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    Bill Maher calls Larry David’s satire of his Trump dinner ‘kind of insulting to 6 million dead Jews’

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    Bill Maher has responded to Larry David’s satirical essay in the New York Times that compared Maher’s glowing account of having dinner with Donald Trump to dining with Adolf Hitler.Maher, a vocal critic of Trump in the past, had dinner with the US president and a group of his high-profile supporters, including their mutual friend Kid Rock, on 31 March. On an episode of his talkshow Real Time on 11 April, Maher described Trump as “gracious” and “much more self-aware than he lets on”, saying: “Everything I’ve ever not liked about him was – I swear to God – absent, at least on this night with this guy.”The New York Times then published a satirical piece written by the Curb Your Enthusiasm creator, a first-person account from a critic of Hitler who accepts a dinner invitation from the Führer and ends up deciding “we’re not that different, after all”.“I had been a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship,” David wrote.“But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side – even if it has invaded and annexed other countries and committed unspeakable crimes against humanity.”Appearing on Piers Morgan’s talkshow Uncensored on Thursday, Maher said: “First of all, it’s kind of insulting to 6 million dead Jews … It’s an argument you kind of lost just to start it. Look, maybe it’s not completely logically fair, but Hitler has really kind of got to stay in his own place. He is the GOAT of evil.”Maher told Morgan he considered David a friend, and didn’t know about the piece until his publicist told him it had been published. “This wasn’t my favourite moment of our friendship,” he said.“Nobody has been harder, and more prescient, I must say, about Donald Trump than me. I don’t need to be lectured on who Donald Trump is. Just the fact that I met him in person didn’t change that. The fact that I reported honestly is not a sin either.”Maher told Morgan he didn’t want to “make this constantly personal with me and Larry”, saying: “We might be friends again.”“I can take a shot and I can also take it when people disagree with me. That’s not exactly the way I would’ve done it.“Again, the irony: let’s go back to what my original thing was. There’s got to be a better way than hurling insults and not talking to people. If I can talk to Trump, I can talk to Larry David too.” More

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      Jimmy Kimmel on Pete Hegseth: ‘Our secretary of defense is defenseless’

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      With several hosts still on Easter holiday, Jimmy Kimmel talks the search for a new pope and Pete Hegseth’s ongoing Signal scandals at the Department of Defense.Jimmy KimmelKimmel kicked off his show Tuesday by acknowledging Earth Day – and for the occasion, the US Environmental Protection Agency fired or reassigned hundreds of employees. “I can’t help but wonder how different things might be if Donald Trump’s father had taken him camping even one time,” he joked.He then turned his attention to the top global story of the week: the search for a new pope after Pope Francis died on Monday morning at the age of 88. “Nobody is going to be more insufferable this week than your friend who saw the movie Conclave and now knows everything about how it works,” said Kimmel. “I’ll tell you how it works: over the next few weeks, 135 flamboyantly dressed cardinals will gather to pass judgment on a series of aspiring candidates and in a lot of ways, it’s the Catholic version of RuPaul’s Drag Race.”Kimmel had a personal favorite: an Italian cardinal long stationed in Jerusalem named Pierbattista Pizzaballa.“Is he qualified? Honestly, we have no idea,” said Kimmel in a prayer for the very Italian-sounding Italian cardinal to be named pope. “Is he made of pizza? Also unclear. Is he round like a balla? We also don’t know. But his name is so funny, please grant the other cardinals the strength to give us a Pope Pizzaballa.”Kimmel also mocked Trump’s defense secretary, Hegseth, who is once again in hot water over using unsanctioned messaging apps to discuss sensitive military operations. Earlier this week, it was reported that Hegseth used a second Signal group chat, this one including family members, to discuss planned strikes in Yemen.Appearing on Fox News, Hegseth tried to dismiss furor as misguided: “Then and now, however you characterize it, was informal, unclassified coordinations … that’s what I’ve said from the beginning.”“Right, but it was bullshit from the beginning, too,” Kimmel responded. “You texted the exact time and place the secret bombing would begin before the secret bombing to your wife on an easily hackable phone. And is defense for this is ‘who told you? And how dare they tell you!’”“This is like your wife catching you in bed with another woman and your response is ‘well, why did you come home so early?’” he continued. “Our secretary of defense is defenseless, but it’s not his fault! The ones who get the blame for this is the leakers.”Kimmel then played a supercut of Hegseth complaining about “leakers” – “I don’t have time for leakers,” he said during the same Fox News interview.“You don’t have time for leakers? You are the leaker,” said an exasperated Kimmel. “You leak so much, you should be wearing Depends to work.” More

