From community reportsEast Aldine’s REACH committee sponsored a 2nd Annual Tour de Aldine Bike Ride on Saturday evening, June 21, 2025 from 6-8 p.m. REACH stands for “Revitalizing ...
Why CBS’s Cancellation of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” Stinks to High Hell
Even back in the now-comparatively-sane Trump 1.0 administration, it seemed palpably true to me that the best check against Trump’s authoritarian instincts wasn’t legal or Constitutional, but rather cultural. The culture of free speech, of being able to criticize — in no uncertain terms, with no held punches — anyone in authority is fundamental to the American mindset. It’s like the opening of David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” 2005 commencement address to Kenyon College:
Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class
of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they
happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at
them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young
fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over
at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the
deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story thing
turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of
the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself
here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you
younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The
point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important
realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk
about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a
banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches
of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death
importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely
morning.
In the way that fish take water for granted, Americans take true freedom of speech and freedom of the press for granted. It’s the culture we were born into, the air we breathe. And to my mind, the fiercest and most effective form of criticism — especially political — is mockery. Mark Twain, America’s first great (and perhaps still greatest) humorist, said, “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.”
No one in Russian media mocks Vladimir Putin, lest they find themselves falling out one of Russia’s easily-fallen-out-of windows. No one in Chinese media mocks Xi Jinping. Back in 2017 the CCP went as far as to censor images of Winnie the Pooh, because Xi resembles Pooh so clearly, and people naturally find that amusing. Trump, clearly, has authoritarian instincts and desires, but US media — print, web, podcasts, YouTube, social, and TV — has been replete with unrelenting mockery aimed at him. There’s no better example of that than late night talk shows: Colbert on CBS, Jimmy Kimmel on ABC, Seth Meyers on NBC, Jon Stewart and his fellow hosts on The Daily Show at Comedy Central, John Oliver and Bill Maher on HBO. Vociferous, unrelenting critics of Trump, all of them. (And it works both ways: Greg Gutfield’s Gutfield! is a ratings success at 10:00pm for Fox News.)
That’s been one of the canaries I’ve been monitoring in the Trump 2.0 drift-into-authoritarianism coal mine. So long as Trump is getting skewered by comedians on major TV channels nightly, in some sense, we’re doing OK.
But while our Constitution and cultural fabric protect our media from government interference, there’s no such protection from ownership interference. Trump can’t dictate what a newspaper prints — proven again, just last night, by The Wall Street Journal, which added significant fuel to the Epstein fire that’s rupturing MAGAland with a scoop on a dirty birthday letter Trump wrote to his friend Epstein in 2003, despite Trump trying to quash the story by directly calling Journal owner Rupert Murdoch. Trump can’t dictate who hosts late-night TV shows or censor the jokes they tell, and we still seem far from a world where Jimmy Kimmel might mysteriously “fall” from a high window.
CBS is owned by Paramount, and Paramount is controlled by Shari Redstone. Redstone has a deal to sell Paramount to Skydance, a company controlled by David Ellison (son of Oracle gazillionaire Larry Ellison) for $8 billion, but the deal needs approval from the FCC, and the FCC answers to Trump. That’s why CBS settled a bullshit lawsuit by Trump against 60 Minutes for $16 million. As former 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft told Jon Stewart (righteously, on Paramount-owned Comedy Central) regarding the “settlement”: “They never said, ‘We screwed up.’ They just paid the money. It was a shakedown, that’s what I call it. Some people call it extortion, that’s a legal term.”
Shari Redstone’s Paramount received an unusual assist to settle
its controversial lawsuit with President Trump, which should now
clear the way for its long-awaited sale to independent studio
Skydance, On The Money has learned.
Skydance boss David Ellison, the son of Trump friend and
billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, stepped up and agreed
that once he takes control of the Tiffany Network, currently part
of Redstone’s flailing media empire, it will run between $15
million and $20 million of public service ads to promote causes
supported by the president, a source with knowledge of the
negotiations said.
