Donald Trump has sewn up the Republican presidential nomination. This presents something of a dilemma for the many Republicans who have spent the last few months going on television and saying very unkind things about Donald Trump.
We have put together a sampling of their comments, which will be particularly fun to watch as some of these talking heads suddenly decide, over the next few months, that they were totally wrong about good old Donald. Who do you think will crack first? (Bill Kristol.)
Video by Julian Muller and production coordinator Zoe Stahl
In Southern California, the San Andreas fault is “locked, loaded, and ready to roll,” according to one earthquake scientist. Thanks for being so colorful, dude.
Earlier this week, 19-year-old Hunter Osborn, a senior at Red Mountain High School, had a felony charge and 69 misdemeanor counts of indecent exposure brought against him for stupidly exposing his dong in the football team’s yearbook picture. While we don’t endorse the specific action Osborn took, teens will always pull off stupid pranks in high school and punishing them with potentially life-altering felony charges is a rather draconian recourse. You can’t legislate dumb teen mischief away by making an example of one football dude who didn’t think about the consequences of accepting a dare.
Thankfully, the typically dystopian American justice system course corrected and got this one right, as Osborn will no longer face any of the charges. Maricopa County Attorney’s Office announced yesterday afternoon that they were no longer pursuing felony charges, and that they’d review the 69 counts of misdemeanor indecent exposure:
“An assessment of the available evidence for the felony charge of Furnishing Harmful Items to Minors, ARS 13-3506.A., leads us to conclude that the evidence does not establish a violation of the statute,” said Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery.
A few hours later, Mesa Police announced that nobody else in the yearbook photo wanted to press charges against Osborn, so he’s now clear on all counts:
Mesa police announced late Wednesday afternoon that the case against a Red Mountain High School student accused of indecent exposure was closed because “all parties involved no longer desire prosecution.”
When it comes to discussions of mortality rates, it seems like all we hear these days is “middle-aged white Americans are dying more.” Okay, fine—but here’s the good news.
A new research paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives digs into our nation’s county-level mortality data and finds that, sure, the trends might not be so hot for 40-50 year-old whites, but let’s look on the bright side: babies are dying less!
Mortality rates for those under one year of age, for the age group 1–4, and for every five-year age group above that level, declined for both males and females between 1990 and 2010.1 Particularly pronounced improvements in mortality occurred at younger ages, which tend to be age groups in which deaths occur predominantly among the poor.
And the future of those non-dead babies is promising!
However, among children, mortality has been falling more quickly in poorer areas with the result that inequality in mortality has fallen substantially over time. This is an important result given the growing literature showing that good health in childhood predicts better health in adulthood (Currie and Rossin-Slater 2015). Hence, today’s children are likely to face considerably less inequality in mortality as they age than current adults.
Do you need a cherry on top of that? Okay!!
We also show that there have been stunning declines in mortality rates for African Americans between 1990 and 2010, especially for black men.
So the next time someone you’re speaking to at a party shakes their head and mutters, “Wow, middle-aged whites are dying faster now,” grab them by their lapels and scream, “But there’s great news for babies and African-American men!” Then turn on your heel and go to a real party.
The richest touring musician in the world is being called to the stage for a soundcheck.
“This,” Jim Dolan tells me before he leaves the dressing room for the rehearsal, “is where I’m happiest.”
In a few hours, his band, JD & The Straight Shot, will open for the singer/songwriter Jewel at the Lincoln Theater in Washington, D.C. Dolan’s musical combo is, professionally speaking, his second act. He’s already made more in business than any singer or songwriter ever squeezed out of three chords and the truth.
His sojourn into show biz was made possible by prior successes in his regular biz. So let’s get some of the money stuff out of the way: He has a reported net worth of $1.5 billion. You could almost certainly subtract the combined wealth of everybody else in the nearly sold out 1,225-seat theater on this night—including that of the headliner—from Dolan’s, and he would still have enough cash in the kitty to buy the ornate downtown venue.
Not that Dolan needs another rock room: He already owns Madison Square Garden, as part of a family portfolio that also includes the Beacon Theater, Radio City Music Hall, and the Los Angeles Forum, in addition to the New York Knicks and the New York Rangers.
The world’s second-richest touring musician, some half a billion bucks behind, is Paul McCartney, who as a young man complained that money couldn’t buy him love. Dolan’s demeanor on the way to the soundcheck, however, hints that money can make lots of awesome things happen. It’s allowed him, for example, to hire a fantastic country-rock band and hit the road to sing his own songs.
Dolan has spent the spring in places like Lake Charles, Biloxi, Harrisburg, and Albany, warming up Jewel crowds with tunes from Ballyhoo, his newest and most ambitious recording. In fact, D.C. and Boston are the only cities on the entire 18-show tour that can claim—as Dolan himself can—to have both an NBA and NHL franchise. So he’s performing before lots of people who don’t know of his wealth or give a damn if Kurt Rambis actually gets that head coaching gig or that the Rangers got bounced out in the first round.
“I love playing. I LOVE playing!” Dolan says. “When you get up there and connect with an audience and they love what you’re doing, and you’re playing your own music, not somebody else’s, and you get a great reaction out of that, it’s great. You’re so pumped up you can’t get to sleep!”
Money and business connections have enabled Dolan to work with record producers and music teachers whom hungry up-and-comers with shallower pockets could never retain. (But one example: He shares a vocal coach with Axl Rose.) He’s made worse business decisions than starting up a band—he lost a reported $250 million for Cablevision, for example, after trying to rescue electronics chain The Wiz from bankruptcy in 1998—but JD & The Straight Shot isn’t close to being a break-even financial proposition. Shockingly few listeners have purchased records: A recent report from industry stats keeper Soundscan showed only 113 units of Ballyhoo had been sold since its January release.
Detail from a Soundscan report for the week ending 4/21/16.
The money coming in from performing for Jewel crowds is likely negligible, too. Seth Hurwitz—the local rock magnate whose firm, IMP, promoted the D.C. show—declined to disclose fees paid to opening acts at Lincoln Theater. (A rival area concert promoter estimated that the opener there would get “$150 to $200.”) But Hurwitz, who is also owner of the prestigious 9:30 Club, does confess that the opening slot isn’t a prosperous one. “It’s all over the place,” Hurwitz says, “but what I will tell you is that occasionally we do get asked to find someone for free and we refuse.”
Most traveling bands with an opening-act revenue stream survive on fast food and sleep either on a bus or a friend’s couch.
Dolan’s concerns, at any rate, are about carpe diem, not per diems. He’s going to be 61 years old in May, and knows there’s a limited amount of time to chase the rock and roll fantasies of his youth. So for the Jewel tour, Dolan and his band will travel by private jet, get chauffered in rental limos, grab post-gig meals at the Frenchiest French restaurants they can find—“We’re into souffles,” he says—and stay at the poshest hotels. In D.C., they’re staying at the Dupont Circle Hotel; travel-booking sites price rooms at the inn from $197 - $466, and during Cherry Blossom Festival week, nobody’s giving discounts.
Dolan is risking more than money in hopes of getting an audience for his music. That the historically media-shy media mogul would open up to Deadspin about his mock-friendly mid-life musical moonlighting—Axl’s teacher? Really?—is another indicator of how much he wants his songs to be heard.
“We’re trying to get the music as good as we can get it, all part of the theory that if you keep making it better, then no matter what, you’re going to get recognized. I believe that,” Dolan says. “Right now, I’m pretty proud of it, but if we keep getting better from here, ultimately, it’s going to be undeniable.”
Even hardcore music types who are aware of his financial situation say the effort he’s now putting into his band and the pleasures he’s getting out of it make Dolan easy to root for.
“I get it, you know?” says Rodney Crowell, a Nashville-based mainstream-country star turned alt-country pioneer and the producer of “Find a Church,” Dolan’s recent single. “Providence blesses some and doesn’t bless others. But good for anybody who can do what they want to do.”
In other words: It’s cool to watch a guy make the best out of a wonderful situation.
“I was dreaming guitar dreams”
To hear Dolan tell it, growing up on Long Island, he thought about someday making the Billboard Top 40, not the Fortune 500.
“When I was in 10th grade,” he says, “I was dreaming guitar dreams.”
For a time, he acted on them, too. He says he was 15 when he saw an ad in Pennysaver, the Craigslist of the analog era, where “a guy in Queens” was selling a used Gibson J-50 for $200. He put together earnings from mowing lawns to get it. (As first axes go, that’s a high-cred choice, what with Bob Dylan and James Taylor counted among J-50 users.) That got him invites to join kids in the neighborhood and pals at Cold Spring Harbor High School for jams, where they had a blast playing lousy versions of what he calls “easy to play” songs, such as the Jefferson Airplane’s “Wooden Ships” and Allman Brothers and Neil Young ditties.
His parents, he says, never hid their disapproval of the romance between him and his instrument.
“They didn’t want to to do anything to support it, and kept pushing me toward stricter academics,” he says. “There was no, ‘Here’s a guitar for your birthday!’ or anything like that. My parents never bought me anything musical for either Christmas or my birthday in my entire life.”
Dolan rebelled, and kept jamming with his buddies. And when he headed upstate to attend college at SUNY-New Paltz, he peeved the parents by initially enrolling in the music program. But his lust for that curriculum began waning when he learned that the college had no interest in teaching students the finer points of rock or pop, only classical music. The final straw came when he saw how his off-campus guitar teacher, who he remembers as the best guitarist from Poughkeepsie to Albany, was struggling financially.
