America250, a bipartisan commission that Congress created in 2016 to plan celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday; proceeds went to Feeding America, which calls itself the largest domestic hunger-relief organization in the United States.

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“No politics — just purpose” is how America250 Chair Rosie Rios described the night in remarks from the stage, and it wasn’t hard to interpret the distinction she was seeking to draw between her group and Freedom 250, Trump’s rival semiquincentennial initiative that organized Saturday’s windblown event on the National Mall (not to mention an earlier concert by Vanilla Ice that was called off due to the threat of rain).

But here’s the thing: Compared with the president’s celebration, where he complained about his treatment by the justice system and suggested we should refer to his current term as his third, the show at the Coliseum really did feel like a politics-free zone — the somewhat rare occasion these days when folks from different walks of life come together just to listen to music and drink overpriced micheladas.

Said Stapleton not long into his set: “I won’t waste time talking.”

America250’s success was hardly a sure thing. Despite the relatively low price, tickets moved slowly in the weeks before the concert; one guy I talked to Saturday told me he’d paid six bucks for a discounted pass. Yet to my eyes the Coliseum was close to full by the time Stapleton came on.

The country singer was as solid and soulful as always, snarling gently through “Bad as I Used to Be,” then trading loving harmonies with his wife, Morgane, in “Millionaire.” He closed with “Tennessee Whiskey,” of course — a trusty yet somehow un-shopworn piece of Americana that’s earned a place on the shelf next to Ray Charles’ “Georgia on My Mind” and Willie Nelson’s “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground.”

Smashing Pumpkins was perhaps a stranger fit for an explicitly patriotic event — “The world is a vampire,” frontman Billy Corgan sneered in “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” — yet the band sounded sharp and punchy in the ’90s alt-rock hits that have brought zoomers and even Gen Alpha kids into its audience.

Billed not inaccurately on the concert’s poster as “the legendary Chaka Khan,” the 73-year-old funk doyenne flexed her vocal chops in jammy renditions of “Ain’t Nobody” and “Tell Me Something Good” and got people hoisting their drinks for “I’m Every Woman.” Morris, who’d flown in from New York after attending her pal Taylor Swift’s wedding on Friday night, made an improbably smooth segue between her and Zedd’s synthed-up “The Middle” and the rustic “My Church.”

As the show’s host, Queen Latifah dispensed uplifting thoughts about American idealism throughout the evening but also got a slot of her own to do her classic “U.N.I.T.Y.” with help from a rambunctious drum line. It’s an unapologetic message song about demanding respect, and what was moving about hearing it here is that nobody seemed put off by that idea.

I’ll wave a flag for that.

Here are more photos from Saturday’s concert:

Chaka Khan performs.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Queen Latifah hosted the show.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

A couple in patriotic garb share a kiss.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Smashing Pumpkins performs.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

A concertgoer enjoys confetti.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Maren Morris performs.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

July 5 (UPI) — President Donald Trump called the United States’ 250 years an “unmatched achievement” during his Fourth of July speech in Washington, D.C., on Saturday.

Trump’s address was delayed late into the evening due to severe storms that caused a two-hour evacuation of the National Mall. The storms followed on the back of a heatwave on the east coast.

The president took to the podium at 11:15 p.m. EDT. His speech echoed his past speeches, touting the “golden age of America,” repeating unfounded claims of election fraud and calling for the passage of the SAVE Act in Congress.

“We want to keep America great, and we will do so by approving the Save America Act,” Trump said. “You won’t have cheating on the elections anymore. It’s very simple.”

As Trump listed off a series of U.S. military achievements, he included the January operation to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and the war in Iran, which he compared to the sinking of the Spanish Armada in the Anglo-Spanish War in 1588.

“Much like our recent victory, by sinking the entire Iranian navy,” Trump said. “One hundred and fifty-nine ships to the bottom of the sea, all done in just a moment’s time.”

Trump also focused his attention on communism, which he called a threat to the United States.

“We don’t want communists in our country,” Trump said. “It never worked and it never will work.”

Can you tell the story of America in 10 movies? Maybe so — at least a version of it — if you stick to moments of serious national friction and those rare instances when a filmmaker meets the mood with a true vision. If you want tearjerkers about red, white and blue triumph, this is not your list (although the Space Race drama “The Right Stuff” always does the trick). Meanwhile, our current state of disunity and division will find its own expressions in time; start with “Civil War,” though it’s a bit too soon. Instead, we thought about historical pivot points and built a list of classics, along with a few alternatives for each title.

