creation

Republican infighting crescendoed in the aftermath of California voters overwhelmingly approving Democratic-friendly redistricting plan this week that may undercut the GOP’s control of Congress and derail President Trump’s polarizing agenda.

The state GOP chairwoman was urged to resign and former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who championed the creation of the state’s independent redistricting commission, was called “cowardly” by one top GOP leader for not being more involved in the campaign.

Leaders of the Republican-backed committees opposing the ballot measure, known as Proposition 50, were questioned about how they spent nearly $58 million in the special election after such a dismal outcome.

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, the once prodigious Republican fundraiser, reportedly vowed earlier in the campaign that he could raise $100 million for the opposition but ended up delivering a small fraction of that amount.

Assemblyman Carl DeMaio (R-San Diego), a conservative firebrand, called on state GOP chair Corrin Rankin to step down and faulted other Republican leaders and longtime party operatives for the ballot measure’s failure, calling them “derelict of duty and untrustworthy and incompetent.”

“Unless serious changes are made at the party, the midterms are going to be a complete disaster,” DeMaio said, also faulting the other groups opposing the effort. “We need accountability. There needs to be a reckoning because otherwise the lessons won’t be learned. The old guard needs to go. The old guard has failed us too many times. This is the latest failure.”

Rankin pushed back against the criticism, saying the state party was the most active GOP force in the final stretch of the election. Raising $11 million during the final three weeks of the campaign, the party spent it on mailers, digital ads and text messages, as well as organizing phone banks and precinct walking, she said.

Former Speaker of the House and California Republican Kevin McCarthy speaks to the press at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 19, 2023.

(Samuel Corum / AFP via Getty Images)

“We left it all on the field,” Rankin said Wednesday morning at a Sacramento press conference about a federal lawsuit California Republicans filed arguing that Proposition 50 is unconstitutional. “We were the last man standing … to reach out to Republicans and make sure they turned out.”

Responding to criticism that their effort was disorganized, including opposition campaign mailers being sent to voters who had already cast ballots, Rankin said the party would conduct a post-election review of its efforts. But she added that she was extremely proud of the work her team did in the “rushed special election.”

Barring successful legal challenges, the new California congressional districts enacted under Proposition 50 will go into effect before the 2026 election. The new district maps favor Democratic candidates and were crafted to unseat five Republican incumbents, which could erase Republicans’ narrow edge in the the U.S. House of Representatives.

If Democrats win control of the body, Trump policy agenda will likely be stymied and the president and members of his administration cold face multiple congressional investigations.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and other California Democrats proposed Proposition 50 in response to Trump urging elected officials in Texas and other GOP-led states to redraw their congressional districts to increase the number of Republicans elected to the House next year.

The new California congressional boundaries voters approved Tuesday could give Democrats the opportunity to pick up five seats in the state’s 52-member congressional delegation.

Proposition 50 will change how California determines the boundaries of congressional districts. The measure asked voters to approve new congressional district lines designed to favor Democrats for the 2026, 2028 and 2030 elections, overriding the map drawn by the state’s independent redistricting commission.

Some Republicans lamented that Schwarzenegger was not more involved in the election. The movie star championed the creation of the independent commission in 2010, his final year in office. He campaigned for the creation of similar bodies to fight partisan drawing of district lines across the nation after leaving office.

Shawn Steel, one of California’s three representatives on the Republican National Committee, called Schwarzenegger “a cowardly politician.”

“Arnold decided to sit it out,” Steel said. “Arnold just kind of raised the flag and immediately went under the desk.”

Steel said that the former governor failed to follow through on the messages he repeatedly delivered about the importance of independent redistricting.

“He could have had his name on the ballot as a ballot opponent,” Steel said. “He turned it down. So I’d say, with Arnold, just disappointing, but not surprised. That’s his political legacy.”

Schwarzenegger’s team pushed back at this criticism as misinformed.

“We were clear from the beginning that he was not going to be a part of the campaign and was going to speak his mind,” said Daniel Ketchell, a spokesman for the former governor. “His message was very clear and non-partisan. When one campaign couldn’t even criticize gerrymandering in Texas, it was probably hard for voters to believe they actually cared about fairness.”

Schwarzenegger spoke out against Proposition 50 a handful of times during the election, including at an appearance at USC that was turned into a television ad by one of the anti-Proposition 50 committees that appeared to go dark before election day.

On election day, he emailed followers about gut health, electrolytes, protein bars, fitness and conversations to increase happiness. There was no apparent mention of the Tuesday election.

The Democratic-led California Legislature in August voted to place Proposition 50 on the November ballot, costing nearly $300 million, and setting off a sprint to Tuesday’s special election.

The opponents were vastly outspent by the ballot measure’s supporters, who contributed nearly $136 million to various efforts. That financial advantage, combined with Democrats’ overwhelming edge in voter registration in California, were main contributors to the ballot measure’s success. When introduced in August, Proposition 50 had tepid support and its prospects appeared uncertain.

Nearly 64% of the nearly 8.3 million voters who cast ballots supported Proposition 50, while 36% opposed it as of Wednesday night, according to the California Secretary of State’s office.

In addition to the state Republican Party, two main campaign committees opposed Proposition 50, including the one backed by McCarthy. A separate group was funded by more than $32 million from major GOP donor Charles Munger Jr., the son of a billionaire who was Warren Buffet’s right-hand man, and who bankrolled the creation of the independent congressional redistricting commission in 2010.

Representatives of the two committees, who defended their work Tuesday night after the election was called moments after the polls closed, saying they could not overcome the vast financial disadvantage and that the proposition’s supporters must be held to their promises to voters such as pushing for national redistricting reform, did not respond to repeated requests for comment on Wednesday.

Newsom’s committee supporting Proposition 50 had prominent Democrats stumping for the effort, including former President Obama starring in ads supporting the measure.