“He was great,” says Dolan, “and he was giving me lessons for $5 an hour and not making a living. And I said, ‘I don’t want to work as hard as he is and not have success.’”
So he changed his major to communications. As luck would have it, his family had some ties to the communications world; in fact, they had a burgeoning television empire. Charles Dolan, his father, was the founder of HBO, as well as Cablevision Systems, a behemoth provider of cable TV services in the New York City area. When the younger Dolan got his degree, he went straight into, as he calls it, “the family business.”
Dad detailed the new college grad to Cleveland, where the family owned WKNR, the city’s first sports radio station, the idea being that the kid could manage it while learning the ropes of the telecom realm. Meanwhile, the Dolans’ empire kept expanding: Cablevision bought the Garden, the Knicks, and the Rangers in 1994 for what the New York Times estimated at the time was $1.1 billion. A year later, James replaced his dad atop the family enterprise.
Dolan says the rock and roll bug bit him again beginning in 2001, when he was putting together an in-house conference for all his MSG employees. While planning the shindig, he found some guys on the payroll who also knew a few guitar chords, and they formed an ad hoc rock band to entertain the staff.
“We called ourselves the Off the Wallflowers,” Dolan says. “We rehearsed, took a bunch of rock classics and I rewrote the words with words for our company event. After that was over, I was like, ‘I don’t want to stop doing this!’”
He became the guitar hoarder he would have been as a teenager, if only there had been more mowed lawns.
“I’m like the guy who couldn’t afford a pair of shoes who suddenly can have any shoes he wanted,” Dolan says. “I just went out and bought everything.” He says he now has well over 100 guitars, including that Gibson J-50 from his teens. And he’s still acquiring. His current stage guitar, a McPherson 5.0 XP, is a recent purchase from a boutiquey Wisconsin luthier; it sells for $14,700, a massive price for a non-vintage guitar. (“I played one, and ordered three of them right away,” he says.)
Jim Dolan’s first guitar, a Gibon J-50. Photos courtesy Jim Dolan.
Dolan bugged all his fortysomething friends to play with him until he had enough to start a regular jam session. He noticed the jams quickly meant more to him than others. “Guys were saying it was getting too serious,” he says, laughing. So he started seeking out what he calls “wedding band” musicians—folks who would know how to play every song ever written—just so he could sing them. And for kicks they began playing blues bars on the Island.
He put out a blues album with his new friends, 2005’s Nothing to Hide. The disc got a bland reception from the few critics who noticed it.
“Mash Dr. John, George Thorogood, the Blues Brothers, and Huey Lewis together, and it might sound something like JD & The Straight Shot on Nothing to Hide, which is very much in a snaky, swampy R&B-blues mold,” wrote AllMusic reviewer Richie Unterberger. “Lead singer James Dolan’s functional, raspy vocal style, however doesn’t have the talent or distinction of any of those sort of names. Delivered with the assistance of a decent crack R&B-rock band, it’s not bad; it’s just not special.”
The New York Post noted that Dolan’s “swaggering vocals” were “slightly reminiscent of Tom Waits and Randy Newman,” but was otherwise milquetoasty. “It’s not a groundbreaking album by any stretch, but it’s an enjoyable surprise,” said the reviewer.
Internet users had more fun with the record. The customer reviews on Amazon are hilarious, though the laughs all come at Dolan’s expense. A poster going by “Isiah” gave the disc five out of five stars: “Mr. Dolan has the voice of an angel. I have never heard rhythm guitar played with Mr. Dolan’s level of craftsmanship and passion. Each of Mr. Dolan’s songs has a melody worthy of Mozart and lyrics that would make Shakespeare jealous. Mr. Dolan has truly channeled a lifelong passion for rock ‘n’ roll into a sound and sensibility that will be music to the ears of classic rock fans everywhere. Please don’t fire me.”
Dolan’s review of his debut disc is harsher. “That was really horrible,” he says. “But that was my first time recording, and I was hooked by then.”
Folks he dealt with at his day job, he says, were far kinder about his playing than the critics were, and very supportive when it came to his musical meanderings. And it so happened that many of the people he dealt with at the office were music business titans.
“Irving introduced me to Joe, and Joe invited us to come play with him, which was wild,” Dolan tells me.
I stop Dolan and ask him who this supportive first-names-only duo of “Irving” and “Joe” are.
“Irving Azoff,” he says.
Oh, that guy. At various times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Billboard have described Irving Azoff as the single most powerful person in the music industry. Among the lines on his resume: manager of the Eagles, CEO of Ticketmaster, and chairman of Live Nation, the largest concert promoter in the world. “Irving’s groups were playing my venue and we got close,” Dolan says.
And Joe? “Joe Walsh,” he says. Of course it’s Joe Walsh, the rock and roll Hall of Famer known for guitar work with 70's hard rockers the James Gang, the Eagles, and solo smash hits. Dolan and Walsh met through shows at the Garden, and supported each other’s efforts to stay sober. (Dolan has said the “straight shot” in the band’s name is a reference to his being clean and sober for what is now 22 years.)
“He was so encouraging, taught me more guitar,” Dolan says. “He started mentoring me and kept saying, ‘Go! Go! Don’t stop!’ And so I didn’t!”
“I swore I’d never play the Garden. But, yeah, I did.”
With validation from the pros, Dolan built a studio in his home and started writing and recording his own songs.
He began to take singing lessons. When you’re Jim Dolan, you don’t take your tutelage from just any putz. He went straight to the vocal coach to the stars, Don Lawrence, whose clients include Mick Jagger, Lady Gaga, Bono, Axl Rose and other artists Lawrence says are too famous to name.
“It’s not easy to get on my list,” Lawrence says.” I work with all the best singers.”
Lawrence somehow found space to squeeze in Dolan. The instructor insists that Dolan’s standing in New York had nothing to do with his becoming a client, and that he took him on because a friend who he can’t remember asked him to.
“I didn’t know him or who he was,” says Lawrence. “He came in and told me he worked at Madison Square Garden. He was very unpretentious. So I said, ‘What do you at the Garden?’ And he said, ‘I own it.’ I said, ‘Oh ...’”
Dolan still leaves work every Monday afternoon to go to Lawrence’s studio on the Upper West Side for 90-minute sessions, and he always does his homework. “He’s the hardest worker I know,” says Lawrence. “He’s relentless. He doesn’t stop! He is going back to music, and he has the desire to see this through. It’s the most important thing to him. He studies, man. He’s a beautiful singer.”
I ask Lawrence: If you thought the richest touring musician in the world was a lousy singer, would you tell me?
“I don’t say something I don’t mean,” Lawrence says. “You can listen to opera singers, and they have great voices and they’re boring, and you can listen to Joe Cocker, who has no voice and is the greatest singer out there. Jim sings well and he’s getting better and better, when you can bring emotion to what you want to do, and back it up, it’s great. He’s a damn good singer.”
Jim Dolan takes in a Knicks game, 2015. Photo via AP
Dolan hit up powerful friends who’d offered to help. Azoff took over management of Dolan’s band. He accepted an invitation from Walsh, an Azoff client, for JD & the Straight Shot to open shows, including a date in August 2007 at the Beacon Theater, which MSG had acquired at the end of the previous year. Don Henley—the drummer and face of the Eagles, and Azoff stablemate—also brought the band on as a warm-up act. While serving as the Eagles’ opener, JD & the Straight Shot got to be the first band to play the refurbished L.A. Forum, which Dolan’s company had acquired two years earlier. The Azoff connection likewise landed JD & the Straight Shot several stadium dates on a one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other-ones cavalcade tour in 2010 with the Eagles, Keith Urban, and the Dixie Chicks.
He even played the Garden, hallowed ground in arena rock circles and the site of such legendary shows as the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh, the 1969 Rolling Stones dates that begat Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out, and the 1973 Led Zeppelin shows that gave the world The Song Remains the Same.
“I swore I’d never play the Garden,” Dolan says. “But, yeah, I did.” As he has it, those dates with megabands aren’t as cool in practice as they appear on paper.
“When you open for the Eagles,” he says, “you’re playing for the ushers and security staff.”
Dolan continued writing and recording and releasing records, and continued gettings assists from big-name friends. For his second CD, 2008’s Right on Time, he had Walsh and Robert Randolph, the genius pedal-steel bloozeman from New Jersey, on hand. Slash, guitarist from the Azoff-managed Guns N’ Roses, got JD & the Straight Shot some ink by showing up at an L.A. show the band did with Walsh. Doors were opening for the band’s recorded product, too; Dolan, conveniently, already owned many of those doors. “Can’t Make Tears,” the title track to his 2011 offering, showed up on the soundtrack for Hell on Wheels, a Western series on the AMC network. The Dolan family controls the AMC network. The band’s bio shows that its tunes have appeared in soundtracks for feature filmsHurricane Season, Lawless, Butter and August: Osage County. All of those movies were produced by The Weinstein Company, a corporate business partner of MSG. Dolan and Harvey Weinstein are also individual business partners, and Dolan is a former member of the TWC board of directors.
“Hittin’ all their free throws and no more shooting bricks”
For all the various virtues of Can’t Make Tears, Dolan ranks a tune from the album as his band’s biggest boner. That would be “Fix the Knicks,” the song that also happens to be his most overt melding of his real vocation and musical dream job.
