Can We Stop Talking About Olivia Nuzzi... charliesykes.substack.com/p/can-we-sto...

The canonization of Charlie Kirk is a futile mission--he's already faded as a Christ martyr--and Bari Weiss assembling a town hall in his memory is more evidence of how bubbled up and tone deaf she is. The right wanted civil war after Kirk's death & can't take nah for an answer.

Paul Dano was terrific in Escape at Dannemora and held his own with Benicio del Toro, no small task, so maybe Tarantino ought to button it up a bit.

Among other things one can glean from Bari Weiss hosting a town hall starring Erika Kirk is that the term "town hall" has become utterly meaningless, a media catch-all. If Weiss wants to go nova, she should have Candace Owens make a surprise appearance at the top of a ramp flanked by fiery torches.

Funny how Tim Miller is in sharp focus while Olivia Nuzzi is lemony aglow as if shot through a Doris Day filter.

Ryan Lizza, the rat fink's rat fink.

"We have opened the creaking Gates of Hell to bring you this awesome lineup..."

The worst annual event in American journalism. I refuse to click on this

Jesse Pinkman voice: "She wasn't covering the RFK jr campaign, she was covering *for* the RFK jr campaign."

Candy Darling was born 81 years ago today.

As a columnist at Vanity Fair who served under four presidents (I mean, editors), I ought to have some residual insight as to what’s going on at that wacky spacecraft but, nope, not a clue.

Maureen Dowd flitted through my mind because Thanksgiving is coming up, so I'm told, & that's when she annually turns the Times column over to her MAGA brother, whose turkey stuffing is between his ears. Will MoDo be slumming it again this Thanksgiving or will an editor finally say Enough already?

Maureen Dowd has been around so long that her influence appears to have been diluted but she's had an absolutely dire effect on political journalism, helping produce a corn field of Mini-Mo's.

I never trusted Ryan Lizza's smirk. I always assumed that as a political journalist he was another Mark Halperin in the making, and two of them is two too many. Halperin, after his #MeToo fall, oozed back into standard pundit hackery while Lizza is oozing in every direction.

The soul-stirring high of putting on a new pair of pajamas.

Turner Classic Movies is airing an 11-film exploration of trans identities in movies hosted by the authors of Corpses, Fools, & Monsters (great recent history of the topic) starting tomorrow at 8

Yes, agree, and needless to say Molly Haskell is never wrong.

More Miriam Shor, less Rhea Seehorn. #PLURIBUS

Not digging PLURIBUS, if I'm savagely honest. Whole project seems off--overscaled, overconceptualized, overchoreographed (those delivery trucks), the set pieces show-offy self-contained & strangely weightless. It's all blatantly schematic, which Gilligan's always avoided, & the dialogue is crud.

Please say hello to my son Preorder here: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646320...

Today at the White House -- a visit from Erika Kirk, future Vice President or First Lady (Peter Thiel hasn't decided yet.)

In February 2026 the Manhattan Institute will be bestowing its prestigious, extremely hinky City Journal Award on America's compact-sized sentimental of freedom, BEN SHAPIRO. This should go over swell! manhattan.institute/event/2026-c...

Or as Sherman McDaniels put it more poetically, "Every man dies. Not every man truly gets *down,* right on, right on."

It's perturbing yet somehow delightful that Elise Stefanik is a dead ringer for Bari Weiss, a.k.a. Schmoopie. The only diff is that Bari wears studious glasses & is flanked by an elite unit of buff catalogue models, but otherwise they could be twins or maybe the same "op" hoaxing and hexing us.

Gawd listening pundits and people in real life (I do know a few) intone, "Now comes the hard part--governing." Yeah, we KNOW. Governing comes after being elected and PRESENTS DIFFERENT CHALLENGES, that's not a lightning strike revelation. We heard the same gumminess after Obama won the first time.

"Ben Shapiro is being swung around by his ankles and let fly in the most vicious hammer throw I've ever seen among these pasty combatants.

I want all of these rightwing podcasters to go at each other in armed combat like news crews in ANCHORMAN. Work out their differences on the backlot battlefield like MEN.

"Attention all units, attention all units, Schmoopie is making an unscheduled stop at Carvel to pick up a Fudgie the Whale cake for Gayle King's going-away party, which could get ugly."

I mean, judge Kiefer's masticatin' for yourself. www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFyW...

STONE COLD FOX looks like yet another Hollywood attempt to recapture the raucous road energy of '70s exploitation flicks but that neo-retro genre seems Tarantino'd out by now, though maybe it'll better than DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS/HONEY DON'T. As a cold stone psycho Kiefer Sutherland masticates a lot y'all

Michelle Pfeiffer is a goddess and should not be subject to the indignities depicted in the trailer* for OH. WHAT. FUN. (Amazon Prime), the first of which is casting the charmless Denis Leary as her husband. The slapstick looks painful. I just can't with this. Remember, the trailer IS the movie.

I wonder if her security has a code name for her. "Eagle 1 to Eagle 2: Schmoopie is on the move..."

this is obviously not real, but it *is* extremely funny

i love this for all of them, all these people deserve this (and much more)

Imagine telling someone in the 1970s that the NYT and WaPo are bending the knee to fascists while Glamour and Teen Vogue are the journalistic champions of human rights and democracy.

DOWN CEMETERY ROAD (Apple TV) is dreadful from the opening dinner party scene on. I am losing faith in prestige serialized entertainment, holding out hope for PLUR1BUS...

Congratulations to the effulgently worthy Julia Vitale, the new editor of Air Mail. (And a bonny farewell, though in this merry-go-round world no farewells are final, to founds Graydon Carter and Alessandra Stanley.) www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/b...

"I understood that reference." --Captain America, THE AVENGERS

Martin Luther King: "I have a dream." Andrew Cuomo: "I have a thumb."

Cuomo going on Sid Rosenberg's radio show is in itself ipso facto verily I say unto you the act of a crumb-bum. Whatever respect I lost for Cuomo has now been quadrupled.

Michael Rapaport and his boorish acting are the reason viewers of taste and discernment SHUN season five of JUSTIFIED and do their best to eliminate it from memory. (Season five: non-canon.)

Good thing I'm not an art critic because no matter how many times I internally correct myself I keep getting Lucian Freud mixed up with Francis Bacon and vice versa. I'm sure others have this problem and I just want to assure them that they're not alone in their confusion.

I admit, I've never gotten the hang of the Alan Partridge phenomenon in any of its stages. Just when I think Steve Coogan has phased him out back he comes in another gimmicky guise.

Watching ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING and Renee Zellweger is like misfiring animatronic device whose head isn't securely fastened. Truly weird and somewhat troubling.

The beloved Diane Keaton dies and the dung beetles can't wait to rank her films from best to worst or some other listicle as if she wasn't a human being but a collection of algorithmic bits.

I'm done with SLOW HORSES. Too much rot has set in.

Not sure if I can make it to opening reception but this is an exhibition I'm definitely attending once I'm Back... www.howlarts.org/event/the-dr...

$22 million opening box office weekend for ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER doesn't indicate the Zeitgeist juicer many were expecting/rooting for.

"As Art Cashin once observed over dinner – 'If there was a report tomorrow that heroin addiction was skyrocketing among teens, the first question you’d hear on Wall Street is ‘Who makes the needles?’” --from John Hussman's most recent market letter www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mc25...

THE MORNING SHOW (Apple TV) persists in acting as if going before the cameras and reading off a TelePrompter and bantering in between requires gladiatorial stamina and steely nerves, absurdly embodied by America's Sweetheart, Jennifer Aniston, and America's Other Sweetheart, Reese Witherspoon.