That’s in stark contrast to the opposition efforts. Trump was largely absent, possibly because he is deeply unpopular among Californians and the president does not like to be associated with losing causes.

The summer rain in Mexico City has been driving Meme del Real crazy. “This season of permanent torrential downpour gets to a point where you’re like, ‘Enough,’ he says with a sigh. “There’s people who really enjoy it, but I’m done. It’s too much introspection to be in here all day, to not be able to go outside. It forces you to try other things, to find a conversation within that rather than a resistance.”

Surrender has been a big theme lately in the life of the longtime vocalist and keyboardist of legendary Mexican alt-rock group Café Tacvba. Del Real — a Swiss Army Knife of a musician who has produced for the likes of Julieta Venegas and Natalia Lafourcade, among others — has been unpacking his life after a recent move back to the Mexican capital, after five years in the idyllic Valle de Bravo. About two hours away from CDMX, the lakeside town became his district of solitude.

It was in this escape from city life that the singer-songwriter was able to be quiet enough to tap into something beyond himself. With his own studio, a broad space overlooking a forest, he had the mental space to look inward. Perhaps more importantly, he gave himself permission to welcome the inspiration that arrived without him seeking it.

“It’s not that I went to this place and said, ‘OK, now I’m going to find inspiration.’ It was more of a tension within myself that naturally unraveled,” says Meme of his “Walden” moment. “From that exercise of exploring old songs and ideas in process, something started to bloom within me in a way that had never happened before. It was a moment that invited me into a solitary process that I hadn’t undertaken with any formality or intention. If these songs have anything to do with where I was physically at the time, I do think that distance I had from everything manifested itself as music.”

The songs on Del Real’s first solo album — the title yet to be revealed — plumb the depths of silence and sonic expansion. He is unpretentious in his experiments and unafraid to get playful. “Tumbos” is a warbling electronic love song intercepted at times by plinking bachata strings. Del Real swelters on futuristic bolero “Incomprensible,” which takes the old-school Cuban torch-song genre and pitches its emblematic guitar to psychedelic new heights. Atmosphere is everything here: Two of the soon-to-be-released tracks border on ambient, zeroing in on the sounds of church bells and chirping birds and the expansive feeling of mushrooms blooming across a forest floor.

These little mountains of fire blaze with a gentle heat emanating from Del Real’s voice. Die-hards and casual fans of Café Tacvba have heard “Eres” at least in passing, a smash from the group’s 2003 album, “Cuatro Caminos,” that features Del Real on lead vocals. He’s still singing about love: Careening norteña-inspired “Embeces” sees Del Real’s voice soar over warbled trumpets, and lead single “Princesa” layers cinematic orchestration with trip-hop beats and sweltering lyrics about failed promises and proclamations of loyalty.

For those who can’t get enough, Del Real is set to preview some of the new music with a special performance on Sept. 2 at the Grammy Museum.

“These songs arrived, and I couldn’t look the other way. It was an instinct that was stronger than me, a now-or-never moment,” says Del Real. “I’ve found that every unknown and every challenge has left me with a lesson. When I’m onstage [with Café Tacvba], I play and sing, but I also love to dance and express myself with my body. Before we can play, when we’re children, we hear a rhythm and dance. It doesn’t matter if you look ridiculous, but you made something. It’s better to make a fool of yourself and experiment rather than not live what you’re feeling.”

De Los spoke with Del Real over Zoom from Mexico City as he’s settling into a number of beginnings: a new home, a new daily rhythm and his first solo project, which is out next month.

There are so many places where artists go to isolate and channel, but you weren’t looking for that at all. Listening to the album, I heard the parallels between the songs and the space that natural environments bring. There are two tracks that border on ambient, focusing on the sounds of a church bell and a small sound that grows into an encompassing roar.
The creative act is intuitive and spontaneous, and I think it makes a symmetry with the cycles and forms of nature. Having such a tangible way to witness creation left a deep impression on me, to be in such an exuberant forest coexisting with so much.

How was making this solo record different from making a Café Tacvba record?
I have a certain experience of creation with the band — of making an album, a project, a video, a tour, a spectacle — but these songs manifested themselves almost like they rose out of the floor to meet me. At my old house, the studio I made was surrounded by a massive forest. I really felt like I was yet another element of nature in that cycle of life that I had to live there. Something bloomed in that moment for me. More than the result, the experience itself for me was its own project, and it’s been so personally valuable to me that anything that comes of that is a consequence, an extra gift. The process was transformative, like nature itself, something that couldn’t be controlled or manipulated.

I love that you describe the songs as arriving; that’s very different than creating with the intention of connecting to a muse. To your point about movement, there’s so much of it here: bachata, cumbia, electronic music … so much to dance to.
Everything you describe came about very organically. My dad was a musician, and he devoted his life to music. At home, my mom and dad and siblings and I all grew up hearing a lot of music across genres. I got very familiar. Watching my dad [on the trumpet] with his orchestra play at parties, specifically all of these formal Latin American genres to dance to …

When I started making the songs, the genres rose out pretty organically. If it came out sounding like Ministry or a norteña or a bolero or disco or punk, then that’s what it was. If creating doesn’t have that playful factor, if it doesn’t translate honesty, then it becomes so intellectualized. I think it’s a balance between spontaneity, a game between the organic, the intellectual, the conceptual. When I listened to all the songs, I really didn’t know if it was an album. I approached Gustavo Santaolalla [Godfather of Latin rock] to get his feedback, and that’s when it became clear to me that something was happening.

The songs were there, as I built them there in this place I described to you, like beyond just composing on guitar, piano and making a demo, it was like, “Well, what if I add something else?” I started experimenting, and before I knew it, there were already quite robust and complex arrangements in most of them. But another thing is that, when I [would] bring a demo to [Café Tacvba], I [would] sing it, and that [was] it. But in this case, the same thing. Gustavo told me, “Hey, one of the things that’s interesting is the way you’re singing … What’s happening on a vocal level, that seems to me to be revealing a very clear picture of you at this moment.” So, nothing, it stayed that way.