“There is an anticipation of a mid-eight-figure sum that will be
allocated by the network to PSA advertisements and other broadcast
transmissions that support conservative causes supported by
President Trump,” the source said.
It made no sense journalistically or financially for CBS to settle Trump’s lawsuit. 60 Minutes clearly did nothing ethically wrong, let alone illegal, with its editing of Kamala Harris’s interview.1 It only makes sense as a de facto payoff to Trump to help secure approval of Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount. Likewise with CBS’s decision not just to part ways with Colbert as host, but to cease production of The Late Show entirely. It makes no TV sense. The Late Show isn’t just doing OK in the ratings, it’s the top show in the 11:30 timeslot. Here’s Jed Rosenzweig, writing for LateNighter just four days ago:
As the second quarter of 2025 wrapped, late-night’s pecking order
held mostly steady — with The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
topping the 11:35 PM hour in total viewers, and Late Night with
Seth Meyers leading at 12:37 AM across both key ratings metrics.
CBS’s Late Show was the only show among the nine tracked by
LateNighter to draw more total viewers in Q2 than it had in the
first quarter of 2025 — although just barely, with the show
growing its audience by 1% quarter over quarter. All told, the
Stephen Colbert-hosted show averaged 2.42 million viewers across
41 first-run episodes, comfortably outpacing ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel
Live (1.77 million) and NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy
Fallon (1.19 million). In the advertiser-coveted 18–49 demo,
however, Kimmel surged ahead with 220,000 viewers — his strongest
performance in a year — edging out Colbert (219,000) and leaving
Fallon (at 157,000) in a distant third.
At 12:37 AM, Late Night With Seth Meyers continued its quiet
reign. The NBC mainstay averaged 900,000 total viewers and
111,000 in the demo across 35 episodes — easily topping both
metrics in the late-late slot. ABC’s Nightline held second
place with 810,000 total viewers and 108,000 in the demo, putting
it ahead of CBS’s After Midnight, which ended its two-year run
in early June with an average of 591,000 total viewers and 89,000
in the 18–49 demo.
So Colbert’s Late Show is the highest-rated overall, and effectively tied with Kimmel in the advertiser-coveted 18–49 demo.2 Like all of traditional TV, late night viewership — and thus revenue — isn’t what it used to be. (For context, through the end of the 1990s and into the 2000s, Letterman and Leno each drew around 4–6 million viewers per night. Johnny Carson averaged over 10 million viewers per night in the 1970s and 80s.) CBS declaring in its announcement that “This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night” is obvious bullshit — and, in light of its timing, extra stinky bullshit at that. Surely the top-rated show in late night isn’t just at least profitable, but almost certainly more profitable than whatever CBS might replace it with in that time slot. (CBS sources suddenly claim The Late Showlost $40 million last year; Bill Carter isn’t buying that and neither should you.)
The TV industry has always been obsessed with ratings and obsessed with advertising revenue. I can’t recall the top-rated show in any category being cancelled. Again, it makes no TV sense. It doesn’t pass the sniff test. Back in December, regarding the Bezos-driven upheaval at The Washington Post, I wrote a piece titled “Journalism Requires Owners Committed to the Cause”, which title sort of says it all. The only proper way to run a serious newspaper is for the work and reputation of the newspaper itself to be the topmost priority of everyone in leadership, right up to the owner. That’s just clearly not true for Bezos. And part of it too is that the entire business of The Washington Post just doesn’t matter to Bezos. Jeff Bezos has a net worth of around $230 billion. He bought the Post from its longtime owners, the Graham family (who wereowners committed to the cause) in 2013 for just $250 million. Financially, the entire Washington Post Company represents like one-thousandth of Bezos’s wealth. Trashing the paper’s reputation and the trust of its readers meant less to him than cozying up to Trump for potential trade policy favors for Amazon and rocketry deals for Blue Origin.