The track makes light of the putrid state of the team, which hasn’t won a title since the early 1970s and has only made it out of the first round of the playoffs once since 2000. The chorus: “Fix the Knicks and make them shine/Get ‘em to win like it’s ’69/Hittin’ all their free throws and no more shooting bricks/Time to get it right and fix the Knicks.”
Fans were peeved that one verse found Dolan boasting about making personnel decisions after he “called Isiah Thomas,” the disastrous former head coach and on-and-off alleged Svengali who was and remains one of the most polarizing folks ever to work for the Knicks. Thomas’s reign with the team was lowlighted by a sexual harassment suit filed against him in 2006 by marketing executive Anucha Browne Sanders—Dolan and MSG were named as co-defendants—in which the plaintiff was ultimately awarded $11.6 million. The New York Times concluded that the trial “made the inner workings of the Garden appear dysfunctional, hostile and lewd.” (Guard Stephon Marbury told the court about having sex with an intern “in his truck after a group outing to a strip club.”)
Knicks enthusiasts did not want to be reminded, in song or otherwise, of what is generally considered the low point in franchise history. The New York Post reported that when Dolan debuted the tune for a New York audience at a 2011 Long Island show as his band was opening for Aretha Franklin, the crowd let out “an audible groan” at a mention of Thomas. It didn’t help that Dolan introduced his sarcastic tune just a month after he and his fellow NBA owners had locked out the players as part of a contract dispute.
I ask him how that mess came about. “‘Fix the Knicks!’ Oh, man. ‘Fix the Knicks!’” he says. “Everybody makes mistakes! I make mistakes. That was one of my mistakes. I thought I could appease the hungry masses with it. I was just thinking, well, maybe we could just write a song about it and then it will go away. That was wrong. Fortunately, nobody bought the album.”
It’s not literally true that nobody bought that record. But, as Soundscan will tell you about all this band’s releases, it’s damn close.
“I knew about Jim Dolan. He owns everything.”
Dolan isn’t hanging out with wedding-band guys from the Island anymore.
For the Jewel tour, he’s backed by top-flight Nashville players. Dolan is the only original member of JD & the Straight Shot in the credits for his new CD, Ballyhoo, or the live lineup on the current tour. There aren’t any celebrity cameos or Knicks references on the latest record, either. Guitarist Marc Copely previously played with alternative pop pixie Mary Lou Lord and Rosanne Cash, the urbane country fave, and even wrote a song with Carole King. Fiddler Erin Slaver gigged with arena acts Martina McBride, Eric Church, Keith Urban, and Vince Gill. The biggest catch Dolan fished out of Music City’s peerless talent pool was bassist Byron House, a studio institution and a member of Robert Plant’s Band of Joy, a first-rate Americana outfit that recorded and toured in 2010 and 2011.
“I was asked if I wanted to play with Jim Dolan,” says House. “I said, ‘Sounds great! And who’s Jim Dolan?’ I knew nothing about him except he was a guy with a band.”
By the time Copely filled him in on who Dolan was, House was in that band. Dolan knows music people have a hard time understanding how he got House to play with him, so when asked, he answers, “We stole his dog and we still have it.”
Rodney Crowell, whom Dolan brought in to produce some Nashville studio sessions, says he was trying to recruit House at the same time, only to learn he was overmatched. Crowell, a former son-in-law of Johnny Cash, has enjoyed scads of mainstream and critical success in a music career now in its fifth decade, and adds instant credibility to any project he’s involved with. Crowell says that in 2015, he was putting together a band to go on tour with him and Emmylou Harris. Among the first guys he rang up was House, whom he calls “one of the finest musicians to ever walk down the street.”
“Byron told me he couldn’t make it to play with me and Emmylou,” says Crowell, “but he didn’t say why.”
Around the same time House rejected his offer, Crowell was contacted by Dolan, who wanted him to produce a country-blues tune he’d written with Copely, House, and Slaver called “Better Find a Church.”
At that point, the bassist’s brush-off suddenly made lots of sense.
“I knew about Jim Dolan. He owns everything,” says Crowell, laughing. “I was thinking about how I could make this work. So I said, ‘Jim you’re a man of means, and I happen to have a charity. So how about this: I’ll make this record with you, and next time we have an event I’ll lean on you to be a sponsor?’ He said, ‘Sure.’ So, barter is still in! And so then we do this session with Jim in Nashville, and into the studio walks Byron. So I’m like, ‘Oh! This is why!’”
Crowell, now 65, and Dolan are of similar ages but polar opposite backgrounds. Crowell’s 2011 memoir, Chinaberry Sidewalks, describes growing up in extreme poverty in East Texas, and tells how his father, J.W. Crowell, pushed him to be a musician; in fact, J.W. bought young Rodney a drum set from a local pawn shop just so his band would have a drummer it didn’t have to pay. Crowell went on to record five chart-topping singles, win a couple Grammys, and gain more credibility in music circles than Dolan ever could. But Dolan, in about the same amount of time, has accrued at least $1.5 billion, and Crowell ain’t shipping his band from town to town by private jet.
“Jewel travels with us,” Dolan says.
When Michael Jordan decided to play baseball late in his sporting life, he won over all the baseball lifers on the Birmingham Barons by showing up with the Jordan Cruiser, the nicest bus in the Southern League. Dolan, with his private jet, similarly provides a different level of comfort than anybody else in the opening-band ranks can offer. And, say members of Dolan’s band, vive la différence. “Yeah, I really wish I could be on a bus smelling 20 other dudes,” Copely tells me.
So Crowell can’t blame Dolan for making House an offer a mercenary musician couldn’t easily refuse. And Crowell insists he came out of Dolan’s session happy for all concerned.
“Jim surrounds himself with very talented people, and he holds his own,” Crowell says. “Producing is mostly just making the right comments and right adjustments at the right time so you don’t halt the flow, and as an actor or performer, sometimes you have to trust the directions you’re getting. Jim really listened to everything I suggested. In sports talk, I guess you could say he allowed himself to be coached. That’s all anybody who is collaborating can ask for. And I think Jim had fun, and was happy with the results.”
“Better Find a Church” got JD & the Straight Shot its best notices ever. Critic Henry Carrigan of No Depression, a quarterly for alt-country fetishists, gushed that the song showcased “the mesmerizing voices of Jim Dolan and violinist Erin Slaver.” “‘Better Find a Church’ promises the funky beauty of things to come,” Carrigan wrote. (Dolan doesn’t own No Depression.)
But as of his current tour, Dolan has apparently finally won over the critics that matter most: “My mother and father came to our show in Fort Pierce,” he says. “Now, they love my music.”
There are other guys who have tried play rock star after striking it rich in business, even some with major league sporting connections. Dolan brought up the example of Paul Allen, the fellow billionaire who co-founded Microsoft and now owns the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trail Blazers. Allen often throws corporate parties seemingly just so he can plug in a guitar and jam with his band, called the Underthinkers, in front of a crowd.
But Dolan says the strength of his supporting cast, and the time he’s spending in rehearsal and recording studios in Nashville—the band spent a three-day break in the Jewel tour practicing and writing there—as well as on stages in minor league towns on the road, separates him from Allen and any other affluent weekend warriors.
“I know plenty of guys in corporate bands,” he says in the dressing room, crowded with his band, before the Lincoln Theater show. “But what we’re doing isn’t anything like what Paul does or the other guys do. This is a serious effort. Not that Paul’s not serious about his music, or these other guys aren’t serious. But we’re trying to be recognized, like a lot of other bands who want to be recognised as great artists. They’re having fun playing, but not trying to achieve what we are trying to achieve, and what we’re going to achieve.”
After delivering his mission statement, he says, loudly: “Right?”
Nods fill the room.
“If we could fill a theater like this, man, I’d be thrilled.”
“You’re here to see Jewel. We’re not her,” Dolan announces to a half-empty-but-filling Lincoln Theater crowd as his band’s warm-up set kicks off.
Simple joke, for sure, but he delivers the punchline like a pro. The crowd of Jewel hardcores, many of whom have been in the building since her fan club meet-and-greet began two hours earlier, guffaws and claps. Dolan has brought them to his side before singing a note.
His voice is as ready as it’s gonna be. Forty-five minutes before showtime, as he always does, Dolan went through the vocal warmup exercises that Lawrence tells him he must do to keep his voice strong on the road. (“It’s the exact routine I gave to Axl seven years ago, and he’s never had a day’s issue with his voice ever since,” Lawrence says.) Dolan’s booming yet pitchy vocals are the weakest link musically, but he seems aware of his limits and only occasionally overextends his abilities. Besides, the glee he gets from leading his unplugged quintet in front of a crowd more than makes up for the intermittent sharp or flat notes.
He tells the crowd that the idea for “Glide” came last year after watching his five-year-old son (playing a guitar isn’t the only thing Dolan’s continued to do into midlife) run and skip away from him at a school fair exuding not a care in the world, and how that sight made him wish his inner child dictated more of his behaviors. The band delivers a harmony-heavy, The Mamas & The Papas-type arrangement of the tune, whose lyrics could be taken as Dolan’s musical manifesto. (“Why do we get old and cold and grow to lose the child that’s inside?/Exchange it all for fear of being judged undignified/By doing so you lose it all, the parts that made us feel alive/release the brake that’s all it takes and you will feel yourself just glide!”) Dolan looks pretty darn pleased with his lot in life as he bangs out the song’s beat on House’s stand-up bass.