When I was trying to find the throughline here, I was thinking about the subject matter: There’s a lot of love and yearning here. Would you consider yourself a romantic?
Based on some interviews I’ve been doing, they haven’t asked me this question, but the term “romantic” has come up. And it’s not that I’ve thought about it or assumed it, but I think that if romantic means, in my case, finding a translation of what I feel and what I reflect on and resonating well with it, then yes.

I’ve also found myself — who hasn’t in these times? — being attentive and reflecting on the issues that are happening around the world, all the horrors of certain situations and in certain regions. But I definitely find that there is beauty in human relationships or in personal relationships, in relationships with your personal, universal, cosmic or internal ecosystem, with paradoxes, with what is opposed. I don’t know if that’s romantic, but that’s it. Even at the end of the world, in the midst of so much horror, love and beauty are the things that give us the desire to want to go on, right?

This album is so sonically forward-thinking, and I’d say it’s aligned to the current zeitgeist of genre mixing. Where do you situate it?
I am also very attracted to the way in which I don’t understand much of what is happening with these new generations and all the music, all the art and creation that is taking place. It seems that, as in other eras, attention was focused on the situations that were happening around them, socially and politically, and there was a lot of talk about it and criticism was made. Today, it seems that this generation is not observing that, but I have discovered in my theory that discourse is more powerful precisely because it is not talked about directly, but rather it is talked about as, “I am going to have a good time and enjoy it because this is coming to an end … I have no choice but to take what I have and what I can do and what I can experience with my gang, with my people, and with this global digital community.”

I find that very powerful and very sad at the same time. I mean, it’s very sad to think that there is a generation that sees the world as ending. That’s my take on it — that there’s little hope, that everything is so complex that it’s better not to look at that. “Just look at what’s in front of me, because I’m young and because if I don’t take advantage of my youth to have a good time right now, I don’t know if I’ll make it to the next stage. Or I don’t see how.”

In our time, at least in my time, I think there was more. The outlook was clearer. You could see further ahead.

This interview was conducted in Spanish, translated, edited and condensed for clarity.

Colorado football coach Deion Sanders addressed his health issues Monday during a news conference, acknowledging that he’d kept the worst of it a secret, not even informing his sons or his team.

Sanders said he had his bladder removed in May to address a cancerous tumor. His scan looked normal from the vascular side, he said, but a visit to Janet Kukreja, Sanders’ doctor at the University of Colorado Cancer Center, revealed the tumor.

Sanders, 57, opted for a bladder removal and creation of a new bladder to remove the cancer from the organ. He said he was fortunate and urged others not to delay getting medical attention when symptoms occur.

“Let’s stop being ashamed of it,” he said he decided. “Let’s deal with it. Let’s deal with it head on.

“This wasn’t easy. Everyone, get checked out. Because if it wasn’t for me getting tested for something else, they wouldn’t have stumbled upon this. …. This could have been a whole other gathering if I hadn’t. It’s been tough. I think I dropped about 25 pounds.”

He said urinating is, well, different now.

“I can’t pee like I used to pee,” he said. “I depend on Depends, if you know what I mean.”

Sanders said he has returned to coaching, and smiled when he said folks shouldn’t be surprised if they see a portable toilet on the sidelines during games this fall.

Sanders had been absent for several months, and he lauded his coaching staff for picking up the slack and not asking too many questions. He has long had blood circulation issues in his legs that led to the amputation of two toes and several surgeries since 2021.

“Thank God the [coaches] are good enough that I don’t have to babysit,” Sanders said. “They didn’t know. They found out yesterday like the rest of the team. The team that didn’t disclose this to anyone.”

July 15 (UPI) — Pennsylvanians and the nation will benefit from $100 billion in energy- and artificial intelligence-related investments announced on Tuesday to energize the nation’s growing AI economy.

The investments should create tens of thousands of new jobs for Pennsylvanians in the energy and AI sectors while helping the United States improve its economy and global AI standing, President Donald Trump said during Tuesday’s inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit in Pittsburgh.

“We’re here today because we believe America’s destiny is to dominate every industry and be the first in every technology,” Trump told attendees.

“That includes being the world’s No. 1 superpower in artificial intelligence,” he added.

The president said the United States is “way ahead of China” in AI development and has many plants under construction.

“China and other countries are racing to catch up to America having to do with AI,” Trump said.

“We’re not going to let them do it,” he said. “We have the great chips [and] the great everything.”

Trump said the United States is “going to be fighting them in a very friendly fashion,” adding that he and Chinese President Xi Jinping have a “great relationship.”

“Remaining the world’s leader in AI will require an enormous increase in energy production,” Trump told the audience.

He said “clean, beautiful coal” and oil production will be a key element in producing more electrical power to support AI endeavors in the United States and to stay ahead of China in AI development.

More than $56 billion in new energy infrastructure and $36 billion in new data projects were announced on Tuesday, the president said.

A $15 billion investment by Knighthead Capital Management will create the largest natural gas-fired power generation plant in North America in Homer City, Pa.

Google also is investing “billions and billions” to revitalize two hydropower facilities in the commonwealth, Trump added.

Westinghouse officials also have announced that the company will build several nuclear power plants throughout the nation to ensure the AI economy has ample energy available.

“A lot more than that will be announced in the coming weeks and months,” Trump added.

The president said 20 “leading technology and energy companies” are poised to invest in Pennsylvania to develop an AI economy that utilizes the commonwealth’s energy and technology assets, CBS News reported.

Many firms are investing elsewhere in the country, too, in order to support the nation’s AI economy, according to the New York Post.

Trump spoke for about 30 minutes during the hour-long Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, which was organized by Sen Dave McCormick, R-Pa., and held on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University.

Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and others joined Trump and McCormick to discuss energy matters and the growth of AI in the United States.

After years of soaring rents, increasingly out-of-reach home prices and an enduring homelessness crisis that touches every corner of the state, California is finally creating a state agency exclusively focused on housing issues.

You might wonder what took so long.

Earlier this year, Gov. Gavin Newsom introduced a proposal to split up the Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency — an awkward grab bag of disparate bureaucratic operations — into two fresh agencies: one just for housing and homelessness-related departments and one for everything else.

The Legislature had until July 4 to veto the plan. It didn’t (though some Republicans tried). Now the work of setting up California’s first housing agency begins.

Supporters of the bureaucratic reshuffle say the move is long overdue. In surveys, Californians regularly name housing costs and homelessness as among the state’s top concerns. That alone warrants the creation of a new Cabinet-level advisor to the governor, said Ray Pearl, executive director of the California Housing Consortium, which advocates for affordable housing development.

“A Cabinet-level secretary who will sit with other Cabinet secretaries, whose purview will be housing … that is elevating the agenda to the highest level,” he said.

Pearl, like virtually every expert interviewed for this article about the new agency, described the reorganization as “just the first step” in bringing much-needed order and efficiency to California’s network of funding programs for affordable housing.

“Simply moving people around and giving them a new business card doesn’t change the system,” he said.

A spokesperson for the governor stressed that the creation of a new housing agency is part of a broader effort by Newsom to prioritize one of California’s most vexing issues. Since taking the helm of state government in 2018, the governor has ramped up pressure on local governments to plan for more housing, urged them to clear encampments of unhoused Californians and pushed for legislation aimed at ramping up construction.

“This is the first administration to make this a part of our everyday conversation — putting a magnifying glass on the issue of homelessness and finding ways to effectively address it. These structural and policy changes are going to create a generational impact,” said spokesperson Tara Gallegos.

Among the seven Cabinet-level agencies, the BCSH has always seemed like the “everything else” wing of state government. Affordable housing grantmakers, lenders and urban planning regulators share agency letterhead with cannabis and alcohol industry overseers, professional licensors, car mechanic watchdogs and everyone at the California Horse Racing Board.

“We used to call it ‘The Island of Misfit Toys,’” said Claudia Cappio, who ran both the California Housing Finance Agency and the Department of Housing and Community Development in the years immediately before and after 2012 when both were packed into the newly created BCSH. “Imagine a staff meeting of all those things … I learned a lot about horse racing.”

Aside from giving housing and homelessness their own box atop Newsom’s organizational chart, the chief selling point of the reorganization has been to simplify the state’s hydra of affordable housing financing systems.

Currently, there is one state organization where affordable housing developers apply for loans, another where they go for most grants, a third where they apply for the federal tax credits that builders use to entice private investors to back their projects and a fourth for the bonds needed to secure many of those credits. This doesn’t include one-off programs for veterans, transit-oriented development and short-term housing for homeless people, which are sprinkled across state government.

Complicating things further, the tax credit and bond funding programs — the backbone of funding for affordable housing development across the country — aren’t even under the governor’s control. Those programs are run by the state’s independently elected treasurer.

“Many, many states have what is essentially a housing finance agency that controls the majority of affordable housing funds,” said Sarah Karlinsky, who directs research at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation. California’s programs are split up, which is unusual.

Beyond that, “what makes California so unique,” said Karlinksy, “is the fact that the resources are spread across two different constitutional officers.”

That fragmentation appears to be adding to the cost of construction in California. A Terner Center analysis this spring estimated that each additional public funding source delays a project by, on average, four months, and adds an additional $20,460 in costs per unit.

Affordable housing construction is already distinctly expensive here. Building a publicly funded project in California costs more than 2.5 times more per square foot than in both Texas and Colorado, a recent report from the Rand Institute found.

Will the new housing agency solve that problem? Not everyone is convinced.

Of the many ways in which the scarcity of affordable housing affects most people, “the lines on the org chart” don’t crack the “top 100 list,” Sen. Christopher Cabaldon, a Napa Democrat, said about the governor’s proposal at a hearing in March.

Cabaldon noted that executive reorganizations are a semi-regular feature of California governance. The Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency is itself the product of a reorganization which spun off California’s independent transportation agency.

“The dance of the secretaries we do constantly, always with grand ambitions,” said Cabaldon. “Simply saying that it’s going to cause more focus, that it will be streamlined, that it will cause leadership level action — but how?”

As written, the new housing agency will consist of the current agency’s housing-related entities along with a new Affordable Housing Finance Committee, which will be tasked with coordinating the housing subsidy programs currently under the governor’s control.

But the major funding sources managed by the treasurer’s office will remain where they are. The California Constitution wouldn’t have allowed Newsom to commandeer those functions from the independent treasurer even had he wanted to.

That’s a significant shortcoming, according to the Little Hoover Commission, the state government’s independent oversight agency, which reviewed the governor’s plan before it was passed along to the Legislature. In its final report, the commission recommended that the governor and treasurer strike a formal deal to “create a unified application and review process” for all the affordable finance programs under their respective purviews.

Neither the governor’s office nor the office of state Treasurer Fiona Ma would say whether or how they are pursuing that goal.

A single, unified application for every one of California’s public affordable housing funding programs has been the bureaucratic holy grail of California affordable developers and policy wonks since at least the mid-1990s. Though the reorganization stops short of requiring that, it set up both constitutional offices to better coordinate in the future, said Matt Schwartz, president of the California Housing Partnership, a nonprofit that advocates for affordable housing.

“There’s going to be a bit of diplomacy” between the two executive branches to work out a joint application, said Schwartz, who spoke to CalMatters earlier this year after the governor first introduced the proposal. “That’s the longer-term prize that many of us will be pushing to come out of this process.”

Some affordable housing advocates have urged lawmakers to be cautious in mushing the various bureaucracies together.