It’s exactly the same for David Ellison. His father, Larry Ellison, is even wealthier than Bezos, with Forbes estimating his worth above $250 billion after recent Oracle stock price gains. In normal times, with a normal US president (that is to say, not crooked), and a normal incoming buyer of a major television network (that is to say, concerned with ratings and ad revenue) it would be insane for the network to cancel the top-rated late night show just before the deal is finalized. But David Ellison doesn’t give a shit how much money CBS makes at 11:30 and doesn’t care about the three-decade legacy of The Late Show or the storied history of the theater in which it’s produced each night. Cancelling this particular hit show isn’t poison to the deal for Skydance to buy Paramount — it’s a sweetener. I missed this at the time, but Oliver Darcy, media reporter extraordinaire, called it at Status (paywalled, alas) just over a week ago:
Jon Stewart opened Monday’s episode of The Daily Show not
mincing words, calling Paramount’s settlement with Donald Trump
“shameful.” Just as he was digging in, a fake Arby’s ad suddenly
appeared on screen, as if to cut him off mid-rant for criticizing
Comedy Central’s parent company. “Did they? Son of a bitch!”
Stewart exclaimed, playing along with the bit — yet nodding to a
deeper fear that his commentary might soon be silenced amid all
the corporate upheaval.
Later in the episode, Stewart continued to needle Paramount,
sitting down with former 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft
for a candid and unsparing conversation. Kroft described the
settlement in clear terms: “It was a shakedown.” Inside “The Daily
Show,” I’m told staffers have taken pride that Stewart showed once
again he is willing to stand up to powerful interests, even if it
potentially risks his future employment. And while they may not
yet know it, inside certain power circles, there is an open
question: How much longer will Stewart have this platform?
Indeed, the reality is that the ground under not only Stewart, but
also Stephen Colbert, is shifting fast. Skydance, led by Larry and
David Ellison, now believes its merger with Paramount will close
in the next several weeks, I’m told. Much of the attention has
focused on how the Ellisons will reshape 60 Minutes and CBS
News. We first reported that David Ellison met with Bari Weiss
about a possible role at CBS News, and it is clear the Ellisons
want to rid the network of what they see as a liberal taint. But
little has been said about the futures of Colbert and Stewart, who
have been two of Trump’s most consistent comedic antagonists,
under the new corporate leadership. [...]
As one media insider put it to me this week, “What better gift
could [the Ellisons] give Trump than to get rid of Colbert and
Stewart?”
The first shoe dropped at CBS last night. TV-wise, it’d be crazy for Paramount to drop Jon Stewart too. But dropping Colbert is even crazier, and they already did that. It’s not tyranny or the threat of state violence that is taking The Late Show With Stephen Colbert off the air, but rather oligarchy and unchecked cronyism and corruption. The breathtaking abdication we’re seeing at CBS — first news with 60 Minutes, now commentary and humor with The Late Show — signals a decidedly American descent into curse-not-the-king mass media acquiescence to Trump’s authoritarian hostility to criticism and dissent.
I absolutely love that Colbert’ [sic] got fired. His talent was even
less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less
talent than Colbert! Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them
combined, including the Moron on NBC who ruined the once great
Tonight Show.
I will admit that it’s kind of funny that he didn’t even deign to address Fallon by name, especially since Fallon is the one who did the most to normalize Trump’s aberrant candidacy in 2016.
If any interview with a 2024 presidential candidate was edited deceptively to help the candidate in question, it was this Fox News interview with Trump, which resurfaced this month amidst the Jeffrey Epstein imbroglio. Fox grossly truncated a glaringly evasive answer from Trump regarding whether, if re-elected, he would release all DOJ files related to Epstein. ↩︎
Which hurts slightly to write about, insofar as I’ve aged out of the demo personally. Now I’m a non-coveted TV watcher — but one who’s skipped all the commercials on late night shows for 25 years anyway. ↩︎︎
It’s the first time Operation Border Health has canceled in 26 years. More than 6,600 people received check-ups, dental services, diabetes screenings and more last year.
Just 7% of homeowners in Texas have flood insurance through the federal government, which runs the biggest flood insurance program in the country. That percentage drops to 2% when you move inland, to areas like Travis and Kerr counties.