They cover “Nature’s Way,” a non-hit 1971 pro-environment single from Spirit, an L.A. band most remembered for writing the riff that Led Zeppelin stole for the opening bars of “Stairway to Heaven.” It’s a high-credibility cover song selection, highlighted by Copely’s solo and delicate chimey fills from percussionist Joe Magistro, a veteran of the Black Crowes. This ain’t a bar band.
JD & the Straight Shot performing earlier this year. Photo via Getty
The longer he’s onstage, the more Dolan hams it up. Before “Find a Church,” he pokes fun at the band’s commercial irrelevance by disclosing that record industry folks assured him the single would get airplay that has yet to materialize. “If you happen to hear it on the radio, call us!” he booms as the band kicks into the song. “We want to hear it on the radio!” Some portion of the crowd giggles at the self-deprecation; within the first few bars, lots of listeners are snapping their fingers.
During “Ballyhoo,” the new disc’s title track, he puts on a tophat, scarf, and sunglasses and breaks into the carnival barker character spelled out in the lyrics. As Copley and Slaver play the song out with a kinetic guitar/fiddle duel, Dolan steps to the rear of the stage near the drum kit, out of the spotlight, and cheers his bandmates on. This really is where he’s happiest. As Dolan predicted earlier in the day, nobody in the seats is wearing a Knicks or Rangers jersey. There will be no “Fix the Knicks” in the set.
Dolan picks his pricey McPherson guitar off its stand for the first time and strums the band into the closer, “Let It Roll.” That tune was originally recorded by Little Feat, a band that owned D.C. for a time in the 1970s, and whose frontman, Lowell George, died of a drug overdose from partying after a 1979 show at Lisner Auditorium, not too many blocks from the Lincoln Theater.
Some portion of the now almost-full house gives JD & the Straight Shot a standing ovation as Dolan et al leave the stage. They reconvene backstage, beaming, a few minutes later, where everybody’s in a party mood but there’s nothing to OD on, save perhaps the artisanal chocolate treats sitting on a table. Dolan tells me he’s very happy with how the show went, and the audience’s attentiveness and huzzahs give him the confidence to admit he’d love for JD & the Straight Shot to top the bill next time they come to town.
“If we could fill a theater like this, man, I’d be thrilled,” he says. “I can’t imagine anything more than that.”
That’s probably a pipe dream for a band touring behind a record that has, again, sold 113 copies. But, perhaps because it’s coming from the guy who owns Madison Square Garden, headlining the Lincoln Theater sure seems humble.
While members of the Straight Shot start packing up to leave the theater, Dolan puffs on a vape pen and checks his phone for what he says is the first time all night. “There’s a Ranger game going on right now,” he says. “We’re losing, but, that’s okay.” (His hockey team is down 3-0 after two periods of what will be a 4-1 loss to the New York Islanders.)
Dolan then tells the troops it’s time to head out to a restaurant in Georgetown called La Chaumiere, which a young assistant has determined, after the same research she performs during every stop on the tour, has the best souffle in town. Jewel, the headliner and longtime Azoff protégé, can be heard crooning while the richest touring musician in the world and the rest of the opening band exit through a backstage door and pile into two Chevy Suburbans waiting in the gated lot behind the theater. I say goodbye and follow the big black limos into the street, humming “Better Find a Church.”
Given no other choice, the Republican National Committee is tepidly rallying around Donald Trump and, according to the New York Times, if its employees don’t like it, they can get the hell out.
For some in the party, the question of whether to embrace Mr. Trump is not merely an intellectual exercise. Some staff members at the Republican National Committee were told Wednesday that if they were unable to get behind the nominee, they should leave by the end of the week.
Honestly—pretty cool of the RNC to let them escape now, while they still can.
Here’s Donald Trump at his desk, doing what he does best: Pandering to a group of people he’d previously insulted. Featured alongside his thoughts on where the best taco bowls are made (Trump Tower) and who he loves (Hispanics), is a photograph of his ex-wife in a bikini, spread open on his desk. Life is such a rich tapestry.
The photo in question is actually part of a People spread on Trump’s second ex-wife, Marla Maples, who parlayed her former husband’s newfound fame into a spot on Dancing With the Stars this season. Here’s the page he was looking at:
The article was initially pointed out by Benny Johnson, because even a broken reporter can be right twice a day.
Stephanie Grimes, the features editor at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, announced today that her boss, the newly installed editor-in-chief Keith Moyer, has fired her after she failed to demonstrate sufficient loyalty to the paper’s new management, the members of which were chosen and installed earlier this year by Sheldon Adelson, the conservative billionaire who purchased the Review-Journal last year. The sudden dismissal is the latest in a string of increasingly contentious internal controversies related to concerns about Adelson’s control over the Review-Journal’s coverage.
Grimes initially broke the news of her firing on Twitter:
Though Moyer refused to clarify the circumstances Grimes’s firing, telling Politico that “this is a personnel matter,” Grimes elaborated on the events that preceded her dismissal in a lengthy essay on Medium:
There were a few weeks during which it felt as if the newsroom was engaging in open warfare with management. ... I found myself involved without intending to become so: I live-tweeted an internal meeting with a GateHouse representative during which we had a tense discussion about the future of Review-Journal transparency.
[...]
Last week during an editors meeting, Keith Moyer told us “my job is hard enough without reporters stabbing me in the back” and threatened to fire people he didn’t feel were loyal to the RJ. ... Keith never made me feel welcome in his newsroom and made it clear in every conversation that he didn’t trust me. It was only a matter of time before he pulled the trigger.
Grimes described one of these conversations on Twitter:
Grimes’ firing comes ten days after the departure of Review-Journal columnist John L. Smith, who resigned from the paper after Moyer banned him from writing about Sheldon Adelson and fellow billionaire Steven Wynn, both of whom have unsuccessfully sued Smith for defamation. Adelson and Wynn each own several Las Vegas hotels, and the former is currently pursuing plans to build a $1 billion football stadium, whose costs would be largely underwritten by public funds, in hopes of persuading an N.F.L. franchise to relocate to Las Vegas.
As Grimes notes in her post, the Review-Journalhas mostly ceased from publishing critical coverage of Adelson’s local business interests. It has, however, meticulouslycovered the efforts of Adelson’s parent company, the Las Vegas Sand Corporation, to remove a particular judge from overseeing a wrongful-termination lawsuit against the company.
Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts, whose family has spent at least $5.5 million bankrolling the anti-Trump Our Principles PAC, will endorse Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Omaha today. The governor had been expected to endorse Ted Cruz.
“Governor Ricketts will appear with Donald Trump in Omaha tomorrow,” Ricketts spokesman Taylor Gage told the Wall Street Journal. “The governor has always said he will support the GOP nominee to retake the White House. The governor is supporting Donald Trump as the presumptive GOP nominee.”
According to Federal Election Commission filings, Joe Ricketts, the governor’s father and founder of TD Ameritrade, contributed $1 million to the Our Principles PAC in February. His wife, Marlene Ricketts, has contributed $4,500,000 to the committee since January.
Last year, FEC filings show, Joe and Marlene Ricketts contributed at least $4 million to Unintimidated PAC, which supported Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.
Yesterday, after publishing a post detailing the long list of people who have accused Donald Trump of cheating at golf, I received an email from Larry Glick, executive vice president of the Trump Organization and the man who oversees the Donald’s global portfolio of golf courses.
“Andy?” it read. “At your earliest convenience please contact me. Thanks.”
I gave Mr. Glick a call at his office, and he proceeded to politely inform me that his boss has never broken the rules while golfing. As a matter of fact, Glick said, Trump had never even played a round with Oscar de la Hoya, the latest accuser. He had proof, he said, in the form of a clip from an episode of a short-lived Golf Channel show called Donald J. Trump’s Fabulous World of Golf, in which de la Hoya faced off against George Lopez.
In the clip, Trump himself makes a guest appearance on a par three, hitting the green on his tee shot. “That was his first shot of the day. Here’s Trump: gets the ball from the bag, looks at the hole, hits the shot, puts the shot this far from the flag. What does that tell you? He’s a great golfer,” de la Hoya says in an interview later.
Glick presented the clip as smoking-gun evidence that de la Hoya is lying about Trump cheating. It isn’t really that. For one thing, the prizewinning boxer claimed that Trump cheated when the two men played together two years ago, in 2014, but the Fabulous World of Golf episode is from 2010.
The interesting part isn’t the video itself, however, but the fact that Glick felt compelled to send it to me at all. Did the cheating accusations hit a little too close to home? Even Trump himself called the AP, apparently against the advice of his son Eric, to accuse de La Hoya of making the whole thing up. “He’s absolutely lying,” he said. “Golf is an important thing and I felt I had to say something.”
Golf is an important thing. On that, we can all, Democrats and Republicans alike, agree. That is precisely why it is so troubling that a parade of accusers have come forward claiming Donald Trump—who wants to be our commander-in-chief—cheats at golf.
I asked Glick why so many celebrities would have accused his boss of cheating if he didn’t actually do it. “A better question is why Oscar De La Hoya, Samuel L Jackson and Anthony Anderson are even bothering to comment,” he answered. “I guess people will do anything for media attention.”