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      in US Politics

      The America I loved is gone

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      View image in fullscreenThe first impression America gave me was gentle carelessness. We were driving down from Canada to visit family friends in Texas sometime in the mid- to late 1980s, and a young border patrol agent at a booth, crouched over a newspaper, leaning back in his chair, carelessly waved my family’s station wagon across without looking up. You didn’t even need a passport to enter the United States until I was 33.You need clear eyes at the border today. Europe and Canada have issued travel advisories after a series of arbitrary detentions, deportations to foreign jails without due process and hundreds of valid visas pulled or voided amid a sense of general impunity. While I have crossed the border a hundred times at least, sometimes once a month when I lived there, I cannot say when I will see America again, and I am quite sure I will never return to the country I once visited.The America I knew, the America I loved, has closed.And so I find myself like a man who has been admiring bubbles floating in the air, trying to recall their shape and swerve and shine after they’ve popped.America was a country of bubbles. I loved it as one loves anything that is both real and fantastical.Donald Trump has blown himself into a bubble of gilded ceilings, ersatz Roman murals, sycophants on tap and midnight rants of imperial conquest on personally owned social media networks. He is only one story. America was millions of bubbles. For some reason, I find myself remembering Tom Waits in a junkyard making Bone Machine, turning rusted fenders and tossed-out dry cleaners and cracked sheet metal into a scrap marimba of his own invention. Even its dumps could give birth to magic.Golf course palaces and wrecking-lot percussion: twin American truths.You felt the meaning of America the moment you entered. In Canada, wilderness is wilderness. The northern forests I come from resist interpretation; that is their power. But when you cross the border from, say, Quebec into Maine, you can feel myth accruing around the bark of the trees. You are in the haunted forests of New England, redolent with burned witches and ghost stories. Further south, the foggy murderous oaks loom gothically. Out west, the deserts beg for cowboys to cross them. Canada is a country that disillusions you. America is one illusion after another, some magnificent, others treacherous or vicious.Every landscape in America is setting, and you have to pose inside them. In my 20s, I drove Highway 1 from San Francisco to Los Angeles. An older and wiser friend told me to rent a convertible, and I laughed the suggestion off, since it felt like something you would do in the movies. Huge mistake. That drive down the California coast – cows by the big-wave Pacific, condors in the clefts of Big Sur – demands an open roof.I learned then: when you go to America, always pick the option that feels like what you would do in the movies.In San Francisco, right by the Yahoo offices on Mission Street, was a small homeless encampment. I could just see inside one of the tents through an open flap, where a boy – he would have been about 10 years old – was playing with little treasures on a small tray – a ring, a toy car, a key chain. Even the tents of the homeless were little bubbles.In Malibu, at a sushi bar, elegant Japanese surf bums lounged between orders, watching Game 7 of the World Series, languidly curling out cucumber spirals the chefs used instead of seaweed. That was their thing – cucumber-based rolls. That restaurant is ash now.View image in fullscreenSometimes, you can see the bubbles better from the air. Flying into Palm Springs, the desert circumscribed, encroaching, revealed the furious machinery working to push it away. Palm Springs is pure delight on the ground: the misted pools, the cocktails filled with the exactly the right ice shapes, the street names hanging on to the faded glamour of the tacky talkshow guests from half a century ago.The airport has no roof; that’s how crazy a city it is. A glistening shivering bubble, effortless once inside.The sheer prosperity of the country could be breathtaking. I had just come back from Senegal when the Guardian sent me on assignment to rust belt Ohio, during the first stirrings of Trumpism, back in 2015. I was there to report on the growing swell of populism by way of the postindustrial immiseration of middle America.I was stopping for gas on the way to a rally, and at the station they were selling a hotdog with as much chilli and cheese as you liked for $1.99. The chilli and cheese came out of the wall. You pressed two buttons, one for chilli and one for cheese.On the streets of Dakar, children hawk packs of peanuts and plastic bags of clean water on the street, and I wondered if you could even explain to them that there existed a place, on the same earth, where chilli and liquid cheese came out of a wall, and you could have as much of it as you liked for the equivalent of 20 minutes’ work at the minimum wage, and that some of the people in that place considered themselves so hard done by that their resentful fury threatened the political order, that they just wanted to burn it all down.It was more than money and grandeur, though. The openness, the generosity of ordinary people, floated free over the country.When I was researching my book The Next Civil War, the far-right people I met, the militia folks, in Oklahoma and in Ohio, at gun shows and Trump rallies and prepper conventions, were, without exception, polite in person – no doubt because I’m white, with blond hair and blue eyes, so I can pretend to be a good ol’ boy when required. They lived in dark bubbles, bubbles of serpentine paranoia and weird loathings and strange fantasies of breakdown.They welcomed me into their bubbles as equably as concierges. Militia pie is delicious; the crusts are richer, flakier. I think they use lard. Anyway, they talked to me about their hopes for the destruction of their government cheerfully and frankly, because they were living the movies playing in their minds and they wanted me to witness the projection.At one prepper convention I remember, a vendor was selling gluten-free rations for bunker survival. That was America in a bucket to me: even at the end of the world, don’t let a gluten allergy interfere with your active lifestyle.View image in fullscreenMuch later, for another publication, I attended a human-fairy congress in rural Washington state. Both humans and fairies were welcome to attend but only humans could enroll in the courses on fairy gardening and fairy marriages. They were the residue of the hippies, I suppose. The final event was a big dance where the fairies joined them and parlayed a message from the spirit realm. A young man dressed in Tibetan shaman robes ran into the luscious meadow set between ponderosa pines shouting “I! Feel! Better!” He was a definitive American type – a seeker who just went with his seeking.In America, one bubble was as good as another: the next week, many of the human-fairy enthusiasts were headed to a cosmic Sasquatch festival.On the other side of the state, in the Olympia forest, I interviewed illegal lumber poachers who cut a cord of firewood a day from the dead trees on public lands for meth and food and gas money, a primitive existence not that far from stone age tribes or medieval peasants. As I approached their compound, a coagulation of wrecked cars and rotten RVs and driftwood lean-tos with hanging tarps, a turkey strutted out to defend their ad hoc architecture of detritus. They had a guard turkey. The guard turkey was the shine of their bubble, like something in a dream.The American dream. For technocrats, a dying breed in the US, the term was shorthand for each generation doing better than the one before, for generally upward social mobility. There was more to it than that. There was an idea, an assumption really, that if you had enough talent and worked hard and did the smart thing, with a little luck you could live life just as you wanted. The country’s founding promise, after all, is “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.That promise is why success in America does not lead to gratitude but to an intense sensation of loss. The elite take any deviation from their fantasy existence as a broken contract. They’ve been ripped off. That is a big feeling among the most successful people in America: the sense of being ripped off.The country clubs are rife with men and women, in incredible luxury, complaining bitterly about the state of the country. The richest and most powerful, the Americans who have won, who have everything, are still not happy, and why? Their answer is that the American dream must be broken. There is no one who feels more betrayed by the American dream than the world’s richest man. Why else do you think he’s out there with a chainsaw?The American elites of the past 20 years have called their foremost principle freedom, but what they meant was impunity. That’s what the original slave masters built: a world where they could do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted, without consequences. That’s what the techlords dream of today.The truly frictionless world they seek eludes them exactly because it is a dream, because it is unreal. The ultimate truth of bubbles is that they pop.Another bubble: when I was teaching Shakespeare in Harlem, at the City College of New York, I had a homeless student who slept in his car and never missed my seminar on revenge tragedy. You can only live that way if you live in a bubble buoyed by dreams.I, too, have floated in American bubbles. I have inhabited its intoxication. If it were not for America, I would be working part-time in a coffee shop.In the early 2010s, I was a writer stuck between Toronto and New York, and I had written my attempt at the great Canadian novel, about Alberta and Quebec and the unspoken fascination between them – between Montreal, with its wild heart, and the wild prairies filled with longing for a distant recognition. Nationalism was completely out of fashion then. No one in Canada would even look at the manuscript. My friends at small presses stopped accepting my invitations for drinks. You can be a loser and you can be a nag, but nobody wants both at the same time – even in Canada.View image in fullscreenI had been sitting on the book for a year when David Granger, my editor at Esquire, invited me down to New York, rented out a room at a Midtown Manhattan restaurant, and threw a party for me, just to give a speech to the gathered editors of Hearst about what a great writer I was. I returned to Canada, asked myself what the hell was I thinking trying to tell the stories of people who didn’t care if their stories were told, rewrote the novel so it was set in New York, and sold it in a few weeks for six figures.People used to say, about New York: “If you can make it here you can make it anywhere.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The whole point of New York was that it was the city that wanted you to make it. David Granger blew a bubble around me, and the David Grangers on this planet are all American; that’s the fact of the matter.You work hard, you play hard. So many Americans will do whatever it takes to prevent their bubbles from bursting. The second Trump administration has clarified this national trait. As the authoritarian impulse strips America of any motivating ideals, the only -ism surviving is careerism.The past decade has demonstrated that there is nothing that will cause an American politician to resign. There is no line they won’t cross. To keep the bubble from popping, they will drink their own blood until there’s nothing left but a husk. There are currently people in America who are racist, not because they actually think other races are inferior, but because they think it will advance their careers, just as there were people pretending to be civil rights activists when they thought it looked good on a résumé.At the same time as there can be a terrible indifference to those outside the bubbles, there is no other group of people, in the world, happier to see others succeed than Americans. In Florida, there was a private poker room I used to go to, under a dog track in Sarasota, where you could meet the full spectrum of the Floridian population – grill-fronted southern bubbas, Jewish grandmothers, tweakers.They were just so much fun to sit playing cards with, discussing whether life had any purpose or discernible order. I remember, cancer had struck one of the dealers, who was in her mid-20s, and, to help with the medical bills, the house gave all the profits from a night over to her. It wasn’t just the rake, either. They held a silent auction, old customers forked over fistfuls of dollars straight up, and it was magnificent, a sheer festival of generosity.View image in fullscreenBut my little Canadian heart reserved an obvious thought: “You don’t have to do all this.” You don’t have to live this way. No other industrialized country in the world has to throw parties to raise money for its sick people. They could not see their own strangeness. Their bubbles reflect themselves back to them as the world.But it was a hell of a fun night.Fun. America was fun.Other countries do pleasure or luxury or celebration. America did fun. The Beatles were fun because they played American music. McDonalds conquered the world because they put a fun-for-five-minutes piece of plastic in with the fries and called it the Happy Meal. “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest,” Andy Warhol once wrote. “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.”Everyone drinks the drink of bubbles, the fun drink.The bubbles by which they lived were the subject of their greatest works of art. In the great one-hit wonder paintings, like Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth or Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, you can feel the souls pressed up against their bubbles or sinking back in them. This year is the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby, and obviously it is the great American novel, the novel of the careless people who smash up the world and retreat into their money and their supreme indifference, the novel of bubbles.But the definitive work of American art isn’t Gatsby; it’s the roadrunner cartoons. If Coyote keeps running, he can run over air. It is only when he looks down that he falls.In Judaism, it is forbidden to throw out sacred books. They keep the shreds of exhausted texts in a storage room called a genizah.View image in fullscreenThe American text is exhausted. I am going to keep my memories of America in a genizah in my mind, the ones I have written here but also: dawn over the Shenandoah seen from the flatbed of an F-150; Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Modrian in the MoMA; a New Orleans band that must have played When the Saints Go Marching In 10,000 times playing it as if it were the first time; the smell of tacos al pastor in a Tulsa parking lot; low-limit craps in Vegas; a western oriole strutting in pine needles; the stump of the “Tree of Hope” in Harlem; the Siesta Key Oyster Bar, where the walls were covered with Iraqi money stapled there by returning soldiers; the sausages at the Wrigley Field ballpark in Chicago; the New York hustler who went down the A train selling his romance novels out of a box; that wave at the border I may have half-imagined.Countries fall out of the free world. They fall back in, too. These memories are not yet dead. They are only closed.But for now, a great foam is lifting, drifting, blowing through unsettled air, and all I can hear, in the distance, is the sound of bubbles popping.View image in fullscreen