The Great Depression

Henry Fonda, left, in the 1940 film “The Grapes of Wrath,” directed by John Ford.

(20th Century-Fox)

‘The Grapes of Wrath’ (1940)

America is a broken place in John Ford’s poetically charged adaptation of the Steinbeck novel: a downbeat landscape of Oklahoma dust storms, long shadows and the teetering sight of a car turned into a truck transporting a family westward. This will always be one of those essential movies about a particular national dream — not just a myth — of emerging from economic catastrophe and being reborn in the promised land of California. Ford, with the instincts of a showman, foregrounded hope on the horizon via inspired performances by Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell’s pragmatic Ma Joad getting the final word (“We keep a’coming…”). But there is still so much darkness in “The Grapes of Wrath,” especially in its scenes of John Qualen’s Muley Graves, crumpled on the ground, suddenly a squatter on his own piece of land. He’s no match for the bulldozers. As long as the idea remains that property gets its purpose from those tending it, working it, nourishing it and dying on it, the film will never become a relic. Its binding values of labor and community remain relevant, even if today’s Hollywood rarely speaks to them. — Joshua Rothkopf

See also: “Modern Times,” “Sullivan’s Travels,” “Bonnie and Clyde”

Postwar optimism

Michael Hall, from left, Teresa Wright, Myrna Loy and Fredric March in the 1946 movie “The Best Years of Our Lives.”

(Samuel Goldwyn Productions)

‘The Best Years of Our Lives’ (1946)

World War II ended with ticker-tape parades and soaring expectations. William Wyler’s sweeping drama arrived just as America was beginning to reckon with what coming home actually meant. Harold Russell, a real-life veteran who lost both hands during the war, plays a sailor struggling to imagine a future with the woman he loves. Dana Andrews is a decorated bombardier who returns to the same soda fountain job he held before the war, discovering that military heroism doesn’t necessarily translate into peacetime opportunity. The movie became one of the biggest hits of 1946 because it understood a challenge facing millions of Americans: The war had given the country a common purpose but peace meant each person had to find their own. Yet for all its honesty about that dislocation, the film remains remarkably hopeful. Its faith that people can rebuild their lives and start over feels almost radical today. Seen from the distance of eight decades, it feels like a dispatch from a country that had just survived a catastrophe and still believed its best days lay ahead. — Josh Rottenberg

See also: “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “Miracle on 34th Street,” “Giant”

Capitalism, unchecked

Daniel Day-Lewis in the 2007 movie “There Will Be Blood,” directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.

(Paramount Vantage)

‘There Will Be Blood’ (2007)

“I drink your milkshake — I drink it up!” Oil man Daniel Plainview’s deranged metaphor, allegedly taken from congressional transcripts from the 1920s Teapot Dome scandal in which Interior Secretary Albert Fall defended the practice of directional oil drilling, a.k.a. drainage, became a catchphrase when “There Will Be Blood” arrived in 2007. Elon Musk probably has a T-shirt in the back of a drawer emblazoned with the line. It epitomizes the American ethos of extracting resources that belong to someone else and then brutally bragging about the beatdown. Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie is part history lesson, part horror film, which, when it comes to chronicling the American experience, feels like the perfect blend. The oil man’s exploits take place more than a century ago, but seem particularly relevant now with Musk newly minted as the world’s first trillionaire and income inequality rapidly widening. Plainview confesses, “I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed.” It neatly sums up the endgame in which we find ourselves — and his vanquishing of the preacher Eli speaks to what we worship in the United States. He’s finished and sometimes it feels like we are too. — Glenn Whipp

See also: “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “WALL-E,” “Sorry to Bother You”

Post-Vietnam/Watergate cynicism

‘Nashville’ (1975)

Ronee Blakley in the 1975 movie “Nashville,” directed by Robert Altman.