Yes, some people will certainly do anything for media attention. Some people will do things like publicly accuse the president of lying about his birth certificate, or—I’m just spitballing here—even make up false claims about people they perceive as opponents. Some people will really do anything.
His name is Greg Bonecutter, he lives in West Virginia, and he would like to see trap doors under the White House lawn. The Guardian reports:
Greg Bonecutter Jr, a former nurse on disability from Letart, West Virginia, was an avid Trump supporter wearing a Make America Great Again hat and a shirt that proclaimed “Hillary sucks but not like Monica”.
He was a longtime Trump supporter who backed the nominee because he was someone with whom “you knew where you stood” and was sick “of politicians, big money scams and cover-up lies”. A registered independent, he said he thought Obama was “sucking Muslim tail and an apologist to terrorist actions” and “if it was up to me we’d bring back public execution and there’d be several trap doors on the White House lawn”. Bonecutter warned darkly that if Clinton was elected there might be another civil war.
Bonecutter did not immediately respond to a Facebook message requesting clarification about what would be beneath the trap doors.
Illustration: Jim Cooke/Gawker, Photo Courtesy Picador Publishing
John Humphrey Noyes so fervently believed sleepingaround could lead to immortality that he convinced 300 people to join him in a utopian socialist community built on that very principle, in upstate New York. As he saw it, promiscuous “interlocked contact” between men and women—in the form of a polyamory scheme he called “Complex Marriage”—would generate enough spiritual energy to propel the human race into some sort of electrically powered, divinely connected eternal life. And that’s only the beginning of the 19th-century Oneida Community founder’s randy theology.
Ellen Wayland-Smith, a professor of writing at USC, counts two of Noyes’ sisters among her great-great-great grandmothers, has just published a gimlet-eyed book about her family history. Oneida: From Free Love to the Well-Set Table follows the Community from its origins in Noyes’ perverse Christian reveries, through its three-decade existence beginning in 1848, and into its equally improbable afterlife in the 20th century as Oneida Community, Limited – a prosperous silverware manufacturer led by descendants of the original families. In a phone interview Tuesday, the author admitted she’s often asked, “When did your parents sit you down and tell you that your ancestors had been these crazy sex perverts?”
Her family’s Oneida Community lineage was a staple of Wayland-Smith’s upbringing, though her later research revealed a far stranger story than what she gleaned as a child, wandering through the 93,000-square-foot Oneida, NY “Mansion House” Noyes and his followers once occupied. “I definitely got the whitewashed version,” she says. “If you asked, ‘Who built this house?’ or ‘Who are the people in the portraits?’ the narrative would say, ‘These are your ancestors, and they were these social reformers who thought that all people should live equally, and they created this utopian community experiment.’”
Outside of a vague awareness that Oneida’s members practiced “something called Complex Marriage,” Noyes’ wilder theories about sex and God never came up. “I grew up thinking he was this great guy,” says Wayland-Smith. “And then when you read his stuff, you’re like, ‘That guy was batshit!’”
Noyes’ batshit ideas extended far beyond the belief that, in Wayland-Smith’s words, “the more you had sex and the more evenly the sexual energy was spread throughout the whole body, the less sick you would be. Death would disappear once you had attained perfect equilibrium of divine energy through all the bodies [in the Community].” Sex was literally electric: it fueled a sort of heavenly battery with the power to support eternal life.
Years before he dreamed up Oneida, Noyes channeled his romantic frustration into a theory about sex between angels – maybe he didn’t get to fuck the object of his affections now, but at least they’d have an eternity to bone in the afterlife.
In the mid-19th century, the Industrial Revolution and the rise of American capitalism had plenty of people taking solace in odd religious notions. And Noyes, who founded the Community at 36, supposedly radiated a sort of charisma that transcended his plain appearance and electrified his followers. Wayland-Smith recalls an anonymous interview from the 1960s with a veteran of the Community in which the woman said something like, “It’s hard to explain today what it was like back then, but it’s also hard to explain how charismatic he was. There was something about him. When you were in his presence, you wanted to do anything he told you to do.”
Two decades into the Oneida experiment, mortified by the reality that people were still dying, Noyes instituted a creepy, sometimes cruel eugenics program he called “stirpiculture.”
“This was part two of his immortality plan,” Wayland-Smith explains. “He was like, ‘OK, it’s not working the way we are, so we’re going to breed people to be immortal.’ Which was nuts!” Though he touted stirpiculture as a scientific program for breeding the most spiritually potent offspring, it was Noyes who decided which couples were allowed to breed. In practice (and, presumably, because breeding for religious fitness is impossible), that meant the pairings were primarily political.
As all of this suggests, Noyes’ theology tended to evolve in hilariously—if also sometimes devastatingly—self-serving ways. “It’s so closely linked to his own sexual frustration,” says Wayland-Smith. “His first idea about spiritual wives”—as distinct from legal, earthly spouses—“came when the woman he was in love with married someone else. It’s like, that’s a convenient twist in your theology. And the communal thing came on the heels of that, when he realized he was never going to possess her [exclusively], so he would possess her in tandem with other men.”
Oneida Group of Stirpicults, 1892. Photo Courtesy Picador Publishing.
Noyes may have been bonkers, but Wayland-Smith deduced that he never crossed over from magical thinking into cynical manipulation. For his entire adult life, he remained devoted to what he saw as a fundamentally religious mission. Even after he retreated from Oneida in 1879, afraid he was about to be arrested on moral charges related to the Community’s polyamory,Wayland-Smith says, “he literally thought, ‘OK, I’ve been booted out of New York. I’m going to start trying to do the same thing in Canada, and I’m gonna try to enlist the Queen of England to join my campaign to start God’s heaven on Earth.’ It was so delusional, but he writes about it very calmly and matter-of-factly in his diary.” (Please: take a second to imagine a conversation between Queen Victoria and a man who believed his purpose in life was to power a godly sex battery.)
Considering the absurdity of its underlying theology, what’s most surprising about Oneida is how politically sane and progressive it could be. The Community genuinely lived its socialist ideals. In the years following Oneida’s dissolution, Noyes’ industrious son Pierrepont B. Noyes transformed the more modest manufacturing operation that had once sustained the Community into a prosperous, high-end silverware empire that marketed its products to precisely the sorts of bourgeois households its founder would have disdained. But back in the mid-1800s, life in the Mansion House and on the lush agrarian land that surrounded it was never less than economically egalitarian. According to Wayland-Smith, “There was a pecking order at Oneida, in terms of who was more spiritual or who was more of a leader, but they were absolutely materially equal. Everybody wore the same clothes, everybody ate the same food, nobody owned anything.”
Oneida’s gender politics were even more radical – to the extent that many of their policies still sound like feminist fantasies. Noyes certainly held his share of sexist beliefs, and the control he exerted over women’s sex lives seems downright predatory by today’s standards. But he genuinely valued their contributions, and he knew that to participate fully in the life of the Community, they needed to be liberated from the drudgery of “women’s work.” As a result, tasks at Oneida were never split along gender lines. Workdays for all residents were light and diverse, ranging from farm labor to white-collar work like medicine and journalism. Children were raised by a small committee of caretakers and teachers.
Though initially skeptical of her family’s claims about Noyes’ progressive attitudes towards women, Wayland-Smith says she came away from her research “convinced that he may not have been a feminist, but he did a lot to liberate women. Going in, I hadn’t realized the extent to which serial childbirth and domesticity were basically living death for 19th-century women”—who, in mainstream American society, gave birth to an average of seven children in their lifetimes and spent decades raising the ones who survived infancy. “The fact that he mandated that it wasn’t going to be their lot, that they didn’t have to get pregnant ever if they didn’t want to, that they didn’t have to wash dishes and do the laundry, was incredibly prophetic.”
And how did women sleeping with multiple partners avoid pregnancy in the absence of contraceptives? Once the Community was in full swing, Noyes controlled its population by instituting a revolutionary birth control program he called “male continence” – aka, withdrawal. “Comparing the sexual act to a boat in a stream above a waterfall,” Wayland-Smith writes, “Noyes argues that, through experience and training, the skillful ‘boatman’ could learn ‘the wisdom of confining his excursions to the region of easy rowing, unless he has an object in view that is worth the cost of going over the falls.’” Of course, it wouldn’t be a John Humphrey Noyes project if there wasn’t some pseudoscience to back it up. He also believed that ejaculation drained men of their life force. So, Wayland-Smith points out, “It wasn’t as though men had to refrain from ejaculation just while having sex – they also couldn’t masturbate. You were never allowed to have an orgasm as a man in this community.”
When Complex Marriage was abolished in favor of monogamy during Oneida’s final year, it was out of fear that if the Community dissolved in 1879, straight society would ostracize its women and children as whores and bastards. But that’s not to say the decision pleased everyone it was meant to benefit. On the final day of Complex Marriage, a woman named Tirzah Miller – a pillar of the Community, Noyes’ niece, and one of Oneida’s most fascinating characters – bid farewell to her sexual freedom by bedding three different men. In the book, Wayland-Smith describes the voracious Miller as “the most sexually sought-after woman in the Community.” That role came with a measure of political power, a power that is hard to imagine a woman of such appetites wielding in mainstream 19th-century society.