In a letter to four powerful Democratic legislators, the California Housing Consortium stressed that the application systems administered by the treasurer’s office already “function extremely well.”

That process “is not broken and doesn’t need fixing,” said Pearl, the consortium’s director. Before monkeying with it, he said, “let’s get the agency set up.”

Pearl and the consortium also noted that past legislation has already mandated the creation of a working group to propose a consolidated application. The findings of that group are due on July 1, 2026. That’s the same day the current BCSH is set to officially dissolve and the two new agencies will take its place.

That’s also just five months before statewide elections will be held to replace Newsom and Ma, giving voters a chance to decide who will shape the future of affordable housing policy in California.

Christopher writes for CalMatters, where this article originally appeared.

Kou Mariya hasn’t shown her work to her family. That’s because Mariya, not her real name, is living a dual identity, and to protect her privacy, only the most sacred of confidants — or business partners — can know her true persona.

Mariya, to her more than 84,000 followers on YouTube, is a friendly, flirtatious vampire singer, as excited to chat about her digitized outfits and accessories as she is to sing a late ’90s pop song. She performs as an animated avatar using motion capture technology, which matches her facial expressions and body movements to the drawn figure.

Mariya spends a significant portion of her days as this cartoon character, at once wholly real while being completely artificial. She is a professional performer, although her stage is virtual. Instead of a glimpse into a room or a home, her surroundings are fully drawn — she could be in a beach setting one day and an ornate office the next.

As a VTuber — that is, virtual YouTuber — Mariya is part of a movement, one led by those weaned on Japanese animation who are now finding ways to make fantasy world-building feel individualized and personal. We connect via video conferencing software, her location in the U.S. a secret, and Mariya appears in her anime form, her silver-white hair occasionally obscuring her welcoming oval eyes, which blink often as she speaks. Her voice is friendly and warm, and it ever-so-slightly dips into an upper register when she laughs or needs to emphasize a point. She nervously chuckles that she’ll be aged “so bad” when she admits the first anime she fell in love with was “Speed Racer.” Whether I’m talking to Mariya the vampire character or Mariya the performer is never quite clear.

Kou Mariya, hosting a Thursday night concert in Hollywood, is a friendly vampire VTuber.

(Kou Mariya)

This weekend Mariya will be hosting a concert in Hollywood with other popular VTubers. There will be live musicians, but the VTubers will be virtual. Mariya says she’ll be performing from an off-site location to protect her identity.

Those in Los Angeles will have multiple opportunities to take part in a VTuber crash course over the Fourth of July holiday. Mariya on Thursday will host the Fantastic Reality concert at the Vermont Hollywood, a performance that makes virtual and real musicians and features Ironmouse, a horned, operatic demon who was briefly the most subscribed streamer on Twitch.

Even more mainstream, a host of VTubers associated with Japanese firm Hololive will invade Dodger Stadium for the second year in a row. Saturday evening’s Hololive Night will feature three of company’s English-speaking talents — Ninomae Ina’nis, IRyS and Koseki Bijou — virtually cheering on the team, singing the seventh-inning stretch and then leading a post-game dance party on the field. A special event ticket will include playing cards of the VTubers.

Hololive, a division of Cover Corp., is one of the largest VTuber talent agencies in the world, with almost 90 active performers across its various divisions. The company’s U.S. office is based in L.A., and its partnership with the Dodgers is to recognize, in part, that the team has a large Japanese fanbase, thanks to megastar Shohei Ohtani. Cover CEO Motoaki Tanigo, however, has a broader goal, and that’s to further bring VTubers to the masses.

“There are two reasons,” Tanigo says, via a translator, for why Cover has targeted L.A. as one of its key markets. The first, he notes, is due to the fact that a large part of the company’s fanbase resides in the L.A. region. The second, he stresses, relates to his business goals, especially the video game firms Cover hopes to partner with. “Doing events in the Los Angeles area is not only important for our user engagement, but it’s a great opportunity to show to our business clients that we have a strong following.”

VTubers have averaged 50 billion YouTube views annually over the past three years, according to a recent YouTube Culture & Trends report. A YouTube sample of 300 virtual creators found that they drove 15 billion views across the site, with 1 billion coming from the U.S. alone. Almost all of these VTubers are steeped deeply in anime lore, culture and tone. And while there are popular male VTubers, a number of the most famous are female-facing. Cover’s roster, for instance, is more than three-quarters female.

Hololive characters on the Dodger Stadium scoreboard at last year’s event. Hololive Night returns on July 5.

(Cover Corp.)

“It’s very exciting,” says Susan Napier, author of “Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art” and professor at Tufts University who specializes in Japanese culture. “It allows for an enormous amount of creativity, and a real sense of ownership over your creation, and a way of playing and melding with your creation. People have been fans and identifying with favorite stories, anime and manga for years. This is, in a way, a very old phenomena. It’s people wanting to participate in a fantasy world that they love.”

Mariya notes she decided to become a VTuber during the worst days of the global pandemic of 2020. “Everyone was in front of their computers and had a sense of loneliness,” she says. “And VTubers [had] that sense of, ‘I’m not alone. I’m not trapped. There’s a whole world out there for me.’ Being a big fan of that, I wanted to try that myself. I did not expect to be able to make this into a career, but somehow people liked me, and I thought I could keep going with this.”

And how, of course, did she land on her character, a vampire with a bat clip in her hair and an open-chested cocktail server-style outfit? “That one is tricky because technically I was born a vampire,” Mariya says. “We’re not scary. We ask permission before entering doors, which is better than a lot of people. We do bite. That’s the only downside.” Right.