The rescission package proposed by President Donald Trump and approved by Congress claws back nearly $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides annual federal funding to PBS, NPR and their member stations across the country, including Houston Public Media.
Last fall, Mayor John Whitmire instructed the city’s planning department to use discretion in waiving sidewalk construction requirements. According to records obtained by Houston Public Media, about 6% of single-family projects since then received waivers.
Book recommendation of the week: The Bedwetter, by Sarah Silverman (Amazon, Bookshop). If you like her comedy, you’ll like this. Warning: it is crude.
If you don’t like really crude comedy, then let me suggest some hilarious but less crude books by other comics: I’m Just a Person by Tig Notaro (Amazon, Bookshop); I’d Like to Play Alone, Please by Tom Segura (Amazon, Bookshop) and You’ll Grow Out of It by Jessi Klein (Amazon, Bookshop).
NEW YORK CITY – Following the sudden cancellation of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, CBS has announced a revamp of their prime-time line-up designed to appease the Trump administration with the launch of the Late Show with Jon Voight. “We at CBS Entertainment have been trying to get Jon Voight behind a late night […]
Around 100 demonstrators marched from Houston City Hall to Discovery Green and back in opposition of President Donald Trump and his policies, among other issues.
It's been a year since Project 2025 became national news. At the time, I cited the great Rick Perlstein, an expert on the history of the conservative movement, who said that the most important thing about the P2025 document wasn't its extreme plans, but rather, its total incoherence:
You see, Project 2025 isn't just one roadmap for turning America into a doomed, corporate/christofascist hellscape: it is several such roadmaps, with many policy prescriptions that directly and violently contradict each other.
For Perlstein, this was both revealing and important. Like all successful political campaigns, Trumpism is a coalition. Coalitions form when groups of people set aside their disagreements and join together. Virtually every important political change is downstream of a coalition.
The easiest kind of coalition to form is an oppositional one, where groups agree on what they don't want, without agreeing on what they do want. Think, for example, of the Andrea Dworkin wing of the feminist movement making common cause with Jerry Falwell to oppose pornography. Obviously, these people have completely irreconcilable goals for what they want, but when it comes to porn, it's easy for them to agree on what they don't want.
That's fine when you're waging the campaign against something, but if you happen to win that campaign, you're in trouble. That's when the fight starts over who will get their way. That's the moment when winning coalitions become bitterly divided:
Now, some of these conflicts matter more than others. The least politically connected, least sophisticated (and most numerous) members of the conservative coalition have long been mollified by performative acts of cruel racism and gender discrimination. These could be enacted without any real impact on the power-players in the coalition, since they were insulated from discriminatory lending and hiring, immune to police violence, and could skip to another state or country to get abortion care, hire sex workers, etc. No one is ever going to deny Peter Thiel a mortgage, no matter how many twinks he bangs. Ted Cruz's daughter will always be able to get an abortion, no matter what Texas or federal law states. Clarence Thomas doesn't have to worry about getting pulled over because he "fits the description." As Wilhoit's Law says:
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Project 2025 is an anthology, edited by the Heritage Foundation, collecting the post-victory aspirations of the most important members of the Trump coalition. As anthologists, Heritage's job was to choose which submissions to include and which ones to reject. Perlstein's key insight is that wherever Heritage included two or more directly contradictory plans in Project 2025, we can infer the groups that submitted those plans are each too powerful and important to sideline – they are equally matched combatants, and it's impossible to predict which one will get their way and which ones will eat shit in the aftermath of a victory.
There were so many contradictions in Project 2025: immigration policy, military policy, trade policy, monetary policy, tax policy, and more. As Perlstein pointed out, Project 2025 was a 900-page roadmap to the future fracture lines in the Trump coalition. These were the places where the opposition could break off parts of Trump's base, in the same way that Steve Bannon has been doing to the progressive movement (also an easily fractured coalition).