      Stephen Marche lives in Toronto and is the author of The Next Civil War and On Writing and Failure More

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      Stephen Colbert on potential alien life: ‘Take us to your leader, we don’t have one anymore’

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      Late-night hosts spoke about the Easter weekend, potential alien life and Donald Trump’s recent meeting with the Italian prime minister.Stephen ColbertOn The Late Show, Stephen Colbert pointed out that this year’s Easter Sunday also falls on 4/20, the unofficial holiday for weed enthusiasts.He joked that it would be “the Sunday he is risen and you is high”.This week saw Trump meet with the rightwing Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. Some had hoped she might “ease the tariff tension” as she is often referred to as a “Trump whisperer”.He then played footage of Meloni speaking in Italian to Trump who complimented her directly after. “I’ll have the same thing she ordered but double meatball, double parm,” Colbert joked.Meloni has now made an offer to Trump to make an official visit to Italy, a place Colbert said he would feel at home as he “looks like a pile of prosciutto with a little spaghetti on top”.Due to massive cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services, the FDA might have to stop inspections at food facilities. Colbert joked that we would know get to enjoy Tyson’s tangy buffalo beaks and thumbs.The administration is “actively trying to make health officials dumber” with halted efforts to collect data on many issues. It will now lead to “TLC’s sexy new reality show Drug-Resistant Gonorrhea Island”.This is all “just the tip of the cutberg” with the weather service also in trouble, seeing 300 employees let go as severe storm season ramps up, “when we need the weather people the most”.Colbert said that Twisters “will soon be the only programming on the weather channel”.He said that some are scrambling to make major discoveries “before science ends forever” such as this week’s reveal that there is possible signature of life on a distant planet.Officials have said that further studies are needed but Colbert expressed excitement, saying: “Please aliens take us to your leader, we don’t have one anymore.”Conspiracy theorists have also claimed that this week’s controversial all-female Blue Origin space stunt was faked. “Oh, I don’t know if I believe that,” he said. “Maybe Kubrick could fake the moon landing but you could never fake Gayle King’s sheer terror.”Jimmy KimmelOn Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host also spoke about Easter. “If Jesus comes back and sees what’s going on, we are in deep trouble,” he said.Kimmel noted that he was “not sensing a lot of Easter spirit this year” and that Easter Sunday falling on 4/20 will lead to “some very long and confusing egg hunts”.Egg prices remain high, which has seen an “outpouring of tips for other stuff you can colour instead” such as potatoes and marshmallows, but Kimmel said Jesus would only come back for “boiled eggs”.In response to the sky-high prices, he asked: “Is anyone else tired of all the winning yet?”Meanwhile, Trump has given the White House an “extreme makeover” with plenty of gold added. His press secretary called it “the golden office for the golden age”, which Kimmel called “quite the spin”.He joked that for someone anti-DEI, he has the “same taste as Liberace” before asking: “Do you think Donald Trump understands that the story of King Midas is a cautionary tale?”He also spoke about the Meloni visit, joking that Trump probably took her to an Olive Garden to “make her feel at home” before airing a clip of him showing off “his vast knowledge of other lands”.Trump referred to the Congo and said: “I don’t know what that is.” Kimmel asked: “When is someone gonna show that man a map?”He said the government is running like a “well-soiled machine” before moving on to the alien planet news, detailing that researchers have found an equivalent of sea scum. Kimmel joked that we “may have found a new home for Ted Cruz”.The planet is 120 light years away, so Kimmel said “off you go Elon and Jeff, time to climb into those space dildos and boldly go away”.He also joked that we have a “better chance of being visited by aliens than Canadians” with tourism rates down post-tariffs. More