(Paramount Pictures)

Could one movie capture the breadth of emotions around this year’s 250th anniversary celebrations as well as Robert Altman did the bicentennial? As the country was still reeling from the assassinations and discord of the 1960s, the despair of Vietnam and the scandals of Nixon and Watergate, there was a soul-baring uncertainty to what it even meant to be an American. With 24 main characters interwoven around the town of Nashville, home of country music and intersecting political undercurrents, the film tries to make sense of the chaos. While the conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s are seen as the most direct response to the moral malaise of the moment, Altman finds an unexpected way to gild his innate skepticism with a light filigree of hope, a complex quilt of characters capturing the contradictions inherent in the American identity. And yet as cynical and beaten-down as the film’s viewpoint can often be, there is still a spark of decency and perseverance. That is the America that Altman celebrates, even as he lets no one off the hook. Few films capture the hum of life in all its maddening beauty quite like this one. — Mark Olsen

See also: “Blow Out,” “The Conversation,” “The Parallax View”

‘Network’ (1976)

Robert Duvall, Faye Dunaway and William Holden in the 1976 movie “Network,” directed by Sidney Lumet.

(MGM Studios / Getty Images)

Much has been made over the years about how prescient this film was, as if screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky and director Sidney Lumet saw the constrictive dangers of corporate consolidation in the distance and came back to warn us. But if these rumbling premonitions have remained true across multiple eras of an ever-evolving media landscape, have we really learned anything? Perhaps we really do live in a “demented slaughterhouse of a world,” as the unhinged newsman Howard Beale says in one of his apocalyptic broadcasts, and have all along. Maybe what “Network” nails most of all is apathy: that even the most righteously committed can have their heads turned from their true goals and then struggle to get back on track. What may be most shocking rewatching the film today is the suspicion that some current media figures see the maneuverings of villainous executives played by Robert Duvall and Faye Dunaway and somehow think that they were the heroes of the story all along. Not even Lumet or Chayefsky would have predicted that. — Mark Olsen

See also: “Broadcast News,” “The Insider,” “Nightcrawler”

Gentrification and racial tensions

Spike Lee, left, and Danny Aiello in the 1989 movie “Do the Right Thing.”

(Universal Pictures)

‘Do the Right Thing’ (1989)

Spike Lee’s masterpiece was met with hand-wringing when it arrived in theaters 37 summers ago, with white critics fretting how “urban audiences” would react to its shocking ending of brutality and angry protest. “If some audiences go wild, [Lee] is partly responsible,” critic David Denby wrote in New York Magazine. Nobody rioted. “Do the Right Thing” made some people uncomfortable because it told truths from a Black perspective that they did not want to accept. That unwillingness to have hard conversations and learn from them remains evident today as we prepare to celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday without an honest reckoning of the anguish that lies beneath the storybook version of America’s founding. The paradox is that Lee’s movie is itself that conversation, its characters engaging in a series of arguments, evenhanded and empathetic, about how race affects the lives we lead in America. Until our country engages in that dialogue, nothing will change. For a moment, the Black Lives Matter movement signaled a willingness to grapple with the past. But the pendulum swung and we’re back to days of “Driving Miss Daisy” denial. But “Do the Right Thing” remains with us, its urgency and relevance undiminished, waiting for an America open to listen and live up to its idealized aspirations. — Glenn Whipp

See also: “Get Out,” “12 Years a Slave,” “Fruitvale Station”

The rise of the yuppies

Roddy Piper, left, and Keith David in the 1988 movie “They Live,” directed by John Carpenter.

(Universal Pictures)

‘They Live’ (1988)

“I believe in America,” the guy says, but we’re not in the private office of some all-powerful Corleone. Rather, this is a working man in a plaid shirt and denim. As the sun sets on his sad L.A. tent city (inspired by the real-life Justiceville), he only wants what everyone else wants: a hard day’s work for fair pay and the chance to get ahead. “It’ll come,” he says, serenely. He doesn’t know he’s in a John Carpenter movie — Roddy Piper was never put to better on-screen use — and that those keeping him down are, in fact, aliens hypnotizing us into an unseeing stupor as they carve up the world’s resources. Released at the tail end of Reaganomics, Carpenter’s most politically forward thriller now feels like a decoder ring for ’80s-era greed, detachment, complacency and ruthlessness. Carpenter meant us to to see his bug-eyed space invaders as yuppies. He also intended us to question whether we were selling each other out, just to join the “human power elite” for a tiny piece of pie. “They Live” looms just on the other side of appreciated. Many genre films say what our more prestigious dramas can’t about the creeping forces that are changing America; this one still feels like it’s getting away with murder. — Joshua Rothkopf

See also: “American Psycho,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” “After Hours”

’80s women in the workplace

Harrison Ford, left, Melanie Griffith and Sigourney Weaver in the 1988 movie “Working Girl.”