The Japan-led VTtuber trend predates the pandemic. The first proper virtual artist to gain fame is widely credited as Kizuna AI in 2016, but VTubers have grown alongside other similar developments. See, for instance, virtual concert artist Hatsune Miku, who performed at Coachella in 2024. VTubers are also closely aligned with video games, often streaming them for their fans. The game medium, of course, has long been associated with virtual avatars, be it Nintendo Mii figures, the personas of “Second Life” or today’s platforms of “Fortnite,” “Roblox” and “Minecraft.” And this summer, in one of the biggest releases of 2025, VTuber Usada Pekora has a role in the PlayStation 5 game “Death Stranding 2,” with famed director and auteur Hideo Kojima admitting he is a fan.

For creator, voice-over actor and Anime Expo attendee AmaLee, the rare VTuber who, while using a stage name, does show her face, anime’s fantastical yet mature storylines reached her as a young teen when she was exploring her creativity. “It’s bridging a gap,” she says of VTubing. “Ever since I was a teenager I loved anime. It’s music, beautiful animation and acting all in one. VTubing brings it into the real world. You can do so much with your VTuber lore story. You’re kind of creating your own anime.”

VTuber Ironmouse will perform at the Fantastic Reality concert on Thursday.

(Ironmouse)

The most appealing VTubers bring a level of real-life authenticity into their work. “If you go back and watch my very first streams, I’m very cemented in this cleanly elegant actor [persona],” AmaLee says. “My voice is different. I dropped it to be cooler. I realized quickly how hard that was to keep, and I didn’t like not being authentically me. I’m a little clumsy, a little blond and I have major tech issues.”

Mariya describes herself as introvert, saying she wouldn’t be streaming — or likely even performing — if it weren’t for VTubing.

“With VTubing, there’s a sense of anonymity that I think is really good for the audience as well,” Mariya says. “Some people don’t want to see a physical person in front of a screen. They want to see anime girls. I think people latch onto the idea that it’s something that is different and bigger than me and bigger than them. It’s a new world.”

Last year’s Hololive Night at Dodger Stadium featured a drone show. Look for an on-field dance party led by the VTubers this year.

(Cover Corp. )

Author and professor Napier says it’s a modern, digitized Renaissance faire, if you will, reflecting basic human desires to dress up and play. As for why it just so happens to be so connected to anime, Napier theorizes the medium fosters the idea of fantasy creation.

“Fantasy and science fiction are very popular culture artistic venues to play and to cosplay,” Napier says. “Anime is really good at presenting you with these — it’s brilliantly expansive. Whatever you’re into, you’ll find it in anime. So if you’re looking to VTube, there’s all this anime material sitting in front of you. You can pick and choose and start playing.”

The dream for the Cover corporation, says Tanigo, is to expand VTubers beyond the world of streaming sites such as YouTube and Twitch — hence, the Dodgers collaboration. In August, Hololive will stage another U.S. concert, this time at Radio City Musical Hall in New York. Music, says Tanigo, is a gateway. “I believe that’s a way of reaching new people,” he says. “It’s an interesting thing to go see. There are also people who may not be interested in VTubing or anime at all, but they can listen to the song that’s released and enjoy it as a piece of music on its own.”

For the performers, with VTubing comes a sense of safety — and even comfort — that isn’t always present in more traditional streaming.

“I did a lot of on-camera streaming in the beginning of my streaming career, but I hated having to get ready, do my makeup, wear something nice,” AmaLee says. “Even after an hour of getting ready to do a stream, someone was still [commenting], ‘You look tired today.’ I hated that. There would be days I would cancel streams because I didn’t want to get ready. Now I have my VTuber model and can be a little gremlin in my pajamas and no one has to know because Monarch is always perfect.”

An anime character, after all, is always ready to go.

WILLIAMSTOWN, Ky. — As a colossal manifestation of the biblical Noah’s Ark rises incongruously from the countryside of northern Kentucky, Ken Ham gives the presentation he’s often repeated.

The ark stretches 1½ football fields long — “the biggest free-standing timber-frame structure in the world,” Ham says. It holds three massive decks with wooden cages, food storage urns, life-size animal models and other exhibits.

It’s all designed to try to persuade visitors that the biblical story was literally true — that an ancient Noah really could have built such a sophisticated ship. That Noah and a handful of family members really could have sustained thousands of animals for months, floating above a global flood that drowned everyone else in the wicked world.

“That’s what we wanted to do through many of the exhibits, to show the feasibility of the ark,” says Ham, the organizer behind the Ark Encounter theme park and related attractions.

And with that, he furthers his goal to assert that the entire Book of Genesis should be interpreted as written — that humans were created by God’s fiat on the sixth day of creation on an Earth that is only 6,000 years old.

All this defies the overwhelming consensus of modern scientists — that the Earth developed over billions of years in “deep time” and that humans and other living things evolved over millions of years from earlier species.

But Ham wants to succeed where he believes William Jennings Bryan failed.

Bryan — a populist secretary of State, congressman, three-time presidential hopeful and fundamentalist champion — helped the prosecution in the famous Scopes monkey trial, which took place 100 years ago this July in Dayton, Tenn.

Bryan’s side won in court — gaining the conviction of public schoolteacher John Scopes for violating state law against teaching human evolution. But Bryan was widely seen as suffering a humiliating defeat in public opinion, with his sputtering attempts to explain the Bible’s fanciful miracles and enigmas.

‘The history in the Bible is true’

For Ham, Bryan’s problem was not that he defended the Bible. It’s that he didn’t defend it well enough, interpreting parts of it metaphorically rather than literally.

“It showed people around the world that Christians don’t really believe the Bible — they can’t answer questions to defend the Christian faith,” Ham says.

“We want you to know that we’ve got answers,” Ham adds, speaking in the accent of his native Australia.

Ham is founder and chief executive of Answers in Genesis, which opened the Ark Encounter in 2016. The Christian theme park includes a zoo, zip lines and other attractions surrounding the ark.

Nearly a decade earlier, Answers in Genesis opened a Creation Museum in nearby Petersburg, Ky., where exhibits similarly try to make the case for a literal interpretation of the biblical creation narrative. Visitors are greeted with a diorama depicting children and dinosaurs interacting peacefully in the Garden of Eden.