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      Saturday Night Live: Jon Hamm excels as Trump heads to The White Lotus

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      Ahead of Easter, Saturday Night Live looks back at Jesus’s cleansing of the temple. He vows to ride the holy area of money, which brings out president Donald “Jesus” Trump (James Austin Johnson), who once again compares himself to the son of God: “Many people are even calling me the Messiah because of the mess I-a made out of the economy.”Trump brags about his “beautiful” tariffs, which were “working so well I had to stop them … now everything is back exactly how it was minus a few trillion dollars.”As he’s done in the past, Trump breaks the fourth wall to make fun of the cast frozen behind him – he signals out Ego Nwodim for her big hit performance last week – before tying things back to the upcoming holiday: “We love Easter, we love bunny, we love hunting for eggs just like everyone’s doing in the grocery store right now, because they cost a billion, trillion dollars.”This was one of the better cold opens in a while, mostly because, for as much as Johnson’s Trump rambled, it homed in on one topic: his insane bungling of the economy.Show favorite Jon Hamm hosts for the fourth time. Although his last go-round as host was 10 years ago, he has been on the show a lot since then, having racked up 14 cameos. He extolls the virtues of cameos, which can help take “a medium sketch to a marginally better than a medium sketch, or when a monologue is feeling aimless, and it needs a jolt of energy”. Right on cue, out comes Oscar winner Kieran Culkin to prove his point. The two bicker over their respective awards, penis sizes, and which of their acclaimed cable dramas was better. Hamm is right at home on the SNL main stage.Check-to-Check Business News Channel offers “financial new to regular folk living paycheck to paycheck”. Whereas the S&P means nothing to the hosts or their audience, other signs – such as “candy bars are up from ‘sure, baby,’ to ‘put that back’,” are dire signs. Meanwhile, healthcare spending remains at zero, while millions of Americans are investing in healthcare alternatives such as “just lay down, take an Advil, or just pray it goes away”.Another financial expert advises Americans to prepare for tariff price increases by switching from name brand products such as Perrier, Cap’n Crunch, and DiGiorno to knock-off brands: Uncle Bubble (“made from pure Tennessee tap water”), Sergent Munch (“lower rank, lower price, flavor bad”), and DeVonte (“it’s not delivery, it’s DeVonty”).This is one of SNL’s sharpest pieces of political comedy in a long time, managing to make light of America’s increasingly grim financial predicament in a way that average people will actually relate to. Also, the moment where Hamm and Nwodim’s news anchors laugh off the idea of ever repaying their student loans and start singing the chorus to En Vogue’s 1992 hit single, My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It), is a season highlight. They have great chemistry with each other.A new Please Don’t Destroy sees the guys playing investigators in a police procedural. The grim search for a councilman’s abducted niece is interrupted by Hamm’s detective, who gets way too excited over the prospect of ordering pizza for the long work night ahead. Chastised by the other cops, he turns into a little kid, crying about how “maybe I’ll have a soda and that’s all I’ll have from the pizza party!” When the lead detective casually mentions that he’s already ordered three cheese, three Hawaiian pizzas, the rest of the squad also freak out. Hamm is at his goofy best here, as is everyone else. Indeed, this might be the funniest PDD to date.On the boringly titled game show Guess the Correct Answer, Hamm’s contestant is terrified he will do something embarrassing that will go viral and ruin his life. His fears immediately come to pass when he bungles simple answers and ends up divulging deeply personal secrets about his racism, small penis and “unstoppable, unceasing” lust for his daughter’s friends. Simplistic and kind of lazy as written, but Hamm’s gung-ho delivery keep the laughs coming.HBO’s The White Potus sees Trump attempt to unwind at an exotic vacation resort, only to fall into a suicidal funk. Elsewhere on the island, heretofore absent Ivanka (Scarlett Johansson) immediately bails on her newfound Buddhism, commerce secretary Howard Lutnick (Jon Gries) pervs out on the idea of “America get bent over and railed by other countries,” RFK Jr (Hamm) rambles about fluoride in water to his confused, buck-toothed girlfriend (Sarah Sherman) before darting off to kill and eat a monkey, Marco Rubio (Marcello Hernández) is ditched by his mean girls Pam Bondi (Ashley Padilla) and Kristi Noem (Heidi Gardner) only to be seduced by Vladimir Putin (a returning Beck Bennett), Eric Trump (a returning Alex Moffat) is his usual dumb self, while Don Jr (Mikey Day) has a sex dream about his ex-wife’s current beau, Tiger Woods (Kenan Thompson).This is a welcome return not only of some former cast members, but also the blending of hot button political and pop culture topics that used to be a regular fixture on SNL, but which has, for whatever reason, mostly been absent for the past few seasons. But good as it is, the fact that it didn’t have Don Jr and Eric engage in any brotherly love, a la this season of The White Lotus, feels like a cop out.Musical guest Lizzo performs her first set of the night. Bleating out eye-rolling, self-affirming platitudes while wearing a shirt that reads “Tariffied”, her performance plays like a liberal version of Morgan Wallen’s from two weeks ago: all unconvincing cultural signaling set to rote pop tunes.On Weekend Update, Colin Jost picks up where the cold open and previous sketch left off, noting that the president’s 90-day tariffs pause “may not seem like a long time, but remember, Trump has only been president 82 days and it already feels like a goddamn decade.”Michael Che invites Chinese trade minister Chen Biao (Bowen Yang) on to discuss Trump’s trade war with China. Chen could care less about Trump’s 145% tariff on Chinese goods, asking “which side is more willing to endure hardship for the glory of their nation: the one that’s been around for thousands of years, or the one sending Katy Perry to space?” He also takes a quick dig at JD Vance by hawking his own memoir, Peasant Elegy. There are some good lines here, but Yang’s snotty schtick gets in the way.Later, Jost brings on cast member Emil Wakim to give his thoughts about what it means to be an American these days. He comes out waving flags just to buy some goodwill, before admitting that he’s conflicted: “I know we’re bad, because my life is so good there’s just no way it’s cruelty-free.” He has some decent material about ordering from Uber Eats and hipster anti-capitalist hypocrisy, which is sure to go over poorly online.Wakim’s segment feels abrupt, probably because this week’s Update includes a rare third guest spot. Sarah Sherman plays Jost’s stressed-out accountant Dawn who, between pulling out her own hair and driving her head through the set, takes shots at him over his various sexual and criminal improprieties. It’s a credit to Sherman that this regularly recurring bit hasn’t yet worn out its welcome.A gay couple (Yang and Hamm) get angrily defensive when their confused friends ask where and how they got their newly adopted (or rather, clearly stolen) baby. This attempt to send up progressive identity politics might felt relevant a couple of years ago, but the culture has shifted enough that it no longer does.Scenes of interracial young people partaking in “active fun in slow motion” are revealed to be the number one indicator of herpes. Other signs include “dancing in an outdoor beer garden with strings lights”, “winning a carnival game on the first try” or “hanging out with exactly one white person, one Black person, one Asian person, and one Latin person.” A solid sendup of medication ad tropes.The show wraps up in a corporate office during a new employee orientation ice breaker. The new hires take turns sharing a fun personal fact about themselves. Hamm’s employee, Greg, brings things to a screeching halt when he introduces himself by revealing: “My mom killed my dad naked on TV.” More bits of information come out over the course of the conversation: the show was Jackass; it was funny and sad; and a party donkey, Port-a-potty, and Raven Simone were involved. The initial gag is funny, but the rest of the sketch loses the thread.While there were a few low points to tonight’s episode – the baby sketch, Lizzo’s first song – this was one of the stronger episodes of the season. The focus on Trump’s disastrous economic policy gave it a strong through-line, the guest appearances made for some fun surprises, and Hamm was expectedly great. More