On a more sinister note, what is remembered as “free love” wasn’t exactly free; Noyes had the power to dictate who was fucking and breeding with whom, resulting in plenty of situations that look a lot like coercion—and even rape—to contemporary eyes. He insisted on personally initiating young virgins into what was termed the “social life” of the Community. “The women were introduced to sex whether they wanted it or not, when they were 12 to 14,” says Wayland-Smith, noting that the age of consent in New York at the time was also, unfortunately, 12. “The thing that bothers me is that the people who initially signed on to this thing were consenting adults. Then what happened, once the new generation came up, was they were born into it. They didn’t know anything else. Their parents gave them over to the Community and part of being in the Community was that you had to have sex. And they were not consenting because they weren’t of age [by contemporary standards].” The darkness didn’t end there. Noyes believed in “avunculate marriage” (between uncles and nieces) and held up certain forms of incest as ideal; Wayland-Smith writes that it’s still unclear whether he slept with his sisters.
The author’s skeptical, conflicted relationship to Noyes’ legacy permeates every page of Oneida, and she’s long understood how crazy the Community might seem to outsiders. In the mid-‘90s she told a grad school instructor about Oneida, and “when I finished talking, he said, ‘Oh, this is like David Koresh and the Branch Davidians,’” she says. “My jaw dropped. It had never, in my entire life, occurred to me to think of my ancestors as cult members. Those were never the terms in which it had been framed. People from the outside, that’s what they thought, and they were not wrong to think it… ‘Cult’ is a difficult term. It’s got lots of shades of gray – but [Oneida was] definitely cult-like.”
Even so, Wayland-Smith believes Oneida offers its share of insights that resonate in an America that’s more divided than ever on issues like capitalism vs. socialism, women’s rights and sexual liberation. “I sound like an old-fashioned socialist, but… the basic idea was that the basis for a just society was a certain level of material equality between people,” she says. “The kind of excesses we have today – it was just unthinkable.” And she points out that Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote a book just last year, Unfinished Business, arguing that ‘70s feminism’s promise that women could “have it all” turned out to be a lie. “Oneida already figured that out,” Wayland-Smith says. “They figured out that you couldn’t do the domestic work and have a life, that you couldn’t do the domestic work and be a professional. They worked around it… You wouldn’t necessarily want to live in the system that came along with it.”
Last July, Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., went on ABC News and warned Americans that Donald Trump had a real shot at winning the primary.
“People terrified of the possibility of President Trump better vote, better get active, better get involved,” our fair Cassandra warned. “Because this man has got some momentum, and we’d better be ready for the fact that he might be leading the Republican ticket.”
Here is what George Stephanopolous had to say to that: “I know you don’t really believe that.” Also: “HAHAHAHHAHAHA.”
Here is what New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman had to say to that: “HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA.”
Coincidentally, that is also Donald Trump has to say now.
Ridiculously cheap underwear, the new best coffee maker, and Anker’s new robot vacuum kick off today’s best deals.
Bookmark Kinja Deals and follow us on Twitter to never miss a deal. Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here to learn more, and don’t forget to sign up for our email newsletter.
The Hanes Comfort Soft line took down your vote for best men’s underwear, and today you can get a 12-pack of the Comfort Soft or Comfort Flex for $28 (plus shipping because it’s woot!). Definitely going to sell out.
Update: Hanes are sold out.
If you want to upgrade, another one of your top underwear nominations, the ExOfficio Men’s Give-N-Go Boxer Briefs also got a nice discount, which varies depending on size and style.
This $10 hardcover seems like a pretty fun way to learn some basic architecture history, and even if you never open it it’ll look great on your coffee table. Great gift idea too.
Casper might be the best mattress for everyone, but not for your houseguests. Put them on this impulse-priced queen-sized Intex Air Mattress with built-in pump. It’s waterproof so they can spill hot chocolate or whatever you gave them to distract them all over it without issue.
The OXO On 9 Cup Coffee Maker is our new recommendation for those who want amazing coffee paired with intuitive operation. It’s down to $160 today, and has only been cheaper once before back in December.
If you’re like me, form factor can trump all other specs when it comes to a mobile device, and for that reason, Apple’s MacBook is the best laptop I’ve ever used. Save $100 on it today, either on Amazon or B&H.
This Sony Bluetooth Speaker costs more than most sound bars we post, but this is a feature-packed device boasting serious sound and support for DLNA, Airplay, Spotify Connect, NFC, and high resolution audio files, and will charge your phone over USB.
For a few years now, Antec’s USB-powered HDTV bias light has been one of our most reliably popular deals whenever it went on sale. The problem: It only got a significant discount once every few months. Luckily, a copycat has emerged to fill in the gap.
Just like the Antec model, these Vansky LED light strips plug directly into your TV’s USB port for power, and sticks to the back of the set via built-in adhesive. Once you turn your TV on, the light strip will cast a soft glow on the wall behind it, which can reduce eyestrain when watching in the dark, and improve your TV’s perceived black levels.
Whenever we post a deal on the Antec light, it sells out within hours. I’m not sure if that’ll be the case today, but I wouldn’t take any chances.
One of the only downsides of cast iron pans is that they can be a nightmare to clean, but this 4.7 star-rated chainmail scrubber can scrape away caked-on food without hurting your seasoning, or resorting to soap. No wonder it’s one of the newest members of our bestsellers club. Today’s $11 deal (with code MOMSDY16) is the best price we’ve ever seen.
For a limited time, when you buy one of eight Xbox One bundles, Amazon will throw in a copy of Halo 5 Limited Edition, Forza Horizon 2, and a $50 Amazon gift card that you could use on another game or an extra controller (or, you know, anything else on Amazon).
It’s not unusual to see bonus items included with Xbox One consoles, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a deal that gave you the choice of so many different starting bundles, including 1TB and Elite consoles.
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Jon Stewart isn’t dead but he might as well be—the man hasn’t appeared on television in months, leaving the once-robust television-blog ecosystem shriveled and weak in the hands of that guy who replaced him (if he’s even still on the air.) But rejoice! This week Stewart popped up at the United Service Organization 75th anniversary event at the Joint Base Andrews in Maryland to introduce Joe Biden, and if you can even believe it—he made a joke about Donald Trump.
“He’ll say whatever he kind of thinks of, whatever comes to his mind, sort of impulsive,” Stewart said of Biden. “Sometimes, you might think to yourself, ‘That sounds crazy,’ or ‘Man, that is crazy.’ And who would have thought that now, that gets you the Republican nomination.”
The joke got a lot of laughs, and Stewart couldn’t help but keep going.
“Don’t worry, Trump’s going to keep you busy,” he told the military crowd. “You’re going to have to repaint all the planes with ‘Trump’ in big gold letters.”
It’s Trump versus Clinton. It’s a well-funded mainstream Democrat against a widely reviled demagogue who will struggle to earn the support of his party’s donor base. It’s a man whose every public utterance is a potential negative ad waiting to be cut, versus the most cautious candidate in modern memory. The Clinton campaign has been given a tremendous gift, as I am sure they know.
They better not fucking blow it.
There’s no need to panic yet. It’s still very unlikely that Donald Trump will be our next president. While Trump winning the nomination also seemed unlikely, the two situations differ in one pretty important respect: Trump consistently led in primary election polls since last summer. Meanwhile, he has basically never beaten Clinton head-to-head in general election polls.
The Clinton campaign can run the most (small-c) conservative campaign possible, focused solely on the toxicity of their opponent, and still probably win. This is basically what I expect them to do.
Or they could blow it.
Democrats could, for example, take their famously thin-skinned opponent, who is easily provoked into absurd and unpresidential tantrums when his insecurities are mocked, and they could bestow upon him a nickname that instead serves to reinforce his own (imagined) toughness.
They could call him, I don’t know, “Dangerous Donald.”
“Dangerous Donald.” Democrats are going with “Dangerous Donald.” Did they try testing “Sexy Donald” first? “Leather Jacket Donald”? Jared Leto lived in an abandoned insane asylum for a month to get into character as “Dangerous Donald.”
Since Tuesday, when Trump sealed the nomination, almost everything the Democrats have said about him has reinforced his own message. That night, Clinton campaign campaign chair John Podesta released this statement:
This was the first official Clinton campaign statement on Donald Trump the presumptive presidential nominee, and it contains most of the hallmarks of Clinton messaging. See, for example, how the Bush-esque “keep our nation safe in a dangerous world” comes before the boilerplate “working families” language. Then comes the first iteration of their main anti-Trump line: “With so much at stake, Donald Trump is simply too big of a risk.”
The problem with that line of argument is that it’s Donald Trump’s argument for his candidacy: Conventional politicians and conventional politics haven’t worked—so take a gamble on the ultimate outsider. “Donald Trump is simply too big of a risk” is practically daring people to give him a shot. He might pay off!
Since then, Clinton has repeatedly referred to Trump as a “loose cannon”
“He’s a loose cannon, and loose cannons tend to misfire.”
(Actually, a “loose cannon” isn’t one that misfires, it’s one that breaks free of its restraints and dangerously rolls around the ship.)
Trump is reckless, unstable, “dangerous.” Clinton is sober and responsible—a steady hand on the tiller. The safe choice versus the unpredictable renegade who might say or do anything. It’s a good thing Americans aren’t traditionally drawn to unpredictable renegades!
The Clinton campaign has also pushed this web ad, featuring prominent Republicans brutally criticizing Trump:
This ad isn’t bad, and it doesn’t necessarily indicate, as some have worried, that the Clinton campaign will focus too much energy on winning over disgruntled Republican voters. It’s fine to try to depress the other side’s turnout, and it’s important to try to undermine The Great Legitimizing that the Republican party (and the objective political press) will soon undertake.