The group also produces books, podcasts, videos and homeschooling curricula.

“The main message of both attractions is basically this: The history in the Bible is true,” Ham says. “That’s why the message of the Gospel based on that history is true.”

A commonly held belief

If Ham is the most prominent torchbearer for creationism today, he’s hardly alone.

Polls generally show that somewhere between 1 in 6 and 1 in 3 Americans hold beliefs consistent with young-Earth creationism, depending on how the question is asked. A 2024 Gallup poll found that 37% of U.S. adults agreed that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”

That percentage is down a little, but not dramatically, from its mid-40s level between the 1980s and 2012. Rates are higher among religious and politically conservative respondents.

“Scopes lost, but the public sense was that the fundamentalists lost” and were dwindling away, says William Vance Trollinger Jr., a professor of history and religious studies at the University of Dayton in Ohio.

But the reach of Answers in Genesis demonstrates that “a significant subset of Americans hold to young-Earth creationism,” says Trollinger, co-author with his wife, English professor Susan Trollinger, of the 2016 book “Righting America at the Creation Museum.”

Leading science organizations say it’s crucial to teach evolution and old-Earth geology. Evolution is “one of the most securely established of scientific facts,” says the National Academy of Sciences. The Geological Society of America states: “Evolution and the directly related concept of deep time are essential parts of science curricula.”

The issue has been repeatedly legislated and litigated since the Scopes trial. Tennessee repealed its anti-evolution law in 1967. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1968 that a similar Arkansas law was an unconstitutional promotion of religion, and in 1987 it overturned a Louisiana law requiring that creationism be taught alongside evolution. A federal court in 2005 similarly forbade a Pennsylvania school district to present “intelligent design,” a different approach to creationism that argues life is too complex to have evolved by chance.

Bill Nye, the alarmed guy

Some lawmakers have recently revived the issue. The North Dakota Legislature this year debated a bill that would have allowed public school teaching on intelligent design. A new West Virginia law vaguely allows teachers to answer student questions about “scientific theories of how the universe and/or life came to exist.”

The Scopes trial set a template for today’s culture-war battles, with efforts to expand vouchers for attendees of private schools, including Christian ones teaching creationism; and to introduce Bible-infused lessons and Ten Commandments displays in public schools.

Such efforts alarm science educators such as Bill Nye, the television “Science Guy,” whose 2014 debate with Ham was billed as “Scopes II” and has generated millions of video views online.

“What you get out of religion, as I understand it, is this wonderful sense of community,” Nye says. “Community is very much part of the human experience. But the Earth is not 4,000 years old. To teach that idea to children with any backing — be it religious or these remarkable ideas that humans are not related to, for example, chimpanzees or bonobos — is breathtaking. It’s silly. And so we fight this fight.”

Nye notes that the evidence is overwhelming, ranging from fossil layers to the distribution of species. “There are trees older than Mr. Ham thinks the world is,” he adds.

Varying religious views

One weekday in March, visitors milled about the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, which draw an estimated 1.5 million visits per year (including duplicate visits).

“We are church-going, Bible-believing Christians,” says Louise van Niekerk of Ontario, Canada, who traveled with her family to the Creation Museum. She’s concerned that her four children are faced with a public school curriculum permeated with evolution.

The Creation Museum, Van Niekerk says, “is encouraging a robust alternate worldview from what they’re being taught.”

Many religious groups accommodate evolution, though.

Gallup’s survey found that among Americans who believe in evolution, more say it happened with God’s guidance (34%) than without it (24%). In the Roman Catholic Church, popes have shown openness to evolution while insisting that the human soul is a divine creation. Many liberal Protestants and even some evangelicals have accepted at least parts of evolutionary theory.

But among many evangelicals, creationist belief is strong.

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest evangelical body, has promoted creationist beliefs in its publications. The Assemblies of God asserts that Adam and Eve were historical people. Some evangelical schools, such as Bryan’s namesake college in Tennessee, affirm creationist beliefs in their doctrinal statements.

A wider debate

Just as Ham says the creation story is important to defend a larger truth about the Christian Gospel, critics say more is at stake than just the human origin story.

The Trollingers wrote that the Answers in Genesis enterprise is an “arsenal in the culture war.” They say it aligns with Christian nationalism, promoting conservative views in theology, family and gender roles, and casting doubt on other areas of scientific consensus, such as human-made climate change.

Nye, too, says the message fits into a more general and ominous anti-science movement. “Nobody is talking about climate change right now,” he laments.

Exhibits promote a “vengeful and violent” God, says Susan Trollinger, noting the cross on the ark’s large door, which analogizes that just as the wicked perished in the flood, those without Christ face eternal hellfire.

And there are more parallels to 1925.

Bryan had declaimed, “How can teachers tell students that they came from monkeys and not expect them to act like monkeys?” The Creation Museum, which depicts violence, drugs and other social ills as resulting from belief in evolution, is “Bryan’s social message on steroids,” wrote Edward Larson in a 2020 afterword to “Summer for the Gods,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Scopes trial.

More attractions planned

The protests that initially greeted the museum and ark projects, from secularist groups who considered them embarrassments to Kentucky, have ebbed.

When the state initially denied a tourism tax rebate for the Ark Encounter because of its religious nature, a federal court overturned that ruling. Representing Ham’s group was a Louisiana lawyer named Mike Johnson — now speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

And Ham’s massive ministry charges forward. Expansion is next, with Answers in Genesis attractions planned for Pigeon Forge, Tenn., and Branson, Mo. — tourist hubs offering more opportunities to promote creationism to the masses.

Todd Bigelow, visiting the Ark Encounter from Mesa, Ariz., says he believes that the exhibit vividly evoked the safety that Noah and his family must have felt. It helped him appreciate “the opportunities God gives us to live the life we have, and hopefully make good choices and repent when we need to,” he says.