(20th Century Fox)

‘Working Girl’ (1988)

Mike Nichols’ zeitgeisty hit opens on a shot of the Statue of Liberty hoisting her torch like a paycheck. Down by her green toes, Melanie Griffith’s Staten Island secretary Tess McGill ferries to Manhattan to type memos for important men. Tess has a job, not a career. But 1988 was the first year that female undergraduates outnumbered men on college campuses. Even without a degree, Tess is ambitious to climb the corporate ladder — once she swaps out her practical white sneakers for a pair of pumps. The script by Kevin Wade throws up hurdles of sexism and class snobbery, never sugarcoating how Tess’ male co-workers treat her like a blow-up doll. (Critics dismissed Griffith, too, until this performance earned her an Oscar nomination.) Yet note how her Ivy League-educated boss Katharine (Sigourney Weaver) isn’t immune to harassment either; she’s just mastered how to parry her colleagues’ advances. Fantastic as it is, “Working Girl’s” core flaw is that Tess can’t snag her seat at the conference table until she yanks Katharine out of it. Weaver said that when she showed the script to real-life working girls on Wall Street, they asked, “This awful secretary steals your man, wears your clothes, takes your office — who’s going to sympathize with her?” Millions did and still do. — Amy Nicholson

See also: “9 to 5,” “Baby Boom,” “Silkwood”

Digital alienation

Justin Timberlake, left, and Jesse Eisenberg in the 2010 movie “The Social Network,” directed by David Fincher.

(Merrick Morton / Columbia TriStar )

‘The Social Network’ (2010)

In 2010, Apple introduced the iPad, Instagram launched its app and Silicon Valley still looked to many tech-besotted Americans like a force for progress. At a moment when technology companies were promising to bring people closer together, David Fincher’s acerbic drama about the founding of Facebook had a darker theory about why people wanted to connect in the first place. Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay traces Facebook’s creation back to a very old human desire: getting noticed by the people who matter. Instead of celebrating innovation, the movie unfolds through lawsuits and broken friendships. At Harvard, Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg fixates on the exclusive final clubs that won’t quite accept him. It’s a surprisingly sour approach for a Facebook origin story. Years before social media became a political battleground, Fincher was focused on something more basic — the fear that everyone else had been invited to a party you couldn’t get into. The movie ends with Zuckerberg alone at a computer, refreshing the Facebook page of the woman who dumped him and waiting for her to accept his friend request. More than 15 years later, it’s still hard to think of a better image for the loneliness and insecurity lurking beneath our connected lives. — Josh Rottenberg

See also: “Her,” “Eighth Grade,” “Ingrid Goes West”

Post-9/11 anxieties

A scene from the 2004 movie “Team America: World Police,” directed by Trey Parker.

(Melinda Sue Gordon / Paramount Pictures)

‘Team America: World Police’ (2004)

To add drama to the ennui over the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign, “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone pledged to immediately produce a silly sitcom about the winner. “That’s My Bush!” ran for eight episodes in the spring of 2001, with plans to spin off into a feature called “George W. Bush and the Secret of the Glass Tiger.” But the Sept. 11 attacks changed everything, including the work of satirists. Parker and Stone pivoted to “Team America: World Police,” a bomb-throwing comedy about our country’s napalm-strength combination of naiveté and swagger. To prevent an attack hailed as “9/11 times a thousand,” a squadron of puppet commandos blows up the planet themselves. The dark joke is these marionettes aren’t behaving much differently than the action heroes who have shaped the national id — it’s a through-the-looking-glass lens into our Hollywoodized view of the globe, down to the Parisian streets made of cobblestone croissants. At once straight-faced, sacrilegious and scatological, “Team America” needed nine tries to eke past the MPAA. Yet in divided times, it was a unifier. The political spectrum from Kim Jong Il to Alec Baldwin got equally savaged and the film’s eff-yeah patriotic theme song (“Rock and roll! The internet! Slavery!”) could even be heard blaring from real-life tanks in Fallujah. — Amy Nicholson

See also: “Eddington,” “Idiocracy,” “Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay”

Happy Birthday, America!

You turned 250 on Saturday and, honestly, you don’t look a day over 249. (Ha ha.)

Seriously, it’s perfectly understandable why there’s more gray on your scalp and deeper worry lines on your face. This last year has been another challenging one, to say the least. (And we thought the one cataloged 12 months ago in this space was rough.)