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      The week in audio: Die Die DEI; Drama on 4: The Film; Good Hang with Amy Poehler; Confessions of a Female Founder and more

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      The Slow Newscast: Die Die DEI (Tortoise Media)Drama on 4: The Film (Radio 4) | BBC SoundsGood Hang with Amy Poehler (The Ringer)Confessions of a Female Founder with Meghan (Lemonada)Working Hard, Hardly Working (Grace Beverley) | Apple podcastsThe Slow Newscast is usually worth a listen. Take Die Die DEI, from the week before last. Queasy and pointed, it tackles the issue of the Trump administration’s “war on woke”. As soon as the orange man-baby got into office, his government started shutting down inclusion programmes, and corporate US followed. Why? It’s not about saving money, or terminology-wrangling. It’s far more deeply prejudiced.View image in fullscreenWritten and presented by Stephen Armstrong, the show focuses on one particular member of the Trump administration: the deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller. Described baldly by one contributor as “a violently rightwing racist who is pushing a white nationalist agenda”, he is far from a nice guy. But Armstrong is wise enough to tell Miller’s story gradually. He was brought up in liberal, multiracial Santa Monica, California. Yet as a kid he dumps one of his friends by telling him exactly why he doesn’t like him. “Among that list of things,” recalls the friend, “was my Latino heritage. That was one of the things that disqualified me from being his friend.”We follow Miller through his college years, a controversial rape case (not his: he supported some lacrosse players who were falsely accused of sexual assault) and into the Senate. There, he uses the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) approach against itself, telling white people that they are, in fact, victims. “Hijacked victimhood” is what it’s called: the idea that your lifestyle – your life – is put in a precarious position because other people are different from you. The way Miller plays it, it’s a zero-sum game. You must triumph and “they” – people not like you – must be vanquished.Armstrong’s script is excellent. I could quote from any part of the show, but he really hits his stride towards the end. “Don’t get distracted by absurdities. This administration is throwing out so many bouncing, multicoloured balls that it’s almost impossible to focus on what’s important. The trick is to watch Stephen Miller. When he says something, it matters… The truth is, his views haven’t changed since he dumped his best friend for being Latino.”There’s something at once modern and classic about Armstrong’s script, and I thought about this while listening to Drama on 4: The Film, a small gem of a radio play about a movie. Its subject is a true story. In 1945, Sidney Bernstein, a film-maker and producer, was given hundreds of hours of footage from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Shot by British army crews for the Ministry of Information, the footage was basic but devastating, full of appalling, cruel, hellish murder. How to make this into a film that would both engage and expose the public to the horrors of the Holocaust? How to do justice to the suffering? Amazingly, Bernstein asked Alfred Hitchcock to help. And Hitch, initially reluctant, said yes.Written by Martin Jameson, The Film is a Radio 4 drama of ye olde school: rather stagey, with theatrical speeches and performances. But it’s also nicely paced, well acted, clear, moral. I found myself almost relieved that it exists. Not just because it’s about the Holocaust, which should never be forgotten, but because it’s an interesting real-life story that’s a play, as opposed to an episode of a clever news podcast. Old-fashioned audio.View image in fullscreenHere’s an example of new-fashioned audio, and it’s one that promises much. Amy Poehler, delightfully funny comedian and actor, has decided “about four or five years too late” to give us a podcast. The pitch for Good Hang with Amy Poehler must have had producers drooling: Poehler simply scrolls her contacts list, calls up a famous mate and has a chat, avoiding anything controversial in favour of having a laugh.Her first episode was with Tina Fey, who, being Tina Fey, took over and gave us insight (she works 12 hour days, plus “homework” in the evening) and wit (she’s worried about becoming one of those older Hollywood types who just “tells it like it is”). But, God, it only takes a couple of episodes before we find ourselves riding on fumes. All is slapdash and self-congratulatory. An episode with actor Ike Barinholtz gives us almost nothing. There’s a passing reference to him getting in an ecstasy mess in Amsterdam when he was younger, but we breeze past, and by the end of the show we know him no better. In every episode, Poehler enthuses so much about her guest – to their face! – that it feels performative. She laughs too much and for too long. Are these incredibly successful, creative, funny people so insecure that they need bolstering every other sentence? (Yes, clearly.)View image in fullscreenIn a similar vein, please welcome Meghan, Duchess of Sussex’s latest podcast venture, Confessions of a Female Founder. Actually, don’t bother, unless OMG-yes-sister-and-you-look-so-good-while-doing-it is your thing. Honestly, I think it’s just how they talk over there. Their idea of a good hang, or a good podcast, is different from ours, and involves a lot less piss-taking.Meghan’s first show is with Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder of dating app Bumble, but, nope, we don’t learn anything much, except about how Megs and Whits met (it was NYE and Wolfe Herd was wearing a rhinestone cowboy costume! The embarrassment!) and how supportive they are of each other.View image in fullscreenIf you want a decent podcast from a 28-year-old entrepreneur who’s already built three companies and is generous with her business tips, then I recommend Grace Beverley’s Working Hard, Hardly Working, now on episode 133. She also interrupts her guests too much to talk about her own life, but you get far more corporate insight and life practicality. The world, it seems, is full of these frantically perfectionist, success-obsessed, greige-swathed young women trying to get their life to work. I’d say relax, but they can’t. More