“I think,” Bigelow adds, “God and science can go hand in hand.”

Smith writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Dylan Lovan contributed to this report.

Bertolt Brecht wrote that, in the dark times, there will also be singing. In Susanna Kwan’s debut novel, she asks whether those songs may be sung if there are no choirs to sing them. Choirs require community, and the role of community during environmental disaster is one of the themes that runs through this thoughtful novel about art, creation and the ways we care for one another.

Bo is a 40ish woman living in a San Francisco high-rise in the mid-21st century. The city is underwater after being swamped by the rising Pacific Ocean and incessant rain. But the city continues to exist. Those who have not fled inhabit the upper floors of skyscraper apartment blocks. Bo’s cousins have lined up work opportunities for her in Canada, but when the novel begins, she is insistent on staying. What keeps her there is grief; two years before, her mother disappeared during a storm. Bo clings to the hope that one day she will be reunited with her.

Like Bo before the rains, Kwan is an artist and she conveys what goes missing in her character’s life after environmental disaster: In the perpetual rain there are no longer seasons. And without seasons, there are no holidays or festivals to mark the changes in the year. Bo marks time with her twice-weekly visit to the rooftop markets, where merchants sell food they’ve grown or had brought in by boat. But it’s also where she scans the bulletin boards filled with photos of the missing and lost in search of her mother.

Kwan’s novel hones in on the ways that isolation and boredom sap vital parts of ourselves. The book captures America’s recent history: 2020 and isolating in our apartments and houses while outside, the dead piled up in freezer vans and mass graves. The ways that anxiety and loneliness caused many to turn inward, to make what was happening personal, as if no one else was affected. The loss of community and empathy for others drowned in the waves of fear, uncertainty, and for many, anger. Bo herself struggles with her individual feelings of frustration and grief, but then reminds herself that she hasn’t been singled out for bad fortune.

“What made her special in the long human history of crisis and displacement?” Bo wonders. “She had followed reports of heat waves that never subsided, outbreaks of anthrax and smallpox and malaria, continents dried to deserts, genocidal regimes, military blockades at borders that prevented passage to hundreds of thousands of people with nowhere to go, children drowning at sea. And yet the matter of her own privileged leaving felt extraordinary and without precedent, even as she registered this delusion.”

Before her mother disappeared, Bo worked constantly as an illustrator and painter, a source of joy that sustained her. But after her mom dies — and it is clear that her mother has most likely been washed out to sea — she is paralyzed. “Art, she’d come to feel, served no purpose in a time like this. It belonged to another world, one she’d left behind.” Grief has grayed-out her love for colorful creation.

One day, a neighbor slips a note under her door. It is a request that Bo come help out Mia with household chores. Mia lives alone, and at age 129, is struggling.

Bo has supported herself in the constricted economy as a caregiver. Many of those in the high-rises are the elderly, in some cases abandoned by their fleeing children, but sometimes just too fragile to be moved. By 2050, people are living past 100 and living to 130 isn’t rare. But 130-year-old elders have elderly children and even elderly grandchildren. Weaker bonds with third- and fourth-generation descendants has left many to look after themselves.

Bo is the daughter of Chinese immigrants; Mia came from China with her parents. Mia’s daughter and further descendants live thousands of miles away. Caring for Mia reminds Bo of the time she spent with her mother when they made frequent treks to check in on family elders, a way of paying respect, her mom told her when Bo was a child.

In Mia’s apartment, the two women begin to bond in the kitchen. Bo prepares food while Mia tells stories of her life in San Francisco. She had been born in the 1920s, not that long after the earthquake and devastating fire that leveled the city in 1906. Mia’s life parallels the growth of San Francisco and her memories of how the city changed through the decades in the 20th century intrigues Bo. So much was lost, first in the wave of explosive population growth and wealth, but when the rains came, entire parts of the city disappeared, their histories swallowed by the relentless rise of the Pacific.

Bo’s memories have already been dulled by perpetual grayness. But hanging out with Mia loosens something inside of Bo, and she notices that her senses can serve as “time machines,” and give her access to her own past. There are obvious reminders — a photograph — but songs are especially evocative even before she recognizes the tune. “A song provided passage from the present station back to a place and time, distinct and palpable. The trip was quick, a sled tearing down a luge track, the body sensing its arrival before the mind could register the journey.”

Bo’s occasional lover is a man who visits San Francisco as part of his job working in natural resources. He spends much of the time counting and cataloging what species remain, or what is about to be lost. When he arrives back in town after she has started working for Mia, Bo finds that her growing sense of purpose, her desire to return to art-making, is motivated by a similar impulse.

She wants to catalog Mia’s experiences, her memories of the city that no longer exists. In their long conversations, Mia summons images and histories of places that Bo never knew existed. Inspired by Mia, Bo goes to the city’s archive and searches for the photographs, newspaper articles, blueprints, maps and other ways that the now-missing city documented its existence.

For Mia’s approaching 130th birthday, which Bo senses will be her employer’s last, she decides that she will use her skills as an artist to bring the old city back to life one more time — a gift for her employer, but also a means by which Bo can recapture the wild energy that is creation.

Survivalists preparing for an imagined catastrophic future hoard food and supplies and stock up on guns to “protect” themselves from those in need. But as Kwan shows, such visions of the future are the refractions of nihilism and the American belief that individual survival and success is due solely to individual effort. But that’s never been the case. What preserves human life — even a life in horrific circumstances — are relationships of caring and cooperation. Community built on taking care of each other is the only way that we will thrive. The networks we build to support others eventually becomes the social safety net we will ourselves need.

In dark times, the songs that will comfort us will not be the cacophony of individual voices wailing their grief. The darkness will be lifted by the harmonies of those who recognize each other’s humanity.

Berry is a writer and critic living in Oregon.