Since Trump won the presidency, House and Senate, he has done a remarkable job of keeping this brittle coalition together through a mix of flattery and bullying. But the fact remains that Trump's most important factions hate each other and are gunning for one another, and whenever Trump chooses one faction to win and another to lose, the losers are prone to turning on him:
Trump's lifelong strategy has been to race across a succession of rivers on the backs of alligators without losing a leg. He is the undisputed all-time historical champion of this bizarre sport, but no one can win that race forever, and your first loss is a career-ender.
I think a lot of people – including Trump allies – understand this, at least at a gut level. That's why the Epstein stuff is so huge now. It's impossible to overstate the extent to which the Trump base is organized around conspiratorial beliefs about elite pedophile rings:
These beliefs are a stand-in for an overall rage against elite impunity, the two-tiered system of justice that lets the powerful get away with anything. The sexual abuse of children is such a viscerally offensive crime, so the idea that rich and powerful people are getting away with it carries a lethal charge.
Conspiracy fantasies have their roots in traumatic reality. Without a long list of US military cover-ups, there'd be no room for UFO conspiracies. The credibility of antivax ("pharma companies want to kill you and regulators want to help them") is rooted in the FDA's failure to prevent the opioid crisis, and the million Americans who died as a result:
Conspiratorialism is a cognitive failure that occurs when you blame systemic problems on individuals. That's why they call antisemitism "the socialism of fools" – it's what you get when you blame Jewish bankers, rather than the finance sector's class warfare, for your problems:
Conspiratorialists have the right feeling, but the wrong facts. If you hate elite impunity, you should be furious about the Supreme Court ruling that presidents have "absolute immunity" from prosecution for the crimes they commit in office. But bad actors can exploit the failures of the conspiratorial mindset to make people who are legitimately enraged by elite impunity direct that rage at imaginary "cultural Marxists" at universities.
As Naomi Klein writes in Doppelganger, the right lives in a "mirror world" where child abuse is confined to largely imaginary children in nonexistent pizza parlor basements, while actual kids in Florida concentration camps, or border detention cages, or meat-packing plant night shifts, or living in hunger and without a home, are ignored:
It's not hard to understand why Trump wants to suppress the Epstein files. He had a long friendship with Epstein, and spoke glowingly of Epstein's taste in "beautiful women…on the younger side." Trump sent Epstein lewd drawings and imaginary dialogues about Epstein's "wonderful secret":
Not only that, it's likely that many of Trump's most important supporters were directly complicit in Epstein's crimes (participating in the rape of young women and girls) and indirectly complicit (covering up these crimes and helping to launder Epstein's money).
Can Trump convince the conspiratorial wing of his coalition that Epstein is a "nothingburger" and a fabrication of Biden, Obama, the Clintons, Emmanuel Goldstein and Snowball?
It's not impossible. As The American Prospect's Ryan Cooper points out, conspiratorialists possess an incredible ability to "believe just about anything, even if it literally kills them—witness, for instance, the unvaccinated Texas GOP official who was posting anti-vaccine memes on Facebook right up until he died of COVID":
But so far, the signs are not looking good for Trump. Writing for Wired, Jake Lahut speaks to many high-ranking Trump advisors, past and present, anonymous and named, who are concerned about the mounting fury from Trump's conspiratorial base:
As Lahut writes, Trump is flubbing this badly, but there may be no way for him to resolve the Epstein affair to the satisfaction of his base. They were already primed to be suspicious of whatever story they were presented with, and this latest incident all but guarantees that they will not accept whatever material Trump is eventually arm-twisted into releasing.
And that's not even the biggest disappointment Trump's conspiratorialists will confront. Trump has no intention of changing the system to make life better for these Christmas-voting turkeys. Arresting 11 million immigrants and any number of US citizens who fit the description will not help these people with their very real, material problems. Nor will banning abortion, giving tax breaks to the ultra-rich, or defunding the police at the CFPB who were in charge of shutting down rip-off artists at payday lenders, big banks, cryptocurrency exchanges, etc. So these people can only ever get angrier.