But remember one thing as you watch this: The Republican Party is hugely unpopular. The people criticizing Trump in this video are unpopular. Ted Cruz is unpopular. Mitt Romney is an out-of-touch vulture capitalist who lost the last election after he insulted half the country. This is a parade of unlikable people from a hated institution saying they can’t stand Donald Trump.
“Dangerous Donald,” the “loose cannon,” hated by loser Republicans, capable of doing anything. This is all straight out of the orange idiot’s dream journal.
And it is apparently the line the Democrats have decided to take. They’re going to build Trump up as a reckless and virile force of nature—and a true outsider—rather than expose him as a pitiful clown and an obvious fraud. This is completely backwards. As any writer who’s ever received an angry personal response from Trump can tell you, you get under his skin by mocking and emasculating him, not by feeding the myth of his power and strength, the precise qualities his authoritarian followers adore.
So, look: I’m not saying the Democrats are definitely going to blow it. But they’re more than capable of blowing it.
Mark your calendars: In July, the National Archives intends to publicly release over 1,000 pages of records from the George W. Bush administration pertaining to Skull and Bones, the Yale secret society that counts both the former president and his former president father as members. If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll learn whether Dubya’s grandfather Prescott Bush—also a Bonesman—really dug up and stole the skull of Geronimo from the Apache warrior’s grave, as Skull and Bones legend holds he did one night in 1918.
The National Archives and Records Administration sent a letter to representatives of the Obama and Bush administrations last month announcing its intent to make 3,404 pages of Bush-era records available to the public. The records, which will be stored at the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas, include 1,650 pages relating to The Skull and Bones Society, according to the letter.
A brief Skull and Bones primer for the uninitiated: the society, founded in 1832, meets in a windowless brick building on Yale’s campus known as “The Tomb.” Members are sworn to silence about what goes on inside, and are bound by tradition to leave the room whenever a non-Bonesman mentions the group’s name in their presence. Despite this shroud of secrecy, rumors have leaked out about occult-style rituals and Busch Light-soaked traditional college parties alike. In addition to the Bushes, the society counts Time magazine founder Henry Luce, conservative icon William F. Buckley, and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, W.’s 2004 presidential opponent, as members.
According to Politico, a FOIA request from the conspiracist author Robert Gaylon Ross Sr. prompted the National Archives to release the Skull and Bones records. Ross, whose books include Who’s Who of the Elite : Members of the Bilderbergs, Council on Foreign Relations, & Trilateral Commission and The Elite Serial Killers of Lincoln, JFK, RFK & MLK, will have plenty of material to chew over.
The records will become public July 12, unless either Bush or Obama moves to block the release, Politico reports. Here’s hoping they don’t. I really want to know whether the getting-naked-and-lying-in-a-coffin stuff is true.
A few weeks ago Matt McGorry, actor and male feminist du jour, shared a photo of himself crying. “Who needs bravado when you’ve got vulnerability? Being a ‘real man’ is being true to yourself,” McGorry wrote in the accompanying tweet. Hashtagged #FindYourMagic, McGorry’s tears were manufactured for a new Axe campaign.
Axe and its European iteration Lynx are best known for their hyper-masculine ads, crafted to promote scents that were designed to be aggressive, assaulting unsuspecting olfactory nerves with the potent smell of manliness. The Axe brand eventually became somewhat of a punchline, and as such, the company has recently tried to change its image. Their new campaign, titled Find Your Magic, is an eager attempt to shed its reputation as the soap of choice for bros who loved I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. Instead of lauding hard abs and hot women, Axe’s rebranding attempts to serve up a new kind of masculinity—a kind that prioritizes authentic individuality and expression over overt power and straight seduction. “Who needs a six-pack?” the voiceover in a social media-focused Lynx campaign asks, emphasizing that the new masculinity is better defined by abstract concepts like “protest,” “moves,” and, most importantly, “feeling.”
The campaign, an ad executive toldAdweek, is an attempt to “liberate guys from pressure and bullshit.” Though the connection between liberation, empowerment, and consumption is spurious to its core, the signal of Axe’s rebranding campaign comes through clearly enough: the era of the hyper-masculine bro is dead. Performative vulnerability is in. Even Tucker Max has been converted.
Drafting McGorry for this campaign was perhaps a stroke of genius. The Orange is the New Black and How to Get Away With Murder star is the prototype of vulnerable masculinity in the twenty-teens: he is sensitive, is unafraid to publicly express his feelings, is a feminist, reads the right books (we know because he Instagrams them) and has the right politics. He knows the right words and concepts; he can and will tell you all about intersectionality, for one. McGorry’s Twitter and Instagram feed create a tightly constructed narrative that reiterates, over and over, that he “gets it.” His particular display of vulnerability—shedding tears over the ghost of brands past—signifies that he’s a male feminist, perhaps the epitome of a “male feminist,” in that his very woke tears are a branding tool for Axe.
And McGorry isn’t alone. Pop culture is flooded with vulnerable men, particularly of the celebrity variety. They usually—and vocally—feel an affinity for things like Bernie Sanders, social justice, the environment, and their mom. You’ll find them on lists like “26 Times Celebrity Men Stood Up For Feminism.” This vulnerable masculinity resembles “traditional” masculinity most strongly in the way it’s a consciously rendered performance, one that fits with contemporary mores. It purports to balance strength, that age-old requirement, with gendered softness. These men cry without being weak; they are vulnerable without being penetrable; it’s an iteration of masculinity that draws on the benefits of feeling without being subject to the gendered critique of emotional expression.
With this new masculinity, Chris Pine can weep at the Oscars and still helm a major action franchise; Drake’s self-aware sensitivity cuts to the core yet he’s still sexually potent; Wil Wheaton posts expressive black and white selfies, captioned with descriptions like “Moody,” and yet remains the hero of fanboys; Mark Ruffalo contemplatively stares into the distance, signifying emotional depth, but he’s still Bruce Banner; John Boehner can openly weep. Once celebrated for his authenticity, the vulnerable, crying man is now financially viable. It’s an elaborate performance deeply tied to the market; tears are manufactured for the brand they best serve.
The publicly vulnerable man isn’t exactly new. He is, unsurprisingly, an invention of the theater. Birthed by Shakespeare, the word “vulnerable” first appearance in the final act of Macbeth (1605). Macbeth, who has murdered nearly every character in the play, uses the word as a sort of “your mom” taunt in his final battle with Macduff. “Let fall thy blade on vulnerable crests,” Macbeth says. “I bear a charmed life which must not yield to one of a woman born.”
Despite his “charmed life,” Macbeth is politically spent by the time he’s saying this. His kingdom is adrift; he’s friendless. He’s finally offed a few pages later. Shakespeare’s first use of the word set a precedent for its loaded, uneasy implications: “vulnerable” is an insult that men would throw when their own grasp on power was uncertain in itself.
But for centuries, the idea of vulnerability was separable from what we now think of as vulnerability’s natural expression: weeping and crying. These actions were not always linked to the physically vulnerable, politically at-risk man. In fact, weeping men were very much a part of a public culture well until the mid-nineteenth century.
In her essay “What Happened to the Manly Art of the Noble Weep?” Sandra Newman traces this long, damp history of male tears. From Homer’s Illiad and well throughout the eighteenth century, men publicly cried over politics, religion and romance. “How good are the tears, how sweet the dirges, I would rather sing dirges than eat or drink,” Euripides wrote in The Trojan Women (415 BCE), making clear that crying was more pleasurable than an indulgent feast.
Then, beyond the ancients, religious ecstasy provided another good reason for men to cry. The vulnerable male body was of central importance to the Catholic Church: the flesh “profits nothing,” and the male body, broken and pierced, was the primary site of divine reflection. St. Augustine spilled tears of confession and religious enlightenment; medieval knights displayed authentic tears as part of elaborate courting rituals. As Newman points out, no one thought the tears of playboy-turned-saint Augustine were emasculating. Rather they were evidence of true religious conviction. For at least a couple of centuries, everyone agreed: as long as men wept authentic tears, then they were welcome to do so.
Fra Angelico, La conversion de Saint Augustin. Image via Wikimedia Commons
Crying, then, was part and parcel of an accepted performance of masculinity. Changing definitions of gender—ever slippery as they are—determined the person, place or things that could prompt a manly tear. If religion, music and love were longstanding, accepted sites of weepy expression, then by the eighteenth century, poetry and nature were added to the catalogue too. The Romantic poets and painters were epic weepers; they seemed to cry at nearly everything, from death to slightly dilapidated abbeys. In fact, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelly wrote with a kind of soulful longing about their tears; mournful expression was valued as a great interpretation of the sensitive poet’s soul, and, in the cult of sensibility, vulnerability reigned supreme.
In one of Wordsworth’s earliest poems, “On Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress (1786),” he recounts his broody, rhyming delight at witnessing the tears of another:
She wept.—Life’s purple tide began to flow In languid streams through every thrilling vein; Dim were my swimming eyes—my pulse beat slow, And my full heart was swell’d to dear delicious pain.