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      Novelist Katie Kitamura: ‘As Trump tries to take away everything I love, it’s never been clearer that writing matters’

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      Some years ago, Katie Kitamura came upon a headline that read something like: “A stranger told me I was his mother.” The headline gripped her, but she never clicked through to the article. She imagined the story would offer some explanation – perhaps the author had given up a child for adoption, for instance. “I was much more interested in not having a concrete answer but just exploring the situation itself,” she tells me. “I’m intrigued by the idea that you could be very settled in your life … and something could happen that could overturn everything that you understand about yourself and your place in the world.”The headline provided the inspiration for Kitamura’s fifth novel, Audition, a beguiling and unsettling book that opens with a meeting between an unnamed actor and a handsome college student, Xavier, who claims he is her son. As the story unfolds, the truth of their entanglement becomes ever harder to discern – is he a liar or a fantasist, or is she mad?Audition deliberately sets itself apart from the recent spate of popular novels – such as Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch or Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor – that explore the viscerality and intensity of early motherhood. Kitamura wanted to write something that was “temperature wise, on the opposite pole”, a novel more concerned with maternal separation, the unavoidable and necessary estrangement that occurs as children grow up and away from their parents. Her fiction has always been interested in the moments when you look at a person you know well and they appear to you as a stranger, and it occurred to her that this happens often between parents and their children. Her own children, aged 12 and eight, are “very surprising creatures”, she says, and she marvels at how rapidly their relationship, and her experience of motherhood, changes as they change. When she speaks to friends whose grown-up children have moved back home, they tell her it’s “like living with a stranger”. “You do not recognise large swathes of their personality and their way of being in the world,” she says. “Talking with people, it doesn’t seem like it’s a reconstitution of the old family unit. It feels like a reorganisation of the family.”In Kitamura’s books, the female protagonists are so reserved that they are often accused of being cold or arrogant, but she herself is disarmingly warm and unassuming. “Is it OK if I get a cookie too?” she asks when we first meet, at a coffee shop in Brooklyn, New York. She is dressed elegantly, in a slouchy suit and big sunglasses, and she laughs a lot, generally at herself. At one point, she tells me that when a family friend said she was excited to read her book, Kitamura’s daughter challenged her. “She doesn’t have a book coming out,” her daughter insisted, “I’ve never seen her write!” “And that,” Kitamura says, “feels like a very accurate description of my life.”“There’s something very interesting about being a parent, because suddenly there is another person in the world who is telling you who you are to them. And that is, in a lot of ways, the most important identity that you have, but it is somehow othered. I know very much that the person my children think I am is not the person I always feel myself to be – that crack in being, or experience, is something I wanted to explore.” The actor in Audition struggles to piece together the different parts of herself, her overlapping roles, on stage and in real life, as an artist, a wife and possibly a mother. Kitamura can relate. “Sometimes I feel like a teacher or a writer or a friend or a daughter or a wife or a mother, and there’s something that does feel a bit incommensurate about those parts,” she says.She is married to the British novelist Hari Kunzru. Kunzru writes faster than her, she tells me, and he is better at sitting down to work after the children are in bed, or writing in 45-minute snatches during the day. Ah, I say, is that because of your role in the family: are you the one carrying the household’s mental load? But it isn’t. “My friend said something like, ‘Who does all the playdates and who books the appointments with the dentists?’ – and Hari does all that,” she says, laughing. He also does all the cooking.View image in fullscreenDo they ever get jealous of one another, I ask, now openly stirring. No, she replies, because they write such different books: his are big and multistranded, hers are more compacted. Then she leans forward and says: “What does happen is one of us will have an idea and we’ll say to the other, ‘That’s something you should write’.” Her manner is confessional, as though this weren’t the opposite of what jealous people would do. They are each other’s first editors and always undertake a final read of one another’s work before submission. On a day-to-day basis, Kitamura says, she appreciates her husband as the unloader of dishwasher and purchaser of laundry detergent, and then she’ll read his new book and think: “This is smart! You’ve had all this going on in your head as well!”In light of her family dynamic, it’s interesting that her female characters in novels such as Intimacies and A Separation are often married to writers but themselves work as interpreters, translators or actors – mediums for other people’s messages. Kitamura says she is uncomfortable with the idea of being a writer and sees her own role as closer to interpreting, to channelling other people’s voices. The women she writes about are often passive in their professional and personal lives, which she believes is true to life. “Who of us has that much agency? I mean, what kind of a fantasy world are we living in? We have the illusion of agency,” she says. “I’m interested in passivity in part because it’s the condition most of us live in. But I’m also interested in passivity because it is itself a kind of action.” She’s fascinated by the point at which passivity becomes complicity. Her characters often find themselves in ethically unsustainable positions: working for institutions they disapprove of, for instance, or accepting an inheritance although it isn’t rightfully theirs.View image in fullscreenWe meet in late February, and it seems everyone I’ve passed today in New York has been discussing politics. Kitamura has not been sleeping well. She never sleeps well during a Trump presidency, she half jokes. She teaches on New York University’s graduate creative writing programme and says that the day after the 2024 election her students asked her what the point was of fiction: did they not have an obligation to resist Trump more directly? She had struggled with that question herself in 2016, but the second Trump administration has been so extreme that she can now see with greater clarity the urgent importance of writing, art and education. This is, she says, “in part because they are being targeted so fiercely, but also because [Trump and his allies] are trying to take away everything I love and care about. It’s never been clearer to me that writing actually does matter. It’s not a frivolous or useless task.”In an immediate way, she continues, writers are well placed to respond to Trump’s attacks on language, the obfuscation and doublespeak, the moral panic over pronouns or the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. More broadly, fiction can act as an antidote to authoritarianism. If authoritarianism thrives when people are isolated, fiction brings people together, she says. “In the most basic way, writing is about opening yourself to another person’s mind. The most intimate thing I do on a daily basis is pick up a book and open myself to another person.” And, while the Trump administration may be forcing one way of life on the world, fiction’s job is, as always, to remind people that there are “other ways of being”.Before Kitamura wanted to be a writer, she wanted to be a ballerina. She was raised in California, where her parents had moved from Japan for her father’s job as a professor of engineering at the University of California. Throughout school, she left class at noon to dance, and she planned to go professional. But she got injured and says that was “the nail in the coffin” because it was becoming clear that she wasn’t quite good enough to make it. Having never thought she’d go to college, she won a place at Princeton University, where she studied English. Kitamura sees similarities between dance and writing. Both require discipline: “It’s doing the same thing over and over again, reworking and reworking.” It strikes me too that if ballerinas excel at masking the pain and physical effort required for their art, Kitamura’s writing shows similar restraint and contrast, between the streamlined, exacting prose and its roiling undercurrents.In 1999, after Princeton, Kitamura moved to the UK to study for a PhD in literature at the London Consortium. She worked part time at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (where she met Kunzru) in the early 00s, and found London’s art and cultural scene vibrant and exciting. “People were taking incredible risks with their work, and that was interesting to see,” she recalls. In 2009, she published her first novel, The Longshot, about a mixed martial arts fighter preparing for his comeback match. She has retained a keen interest in performance, “both the pressures and incredible freedom of it”. In Audition, the actor believes that “a performance existed in the space between the work and the audience” and Kitamura believes the same to be true of books. She wanted Audition to be open to multiple, mutually exclusive interpretations, so that a reader could form their own conclusions. She’s curious about what it may say about a reader that they settle for one reading over another, concluding ultimately that the “son”, Xavier, is a con artist, perhaps, or that the actor is a “bad” mother.Audition forms a loose trilogy with her two preceding books, A Separation and Intimacies, novels that similarly have a keen eye for the sinister, for the subtle and yet threatening shifts in power between people, for the moments when closeness becomes dangerous or suffocating. “We have such a tendency to think of intimacy as something desirable, something we seek out with other people,” she says, “but it can also be an imposition.” In Audition, the narrator is almost pathologically attuned to the power renegotiations in the family. The person who is most desired holds the upper hand, the actor observes. Money also shapes how the characters relate to one another, sometimes in unexpected ways: at points, characters try to buy power, but their generosity only weakens them, exposing the extent of their need.Kitamura says she is both fascinated and horrified by the occasions when she has exerted power over her children. “Those moments make me very uncomfortable. It’s really simple things, like when you send them to their room or you lose your temper, or when they are little, you pick them up against their will. It’s really a brutal exertion of power over another person, but it’s also just parenting,” she says, revealing her ability to identify the disquieting elements in everyday interactions. At the same time, she observes, parenthood can make you feel powerless. She often feels powerless to protect her children from the world.She has already started on her next novel, which she says will be very different from her previous books. She checks herself: “Well, it’s not a maximalist … it’s a difference that will be significant to me and nobody else.” She is itching to write, but there’s the book tour, her teaching and, of course, family life. Like any working parent, the fact that she has so little time to herself, so little solitude, could make her unhappy, but she’s come to accept that “work comes from the mess of life”, creativity doesn’t come from a vacuum. “I have to write from the middle of my life, that’s all I can do,” she says. “I’m not going to wait for a decade to pass until I have more time.” More