But the conspiratorial base isn't the only Trumpland faction that is being forced to eat shit after Trump's victory. In another Wired story, David Gilbert presents a snapshot of the pieces of the Trump coalition that have broken off, or are hanging by a thread:
And there's Elon Musk, who is (correctly) furious that Trump wiped his ass with his promise of a balanced budget so he could hand trillions to the richest people in the history of the human race:
Each of these people is an avatar for a bloc in the Trump coalition, and they reflect the fury of the people who stand behind them. This is as Rick Perlstein prophesied a year ago: these groups hate each other and the only way for some of them to get what they want is for others to be totally betrayed.
Trump has been racing over those alligator-backs for so long now, it can sometimes feel like he'll never miss a step. But he's one snap away from losing a leg, and after that, it'll be a bloodbath.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1021 words Wednesday, 3058 words total).
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
Studies show that children who read for pleasure perform better on tests and suffer from fewer mental health problems. Here are some tips for fostering a love of reading:
Make time every day to read the neighbor’s mail as a family.
Emit a high-pitched noise every time they’re not reading.
Use a marker to retitle every book in your home Roblox Tips.
Give each letter of the alphabet a corresponding sound to be made with the mouth.
Tell them MrBeast wrote The Lord Of The Rings.
Make your kids understand that your love for them is directly tied to their reading ability.
Try dipping the books in ketchup.
Let your children play with the gun inside the hollowed-out cover.
Tell them that some books contain the word “ass.”
Create a tense, hostile environment at home, prompting them to seek refuge in the world of literature.
Evaluate your personal ethics before giving up and buying them the entire Harry Potter series.
Once upon a time, success for a company like UnionBustingToxicDeathFactory Inc. was merely turning a profit.
But these days, people want companies that care about more.
Somehow, there is a perception out there that UnionBustingToxicDeathFactory Inc. is just some kind of union-busting toxic death factory. It’s crucial for our planet and our profit that we shift this attitude.
But change won’t be easy.
The microscopic amount of money we recently spent on socially conscious initiatives deeply unsettled our board members.
But we didn’t give up.
We were able to keep the board members in check by ensuring their objectively ludicrous annual bonuses remained exactly the same, using additional profits we made from AI assistants that tell factory employees not to have bathroom breaks.
It goes without saying that the last few years have been hard for everyone.
Even our investors who somehow made an eye-watering profit during the pandemic are still feeling the lingering effects of Zoom Fatigue. There is a justifiable skepticism of big corporations.
That’s why we’re not going to just talk about how we care, we’re going to show you—with leadership.
And no one does it better than the CEO of UnionBustingToxicDeath Factory Inc., Aaron Coldheart.
Many CEOs say they want to do everything in their power to reduce our planet’s carbon emissions. But can you name one other than Coldheart who is so serious about reducing their emissions that they’ll temporarily leave the planet in a rocket to create that reduction? Two or three other CEOs immediately spring to mind, but Coldheart spent the most money doing it, so by default, he is the best.
While all of these new initiatives are fantastic, at the end of the day, one key question remains:
Will any of this ensure that UnionBustingToxicDeathFactory Inc. is a company people associate with more than turning a profit through its technically legal union-busting toxic death factories?
The answer is no, according to a synthetic focus group of avatars modeled on data we stole from fly-over state peasants.
That’s why, with a heavy heart, we are announcing that we have taken the unprecedented step to put an end to UnionBustingToxicDeathFactory Inc.
At this point in her career, Amy Sherald should be a household name. At minimum, when she unveiled her portrait of Michelle Obama in February 2018, making history as the first African American artist to create a Smithsonian-commissioned portrait of a former first lady, everyone should have taken note. But if you are only familiar with that one portrait, you are missing out. Her body of work is much more, and it is evident in Amy Sherald: American Sublime, on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where it debuted last fall, American Sublime offers a look at nearly two decades of work from Sherald’s career. Rooted in the longstanding American Realist tradition, Sherald offers her own take on the genre. Portraying everyday Black Americans, she creates nuanced narratives that address ideas surrounding identity.
