Patriarch Kiril, the spritualist that wears $30,000 of bling (God wanted him to wear that luxury watch, playa hata), has just contracted COVID and is experiencing severe symptoms. And while we wish him the best in his bout with the bug, we cannot fail to note his extreme servility towards the Putin ethnonationalist project. His “holiness” has justified Russia as a “peace loving power,” and that soldiers ought not to fear death because the Patriarch, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has justified the Ukranian war on “spiritual” grounds. "Go bravely to fulfill your military duty,” the Patriarch told a sermon at the Zachatyevsky Monastery in Moscow. “And remember that if you lay down your life for your country, you will be with God in his kingdom, glory and eternal life.” Also — the Patriarch has a private jet and is more than a little “yachty.” Charmed, I’m sure. (Reuters)
Axel Springer CEO Mathias Dopfner, who invited his executives to pray for a Trump’s re-election, also urged Elon Musk to buy Twitter. “‘Do we all want to get together for an hour in the morning on November 3 and pray that Donald Trump will again become President of the United States of America?’ Döpfner wrote, inspired by an article about the Trump administration taking legal action against Google for abuse of market dominance,” wrote Dan Ladden-Hall in in Politico. Which reminds me a little of Sumner Redstone, the late septagenarean media WASP who supported Bush the Younger because, basically, he was good for business. (Michael Calderone)
Rolling Stone is, lets face it, a dad magazine. It remains relevant — important, even — to boomers. People like Howard Stern still covet being on a Rolling Stone cover. But is it still a relevant cultural force, beyond the dads and grandads reliving Woodstock? “Noah Shachtman was up in Vermont last year, ‘thinking about just quitting,’ when Gus Wenner rang with an opportunity. ‘I was burnt out after seven-plus years of running the insane asylum—I mean that in the best possible way—that is the Daily Beast,” he told me. But the chance to take the reins of Rolling Stone quickly recharged him. ‘I couldn’t sleep that night,’ he recalled. ‘I was so excited.’ Such excitement was palpable on a recent visit to Rolling Stone’s Manhattan headquarters, as Shachtman invited me to stick around while he met rising pop star Tai Verdes, who was appearing on the magazine’s Twitch show … You could see his fingerprints immediately, in the exclusives and edgy headlines, and if for some reason you couldn’t tell there was a new sheriff in town, he’d spend the next year telling you so on Twitter, welcoming people to the ‘new Rolling Stone’ and vowing to call out ‘bad actors,’ including past cover stars like Eric Clapton, who has come under fire for being a vaccine skeptic and giving money to a music group with similar views. “The new Rolling Stone is going to confront monsters, even—especially—if it means confronting monsters the magazine helped elevate,” Shachtman tweeted last November in promoting an investigation into sexual abuse allegations against Marilyn Manson, a project staffers tell me got under way prior to the new editor’s arrival—in other words, old Rolling Stone.” (VF)
Christina Oxenberg is incapable of being boring. Today she just happens to let slip that her mother, Princess Elizabeth of Serbia, told her that she was the child of John Kennedy. Imagine her surprise. (RoyalFamilyInsider)
“‘Bros,’ which opens this week, is a gay romantic comedy from Universal Pictures, a combination of words that has earned it the much-ballyhooed distinction of being the ‘first gay rom-com from a major studio.’ That early scene with the fictitious producer points to the question that animates much of what follows: To what extent can you map a gay love story onto the classic rom-com formula, or vice versa? The film, co-written by Eichner and its director, Nicholas Stoller, references—and wrestles with—rom-com tropes. Bobby watches ‘You’ve Got Mail’ on the couch, but instead of AOL, he’s got Grindr. On his first date with Aaron (Luke Macfarlane), his studly love interest, they go see a movie—and then wind up having a foursome at a ‘gender-reveal orgy.’ There’s a sex scene set to Nat King Cole’s rendition of ‘When I Fall in Love,’ a pointedly Nora Ephron-esque choice. There’s the go-to Christmas-party scene, at which Aaron asks for permission to sleep around and Bobby sarcastically references ‘When Harry Met Sally.’ Other familiar rom-com beats fly by—the sunlit stroll through the Upper West Side, the changing-of-the-seasons montage, the fight that tests the relationship, the final big romantic gesture—but they’re self-consciously interlaced with jokes about poppers, bottoming, and Caitlyn Jenner.” (The New Yorker)
Say it aint so! The brilliant Trevor Noah is stepping down from hosting The Daily Show. (BBC)
“The BBC is planning deep cuts to its World Service, to include the elimination of hundreds of jobs as well as radio programming in ten languages, while foreign-language staff currently based in London will be relocated to the countries they serve, according to reports. The broadcaster attributes the move to ‘the government’s ongoing license fee freeze,’ the Guardian writes. (Rasmus Klein Nielsen, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, wrote for CJR about the BBC’s licensing-fees arrangement for CJR here.)”
“If you thought it was impossible for a liberal to go to bat for Amy Coney Barrett, well, think again. Here’s Harvard law professor Noah Feldman writing in Bloomberg: ‘I know her to be a brilliant and conscientious lawyer who will analyze and decide cases in good faith, applying the jurisprudential principles to which she is committed. Those are the basic criteria for being a good justice. Barrett meets and exceeds them.’ It’s interesting that liberals do this for right-wingers, but it almost never happens in the opposite direction. This is due, I think, to the fact that (a) liberals feel a need to show how open-minded they are, and (b) many liberals think they derive a sense of legitimacy from their ability to embrace conservative nostrums and individuals in a sad ‘Thank you sir, may I have another’ syndrome. A century ago, John Dewey pointed out that democracy risked creating ‘a class of experts … inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge.’ Another prophet, and lifelong adversary of this phenomenon, was my late friend and mentor I.F. Stone, who once warned: ‘You’ve really got to wear a chastity belt in Washington to preserve your journalistic virginity. Once the secretary of state invites you to lunch and asks your opinion, you’re sunk.’” (Altercation)
“At first, office life was similarly isolating. When I first entered the workforce in the mid-aughts, the white bosses, who always seemed so large and loud, naturally preferred the younger versions of themselves. As an Asian with a more delicate armature, I felt like a minnow among manatees. I remember the white boss at a later job, who otherwise remained aloof from the proletarian members of the staff, venturing to my desk one day to ask me an important question: Did I know the Wi-Fi password? I suspect he thought I was the tech guy. These experiences left only the faintest scars on my psyche. They were well worth the trade-off that appeared later in my career, when a lack of diversity became a crisis for politically aware companies. Around 2015 came a palpable shift, a sense of doors opening that had previously been shut. Emails were returned; jobs were obtained. Then, in subsequent years, in a great rush, from several companies at once, recruitment, sometimes for positions for which I was patently unqualified. Yet even if this is how things used to work for white people, I still feel like an outsider. One of the ways I’m certain I’m not white is that I do not enjoy the white person’s carefree relationship with the world. No matter what I achieve, I am always reminded that I can never fully become the person I want to be because there is a slippage between who I am and what I signify, the latter of which will always be subject to the projections of white people. I remember attending a meeting at a former job where we discussed improving diversity at our company. I was the only nonwhite person there, and my boss, who was feeling defensive after hiring yet another white man, cited my presence as evidence that he had a good track record when it came to recruiting minorities.” (NYMag)