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      Jimmy Kimmel: ‘Somehow Donald Trump has managed to transform the stock market into Kanye West’

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      Late-night hosts recap Donald Trump’s escalation of a trade war that many expect will lead to a global recession.Jimmy Kimmel“What a crazy country we live in. It’s hard to remember what things we used to be worried about,” said Jimmy Kimmel on Tuesday evening, as the markets once again roiled with Trump’s escalation of his tariffs on nearly all countries. “The Dow, the Nasdaq, the S&P all down again today. Somehow Donald Trump has managed to transform the stock market into Kanye West.”Trump, meanwhile, didn’t seem bothered by the worst week on Wall Street since March 2020. Instead, he posted on Truth Social that he would undergo his annual physical examination at Walter Reed medical center on Friday. “I bet it’s going to be an excellent report,” Kimmel deadpanned. “Let me guess: his physical strength and stamina are extraordinary, his blood pressure is astonishing and he is by far the healthiest president to successfully tank the world economy overnight.“I will say, after all he’s put us through, it will be nice to know that on Friday, somebody will be squeezing his balls for a change,” he added.In light of the economic downturn, Kimmel referenced an old quote of Trump, saying: “There’s a lot of opportunity in the bad times.”“And now there’s nothing but opportunity as far as the eye can see,” Kimmel joked. “It’s a Chernobyl of opportunity right now.”On Tuesday, Trump heaped even more tariffs on Chinese imports, effectively a 104% tax on all goods. “How’s he even coming up with these numbers?” Kimmel fumed. “‘What do you think about a tariff of 100% on China? Not enough! Make it 104!’”In response, the Chinese ministry of commerce said the tariffs were “mistake on top of a mistake” – “which is also what Trump said when Eric was born”, Kimmel quipped.Stephen Colbert“The tariffs are already hitting Americans right in the joystick,” said Stephen Colbert on the Late Show. Gamers were supposed to be able to order Nintendo Switch 2 consoles on Wednesday, but now the company has delayed orders to the US because of Trump’s tariffs.“What am I supposed to do without a new Mario game?” Colbert wondered. “Take a bunch of mushrooms and jump on turtles in real life? That’s what got me banned from the petting zoo.”The markets had a brief upturn on Tuesday, when rumors circulated that Trump may back down from his trade war. Asked by reporters if he would back down or if the tariffs were permanent, Trump answered paradoxically: “It could both be true.”“No, you can’t say it’s temporary and it’s permanent,” said Colbert. “That’s like being asked to call heads or tails and saying ‘I call coin.’”But around noon local time on Tuesday, the White House confirmed that they would levy a 104% tariff on all Chinese imports starting at midnight on Tuesday, “and the market stepped on a rake and then stepped down a mineshaft”, said Colbert. “One hundred and four percent Chinese tariffs are going to make everything more expensive – iPhones, laptops, those wonderful knockoff toys you can find only at the gas station like New Style Ninja Tortoise.”As for the Chinese ministry of commerce’s response – “the US threat to escalate tariffs on China is a mistake on top of a mistake” – Colbert had a wisecrack: “Coincidentally, it’s also what it’s called when Don Jr gives Eric a piggyback ride.”Seth MeyersOn Tuesday, Trump welcomed the World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers to the White House, and praised star player Shohei Ohtani with “he’s got a good future, I’m telling you”.“Not exactly a bold prediction – ‘I think that guy who won three MVP awards is going to turn out to be a pretty good ballplayer,’” Seth Meyers joked on Late Night.In other news, Elon Musk and the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) are reportedly working with Boeing to resolve delays in the new model of Air Force One. “Because nothing inspires confidence like hearing ‘Boeing built this in a hurry,’” Meyers joked.On Friday, Trump headlined a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago that cost $1m a plate. “Unfortunately, due to the price of groceries, they only broke even,” Meyers quipped.And according to a new analysis by the Washington Post, Trump has spent one-third of his days in office at his golf courses. “And I think we might be better off if we could somehow get that up to three thirds,” said Meyers.The Daily Show“It’s been one week since Donald Trump announced his bold vision for destroying the economy,” said Desi Lydic on the Daily Show. “And guess what? His plan is working.”Lydic pointed to a graph of the Dow Jones since Trump took office, which plunged precipitously after the president announced his tariffs. “I’m not an economist, but it’s probably a bad sign when the chart itself looks like it jumped off the roof,” she said. “Look at that drop! Six Flags is going to make a roller coaster of that.”“The president may have singlehandedly tipped us into a global recession,” Lydic continued. “And with so much uncertainty, the world is glued to the financial news networks, who are surely focusing on this story 24/7, right Fox Business?”In fact, Fox’s business network focused on the LA Dodgers visiting the White House, and not Trump’s 104% tax on Chinese imports. “This is getting really serious. We’ll know exactly how serious one we get China to do the math for us,” Lydic joked. “But point is: Trump is out of control right now. I’d say he’s like a bull in a china shop, but at 104%, I can’t afford to say that.” More