Amy Sherald, “It Made Sense…Mostly in Her Mind,” 2011
While some larger paintings in the exhibition offer more visual information via detailed backgrounds, the majority of figures, painted on 54-by-43-inch canvases, are placed on colorful backgrounds. In earlier works, such as It Made Sense…Mostly in Her Mind from 2011, the background appears oxidized or marbled. In more recent works, including her portrait of Michelle Obama, Sherald lets go of that visual effect, opting for solid backgrounds.
Her sitters are executed in grisaille, or a monochromatic gray palette, to challenge viewers’ ideas on race and speak more broadly about the universal human experience. This approach to rendering figures also creates a visual dichotomy within each work. The figures come off somewhat flat, while their clothing and accessories appear more voluminous.
An installation view of “Amy Sherald: American Sublime” at the Whitney Museum of American Art
Another hallmark of her work is attention to detail. Everything is precisely rendered and included for a reason. From brightly colored fingernails to subtle jewelry, each feature catches your eye and begs to be pored over.
Despite varying wardrobes and accessories, as well as differing ages and genders, all of Sherald’s portraits depict contemplative individuals. Their facial expressions reveal little immediate emotion, forcing the viewer in turn to study pieces longer. That portrayed reflectiveness also feeds into larger themes of identity and self-concern.
Amy Sherald, “Four Ways of Being”
Extending the exhibition outside the museum walls, Sherald created Four Ways of Being for a billboard across from the Whitney and The High Line, a nearby elevated public park. The image, which can be seen from the Whitney’s gallery windows, depicts four figures wearing distinctly different styles of clothing. Slightly overlapping with one another, the figures represent different generations sharing a moment together.
Like the impact of multiple figures within Four Ways of Being, the collective presentation of works in American Sublime adds more power to Sherald’s already commanding portraits. Instead of isolated individuals, the feeling of community resonates throughout the gallery space. The exhibition’s depth, with work dating back to 2007, also spotlights a consistent vision from one of the leading portraitists of our time. A vision everybody should be acquainted with.
Amy Sherald: American Sublime is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City through August 10, 2025.
WASHINGTON—Springing into action to save what it could, the U.S. populace reportedly got to work this week boarding up windows and retreating to its cellars moments after learning Lena Dunham had reentered the news cycle. “Dear God, the day has finally come,” said Tulsa, OK, resident Amanda Pendleton, just one of the millions of Americans across the country who shoved whatever shelf-stable foods they could grab into their children’s arms and rushed to the stables to free the horses, hoping they would have a fighting chance against the emotionally raw, Dunham-centered onslaught headed straight their way. “That’s plenty of plywood on the door. Come on, kids, it’s time. Grab any weapons you can find and get downstairs. Don’t worry about Grandma. It’s too late to save her.” At press time, source confirmed the nation had placed cyanide tablets between its teeth in preparation for the terrible event and bitten down the moment the discourse arrived.
In response to a sweeping rollback in federal funding, Houston Public Media has launched the Resiliency Fund, a $4.4 million campaign to offset the losses over the next two years and safeguard the station’s mission-driven services.
Well ... you know ... they don't need to use real cars. They could just get little models, put the camera up close. What are ya talking about Cowboy Slim? The cop show those kids are talking about. We don't want them to do a cop show, do we? We want them to have fun right here at the corral. #CowboyWho
“Forget about the price of cattle for a sec, check out how he owns this blue-haired chick.” Luke and the Panel (Ian MacIntyre, Clare Blackwood and Megan MacKay) speculate about what strategies Poilievre can use to win his by-election, break down Danielle Smith’s over the top list of demands for constitutional amendments, and delight in […]
WASHINGTON D.C. – Amid the ongoing rumours, lies, and coverups related to President Donald Trump’s relationship to notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, White House officials called a press conference yesterday to announce that the president had just been diagnosed with the deadly “Distract From Epstein Scandal-itis”. “We are all praying for President Trump during this […]
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