The reaction to WAITING TO EXHALE’s success was the first time I saw the media cycle of “Wow! Black people go to the movies too! Things will change in Hollywood!” to promptly forgetting that lesson and relearning it as if for the first time. You can still see it play out as recently as SINNERS.

I showed this in Poland and it played like gangbusters.

One of things I wrote about was the gap in understanding how much of a phenomenon the book was. And then the movie was number 1 in its debut Christmas weekend. And execs were shook and shocked.

😅😅😅

I remember the buzz surrounding Waiting to Exhale. Opening day the line was wrapped around the block for a matinee. After the credits finished we stood up and saw Magic Johnson sitting a few rows back.

Love this movie so much

I had so much fun revisiting the movie Waiting to Exhale and its impact, which might be even bigger than you remember, for NPR. 30 years later, 'Waiting to Exhale' endures www.npr.org/2025/12/24/n...

US Supreme Court rejects Trump's military deployment in Chicago area, for now

U.S. regulators on Monday gave the green light to a pill version of the blockbuster weight-loss drug Wegovy, the first daily oral medication to treat obesity. n.pr/4pNYnVN

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

A reminder that Donald Trump and Larry Ellison don't really care if Barry Weiss falls down on her face and looks like a clown. If she resigns, they'll replace her with another clown. Then another, then another. But that's still a good outcome for them. They just want CBS News defanged.

Conglomerate ownership as the dominant media model was always a risk. We are finally seeing the worst version of this.

Michael B. Jordan really should be in the Best Actor conversation right now.

Now seems like a swell time to point out that Frontline just released this excellent 11-minute mini-documentary about what happened inside CECOT.

All of these links went to promotion of this story earlier today. All these links are dead now — that's how thoroughly they've scrubbed this.

America’s Three Media Crises and How to Fix Them newrepublic.com/article/2045... via @newrepublic.com

In an era before “LGBTQ+,” the question wasn’t what are you? but who do you love? Who will fight for you? Who will betray you? Join me & Victoria Christopher Murray at Loyalty Books. buff.ly/4ZbfxY0

Mitt Romney broke his self imposed obscurity to say tax the rich.

Happy to see the historically “scandalous” Rhinelander marriage and divorce getting new attention. It’s emblematic of America’s tortured history with race. “A Revelation Tore Apart Her Fairy-Tale Marriage, and Shocked the Nation” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/m...

There's nothing we love more than to see independent bookstores thriving. Indie bookstores are essential community hubs and foster a love of reading that is unmatched, and we're proud to be part of the movement that keeps them in business. www.fastcompany.com/91461983/ind...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Trump's hand-picked board votes to rename Washington performing arts center the Trump-Kennedy Center, White House says.

Kennedy Center to be renamed Trump-Kennedy Center —Karoline Leavitt x.com/PressSec/sta...

In a remarkable move, engraved typos and misinformation now adorn the walls of the Trump White House in the Presidential Walk of Fame.

The new Presidential Walk of Fame complete with permanently dictated engraved text on each plaque is a historical abomination. And just about everyone’s got a take. I’ll highlight a few here.

"The newspaper industry served as a feeder for our entire news media ecosystem. So when we lose those newspapers, we've lost that journalism. In the early 2000s, we had 40 journalists per 100,000 people. We're now down to 8 journalists per 100,000 people," says @victorpickard.bsky.social.

Trump Expands Travel Ban and Restrictions to 20 More Countries www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/u...

I’m a text-based life form.

This thread brought me joy.

Murray Edelman argued eloquently in Constructing the Political Spectacle for the important symbolic role of the president to provide comfort in difficult times and make sense of a confusing world for his people. Well we have the spectacle part.

Rob Reiner was one of the key people behind the effort to go to court to overturn California's anti-marriage equality Proposition 8 when it passed in 2008. Working with Chad Griffin, they founded the American Foundation for Equal Rights and got Ted Olson and David Boies to team up to fight Prop 8.

Shoutout to every journalist, especially the Black women, who covered #TheDoubleTax this year. The list includes, but is not limited to: NBC News ABC News CBS News Boston The New York Times Marketplace ESSENCE Forbes Magazine (3x) TIME NPR POLITICO GBH Rooted Thank you for seeing this book. 🥹

Reposting this thread in response to a mass shooting at my Alma mater, a shooting that took place in a building where I used to write papers in the computer lab back in the 80s.

In case you have never seen this.

When the winner of the Nobel peace prize smuggled herself over the water and out of Venezuela to attend the ceremony in Oslo this week, her allies called the Pentagon to ask them not to arbitrarily murder her. www.wsj.com/world/americ...

Jared Kushner's financing role in Paramount's $108 billion bid for Warner Bros Discovery raises ethical questions as it injects Trump-family interests into one of the biggest media battles in years, experts said reut.rs/3KMAP4s

🚨New pub alert!🚨 Now available open-access in @journal-of-comm.bsky.social, we (w/ @dkreiss.bsky.social, @danlane.bsky.social, & @shannimcg.bsky.social) critique political communication's "Identity Turn" and offer instead a foundation for studying #polcomm from a *group* perspective. 🧵

Trump: "I've announced a permanent pause on third-world migration…I didn't say 'shit hole,' you did…We had a meeting and I said, 'Why is it we only take people from shit hole countries. Why can't we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few.…But we always take people from Somalia."

Eileen Higgins will be the next mayor of the city of Miami, breaking a nearly 30-year Republican streak, CNN projects

Is anyone researching how Trump has personalized the presidency—making domestic policy and international relations a matter of his individual taste, benefit and beef/relationships? Trump boiling the Warner merger down to how the prospective owners treat him is jarring. AND part of the pattern.

this sentence alone, my goodness

Yes.

Breaking News: Juan Orlando Hernández, a Honduran ex-president convicted for drug trafficking, was freed from prison after a Trump pardon.

In this case skip the book. Read this review by Becca Rothfeld. “A public hungry for scandal might be more satisfied if “American Canto” were uniformly excellent or uniformly terrible. But in our unsatisfying reality, it is what most debut books are: highly uneven and largely forgettable.”

U.S. immigration agency launches re-examination of green card holders from 19 countries 'of concern' share.google/Se4APBkhXWVO...

For some reason Democratic leaders seem to prefer telling voters what they won’t be able to do, rather than what they’d like to do. If Hegseth ordered a war crime and lied about it, shouldn’t Ds try for impeachment? Put Rs on the spot. They might get a few defections. www.axios.com/2025/12/01/j...

Heated Rivalry ftw. I talked in policom about how film and tv depictions of “unlikely couples” that violate social norms can act as a critique of the validity of those rules. And used Heated Rivalry as a current, updated example. First time I got such a yip of recognition in this class.

If movies can shape perceptions, Hollywood has done its fare share of creating misperceptions around disability.

Shorter Days, Signs of Fatigue: Trump Faces Realities of Aging in Office www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/u...

The president has vowed to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries” and deport any foreign national deemed "non-compatible with Western civilization." Secretary Marco Rubio is the child of immigrants from Cuba, one of the 19 targeted countries.