“Delicious pain,” is a resonate phrase. It could practically be the cri de coeur of the Romantics, artists who believed that sensibility and suffering were themselves heroic. Wordsworth’s eyes welled at the very witness of pain while Keats conjured up the “wakeful anguish of the soul,” like manna from heaven’s “weeping cloud.” Shelly, meanwhile, mourned the death of Keats by ordering “melancholy Mother,” to “wake and weep,” while simultaneously cursing “invulnerable nothings... like corpses in a charnel.”
Gustave Courbet, The Wounded Man, 1844. Image via Getty.
As male artists became more and more committed to tearful reflections, vulnerability extended beyond watery eyes and emotional display. The body, like the soul, was subsequently made overtly penetrable. In his 1844 self portrait, the French Realist Gustave Courbet depicts himself wounded by a sword, bleeding, suspended somewhere between sleep and death. Here is the vulnerable male artist in all of his proverbial glory: emotionally injured and dripping in blood, his vulnerability authenticates his artistic identity. Vulnerability reaffirmed the male artist’s ability to move back and forth between intellect and emotion without being beholden to either; it reified an old notion that art was a man’s game.
At the time, Courbet’s overdetermined depiction may have marked the temporary death knell of the outwardly vulnerable man, as the Victorians would soon ask for propriety in the public sphere. The Victorians allowed male tears in private, in their valued domestic spaces; they also remained deeply invested in sentimentality, permitting men to shed tears of moral feeling. A male critic could weep over moral lessons drawn from Charles Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop and a judge could famously cry while listening to testimonies of grisly murders or sentencing a young woman to death. But ultimately, the Victorian era would neatly connect crying with the unnecessary expression of emotion.
Prior to the intervention of Charles Darwin, the outward expression of feeling had been believed to be a divine gift—a higher expression of the soul that self-evidently separated man from animal. In Darwin’s hands, however, crying, like all emotion, was merely part of the evolutionary process, a natural development of communication. Darwin’s “philosophy of weeping,” which he wrote about in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal (1872), suggested that tears were the leftovers of an inherited habit—something that was useful to infants and our ancestors, but served no real purpose for modern adults.
“Englishmen rarely cry, except under the pressure of the acutest grief; whereas in some parts of the Continent the men shed tears much more readily and freely,” Darwin wrote. Crying, then, was for women, babies, and the French. By the end of the nineteenth century, vulnerability wasn’t a question of culture, it was one of biology.
In turn, industrialism seized on and exploited the unemotional man. Mid-nineteenth century factory managers encouraged their employees to quit the with crying; strong and robust men, after all, increased productivity. “The new manliness,” Tom Lutz writes in his Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears, “encouraged men to curb their emotional expression.” Unblushing, heterosexual masculinity was useful for both corporate profit and the decades of combat that would follow the Industrial Revolution. The poet of sensibility gave way to some of the most enduring stereotypes of masculinity: the rugged hyper-individualist, the alienated writer, and the emotionally repressed marketplace man. The great irony, of course, is that Don Draper is his own capitalistic invention.
The crying man never truly disappeared; he just became subject to market forces and scripts of gender that regulated his excess. Sure, a man could cry over death or a football game, but the tears were subject to a Protestant ethic of gentlemanly restraint. Those who showed too much vulnerable emotion—particularly over the wrong things—were subject to censure, a means of hemming in the ever-shifting, ever-important boundaries of gender.
In 2007, these boundaries were tested virally when Chris Crocker posted his “Leave Britney Alone!” video on YouTube. In the video, Crocker, a self-described “sobbing teen lady,” engages in a semi-satirical performance in which he melodramatically defends Britney Spears’ disastrous MTV Music Awards performance. Replete with mascara-filled tears and theatrical delivery, Crocker’s video was purposefully unmasculine—so much so that its parodic intent was seemingly lost on a large portion of the internet.
One newspaper compared the “narcissism” of Crocker’s video with the “self-gratification on the scale of an armed sociopath walking onto a campus.” Leave Britney Alone had crossed a digital line of sorts: Crocker’s excess was offensive because of what it rejected. His self-conscious performance seemed to engage with an artistic subculture that valued the subversiveness of queer (male) vulnerability, while mocking the language of male fandom, whose strict code positions true loyalty as something that shows up mainly in intricate, often arbitrary knowledge of a subject. Men, this code says, show appreciation in the “rational” display of encyclopedic knowledge rather than “irrational” feeling.
Later on, the good cry Michael Jordan had at his 2009 induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame also went viral. The moment, captured in all of its weepy excess by AP photographer Stephen Savoia, was perfect for an online atmosphere engaged in an ambiguous exploration of masculinity, excess and vulnerability—one that would both celebrate and be deeply embarrassed by Crying Jordan, and has continued to do both for years. Part of the humor perpetually elicited by Crying Jordan is a transgression of boundaries. Men are generally allowed to cry about sports, but there is a kind of restraint expected in both fan and athlete, admirer and admired.
Crying Jordan has subsequently been turned into countless gifs, his head superimposed on nearly anyone who has massively and publicly messed up. The comedy is in the indulgence: too many tears, too much emotion, and too much embarrassment.
Photographer Sam Taylor-Wood’s series, Crying Men (2002-04), offered a parallel examination of these dynamics in a set of tightly focused and framed images of male celebrities crying. Laurence Fishburne, Daniel Craig, and Robin Williams all sat for Taylor-Wood’s camera, teasing out the dichotomy between the “artifice inherent in acting and the release of what is inside all of us.” Critics struggled with Taylor-Wood’s series, unsure of what to make of such a close examination of male vulnerability. An uncertain critic wrote in the Telegraph:
They show us people in whom popular culture has come to invest an almost saint-like significance. These men are icons, worshipped by many for their talent, their looks, their success. Partly because of their fame, they have gained a meaning beyond their physical presence.
Reduced to tears, their grief has an authority we would not necessarily grant to anonymous individuals. With her stark and simple images, Taylor-Wood is seeking to bestow on her sitters a spiritual significance born of their celebrity, akin to that of the crying saints in Medieval and Renaissance art.
Unable to make sense of modern masculine men openly weeping, the Telegraph critic resorts to history, to crying saints, whose vulnerability seems authentic and appropriate. It’s a strange capitulation to history—a return to the idea that emotional and physical vulnerability could be inherently separated, and needed to be, at that. The truth is, as Taylor-Wood’s project acknowledged implicitly, that grief and sadness are universal. Nonetheless, male tears are perpetually read as transgressive: we interpret emotion based on the identity of the body that weeps.
Justin Bieber crying at the 2015 MTV Music Awards.
In the twenty-first century, we explore male vulnerability in twenty-first-century ways. Thinkpieces and videos ask no one in particular, “What Makes Men Cry?” More recently, pop psychology and scientific journals have dedicated a sizable number of words to decoding male tears. Crying, some studies suggest, is not just good for the soul, but leads to longer, healthier lives (perhaps unsurprisingly, the 19th century saw a spate of scientific studies concerning the physical benefit of male tears as well).
These pieces are haunted by a phantom—the “real man” who never cries. These paragons of masculinity, the narrative goes, are in need of some emotional release; buying into stereotypes frays at their psyche and hurts their health. But this script can’t be rewritten with dispassionate medical advice; such a massive edit requires a familiar point of departure. Thus, in the language of the Internet, simple actions like manly tears became heroic, and sexualized. Crying men were recast from “wuss” to “badass,” and shedding a few tears could help a bro get laid. Gender, tears, and vulnerability thus found its necessary semantic bridge in sexual heroism: what was “woke,” in other words, was automatically “bae.”
There’s a certain unconvincing posturing in all of these arguments. Crying is inevitably framed as an iconoclastic, damn the man, tear down the establishment kind of act. Yet the crying men ask to retain their establishment potency; they ask for their emotional expression to be seen not as mundane, but heroic. And so traditional masculinity remains both a straw man and an unchallenged, ahistorical script. Queerness and gender fluidity still have no place in the celebration of male tears. The new masculinity shows solidarity with nothing but itself.
Where does this leave women? Women are allowed to cry, the narrative goes—and men should be granted the same cultural permission. But this isn’t exactly true. Women are not allowed to cry as much as they are expected to cry; to be ruled by an excess of emotion and governed by irrational expression rather than rational ideas. The stereotypes are familiar: crazy ex-girlfriends, trainwrecks, the hot mess. Women’s crying is still tethered to its stigmas and stereotypes; men’s tears get to remake themselves, combining vulnerability and potency in ways that are continually validated, continually new. Male tears have been constructed to survive their own critique.
As male tears abound, it seems worth asking, for whom exactly is the renegotiation of the publicly vulnerable man for?
If, as historians of emotions have argued, that the stereotype of the stoic, tearless man was an invention of capitalism, created for the purpose of lining the pockets of industrial tycoons and underpinned by nationalism, then who does the new vulnerability serve? Perhaps some idea of authentic individuality, which is, not coincidentally, what brands want right now too. Matt McGorry’s teary tweet—his performance of a vulnerable “real man”—was done for the sake of giving Axe a makeover. Which came first, brand or tears, is hard to say. What exactly is “real” about the new vulnerable “real man” is even harder to identify.
Nonetheless, the model is solidifying. Earlier this month, Vanity Fair jokingly labeled male tears the “hottest trend in movies.” The New Yorkercelebrated the vulnerable masculinity depicted on Outlander and The Americans. The script of manhood is being rewritten. Male tears are no longer the mockable stuff of ironic misandry: for the first time ever, masculine vulnerability has the power to sell on a large capitalist scale.