The country is caught up in an unpopular, on-again, off-again war with Iran that was recklessly launched by President Trump with far more swagger than foresight. In an utterly predictable move, Iran choked off the the Strait of Hormuz, a vital passageway for the world’s oil, sending gasoline prices skyrocketing. Though they’ve fallen since the announcement of a shaky ceasefire agreement, the cost of filling up is still significantly higher than a year ago.

Of course, costlier oil means virtually everything else has become more expensive. Trump was reelected in good part because he vowed to tame inflation on his very first day in office. Instead, it’s reached a three-year high.

The ground beef served up at many July 4 cookouts costs 75 cents a pound more than it did a year ago. A package of hamburger buns is up 15 cents. The price of hot dogs and other picnic staples have also increased, along with just about every other item at the grocery store.

Chew that over with your corn on the cob. (Up roughly 2.5% from July 2025.)

Meanwhile, Trump enriched himself to the tune of $2.2 billion during his first year in office alone. Treating the U.S. treasury like his personal cash cow, the president has lavished hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on vanity projects such as a personally kitted out Air Force One — a “gift” from Qatar that Trump plans to keep after retirement — and a gilded White House ballroom, rising where the demolished East Wing used to stand. Plans are underway for a grand, marble arch in Washington celebrating, well, you know who.

At the same time, Trump has squandered money and resources pursuing political vendettas, persecution of his enemies and fruitless investigations like the one probing “theft” of the 2020 election and “vandalism” at the algae-clogged Reflecting Pool he promised and failed to rehab.

All this while millions of Americans have lost healthcare coverage and/or federal food assistance, all thanks to the One Big Billionaire Bounty bill that Trump signed into law a year ago.

It’s all a bit unnerving isn’t it, America? You’re on edge in a way you haven’t been in at least a generation.

In Minnesota, in the dead of winter, two of your citizens were gunned down by federal officers as they engaged in that most American of exercises, registering dissent against the policies of their government. From sea to shining sea, innocent Americans have been arrested — and sometimes shipped abroad — and immigrant communities cower in fear of federal agents who often seem bent more on meeting deportation quotas than meting out justice.

You’re divided, America, in ways no one alive has ever seen.

It starts at the very top. Trump acts as though he’s president of a favored rump group — his political supporters — rather than the nation as a whole. He’s used your 250th birthday not to celebrate those many grand and glorious things that hold us together as Americans but to bask in the tanning-bed glow of his immeasurable self-regard.

But, heck, if it’s any consolation on this star-spangled holiday weekend, the country has been through worse. Much worse. And you, America, have not only survived but in many ways grown stronger by surmounting obstacles, facing down your flaws and overcoming some knee-buckling, soul-crushing challenges.

Slavery. Civil war. Racist exclusionary laws. Genocide against indigenous peoples. Two worldwide conflicts. Depression. Financial crises. And too many deadly natural disasters — fire, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes — to enumerate.

Your treatment of some Americans, it should be said, hasn’t always been fair and just. It still isn’t.

People are despairing over the Supreme Court and its genuflecting deference to the president. The justices of its conservative majority have done just about everything short of handing Trump a crown and scepter to reign as a virtually untouchable, imperial president.

But it’s worth noting that earlier court majorities held that Black Americans — “beings of an inferior order,” in the words of the wretched Dred Scott decision — could be denied citizenship, that racial segregation was constitutional and that compulsory sterilization based on eugenics was perfectly fine from a legal standpoint.

That ugly, sordid history won’t necessarily make anyone feel better about the current state of affairs, nor should it. But it does offer some perspective and, with it, hope.

This weekend is best celebrated honoring the country’s many good things and the bright, shining place that America aspires to be, with liberty and justice for all. So chin up! Have another slice of birthday cake, America, and don’t worry about the calories — you really do look terrific for 250!

Going forward it’s up to us, your citizens, to keep working toward that more perfect union mentioned in the preamble to the Constitution. Whatever ails you, America, the remedy resides with we the people and the power we hold, particularly at the ballot box.

Unhappy with the wrecking crew that’s heedlessly chain-sawed federal programs and allowed Trump to money-grub with both fists, defile the White House and undermine our rule of law? Send a message and vote ‘em out, starting in November’s midterm election. And bear in mind the damage that’s been wrought come the 2028 presidential race.

Don’t stop believing that, as dark and difficult as things may seem right now, better days lie ahead.

That undimmed and abiding faith is what makes America great.