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      ‘HillmanTok’: how The Cosby Show inspired resistance to Trump’s war on Black education

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      In 1987, the Cosby Show spinoff A Different World made its US TV debut and followed the elder child, Denise Huxtable (Lisa Bonet), as she studied at her parents’ alma mater. The fictional historically Black college (or HBCU), Hillman, would go on to become a byword for Black excellence. “The influence of kids wanting to go to school, period, I think is very powerful,” one of the stars of the series, Jasmine Guy, said while touring HBCU campuses with her former castmates in 2024, 35 years after the sitcom ended. “Because they could see themselves there.”Hillman College is credited with driving record levels of enrollment at actual HBCUs in the 1980s and 90s, and remains a source of inspiration for Black creatives to this day. The actor-screenwriter Lena Waithe had the fabled campus in mind when she launched her production company, Hillman Grad. “I want to call it something that is close to my heart, and that is the world of A Different World and what that show represented for me and so many other people,” she said.View image in fullscreenFour decades later, that fantasy world lives on and finds itself reckoning with the reality of a second Donald Trump administration hellbent on rolling back diversity programs and gutting the Department of Education. On TikTok, the hashtag HillmanTok has become a free online space where Black scholars share their expertise in subjects that the administration is trying to excise from libraries and school curricula. Anyone who scrolls to their content on TikTok and sticks around for the lesson is part of the class. “I’m mindful of the weight of this particular teaching and this particular time,” says Leah Barlow, a liberal studies professor at North Carolina A&T, the country’s largest HBCU. “Honestly, it feels a little ancestral.”Last fall, Barlow posted an introductory two-minute TikTok video for her African studies class; 250,000 users subscribed to the class channel overnight and within a week it hit 4m views. “I thought it was going to be a trend for a short time, and then we’d move on to the next thing,” says Barlow, who posted the video on the same day Trump retook office and rescinded a federal TikTok ban.But then a sixth-grade math teacher named Cierra Hinton seized on the enthusiasm and started the hashtag HillmanTok. She encouraged Black educators to post instructional videos under the banner, and was inundated with hashtagged submissions. Like Black Twitter and Black Lives Matter, another digital social justice movement was born – the world’s first crowd-sourced HBCU. In an emotional response video, Hinton took a measure of satisfaction in helping “people come together and build something that is bigger than we ever imagined, something that means so much”.HillmanTok class subjects run the gamut from US history to mathematics to culinary arts. There are even electives on African American food studies and Stem careers. “I am finally about to post the syllabus,” Carlotta Berry says in the greeting for her Engineering 101 HillmanTok course. “You can learn asynchronously by watching any of my videos.”The HillmanTok educators aren’t limited to real-world academics like Berry, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Indiana. Shannan E Johnson, a former creative executive at the Syfy channel, has a course on screenwriting. The music journalist Touré has a course on the prehistory of hip-hop. “This is actually a reprise of the class I did 20 years ago at NYU,” he joked. “We’re overenrolled, as usual.”Just as A Different World regularly dealt with weighty subjects such as war, homelessness and the Aids epidemic at the risk of losing advertiser support, HillmanTok also offers culturally urgent lessons on resistance and restorative justice. “People have always been trying to limit and marginalize the impact and effect of Black education,” says Jelani Favors, the director of North Carolina A&T’s Center of Excellence for Social Justice. “But it was those teachers opening up their classroom doors, pouring into young idealists and finding ways to unlock their potential to engage in the deconstructing of Jim Crow and white supremacy.”This is all happening against the backdrop of a Black college enrollment gap in which Black men account for 26% of the student body. All the while Maga donors add insult to injury by trashing the value of HBCU education overall. “Howard was not Harvard,” the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel said in a dig at the former vice-president Kamala Harris’s scholarship at Howard University, the most prestigious HBCU. “You couldn’t even point this out [when she was running]. This is probably a racist thing to say.”That’s just the start of the slights against HBCUs, which were founded to provide educational opportunities for Black students at a time when it was illegal or impossible to attend college in the US. A 2023 investigation by the Biden administration found that HBCUs had missed out on more than $13bn in federal funding for more than three decades because state governors blocked the funds. North Carolina A&T, which has a 14,000-student enrollment, was owed more than $2bn alone. HBCUs could well end up suffering more under Trump, who has made a U-turn from allocating $250m in funding to freezing educational grants and loans – which is how most HBCU students cover tuition. Last month, he signed an executive order to close the Department of Education – a critical lifeline for HBCUs, which have a much harder time fundraising than predominantly white institutions.View image in fullscreenThat HillmanTok is poised to become a resource for a Black student population that could find itself locked out of the traditional college experience makes it more relevant than just another Khan Academy, YouTube University or MasterClass. Inevitably, that momentum faces new headwinds from the rush to capitalize on the Hillman name – not unlike the Black Lives Matter movement did at the end. Some HillmanTok supporters have taken exception to attempts to sell merchandise and live events under the name. What’s more, as a number of trademark claims have been filed for the name, Black TikTok users have raised concerns about a white business interest winning control.“Anytime something looks like it’s going to make some money or turn into a movement, you see this,” says the Howard University law professor Nicole Gaither, who adds that the case for each filing also holds potential ramifications. It just really depends on how the US Patent and Trademark Office is going to view this. “Lena Waithe has Hillman registrations that are related to entertainment services, but she also has education services related to manners and etiquette. And she sells apparel,” Gaither aded.While that plays out in the background, Barlow remains strictly committed to the work. Last month TikTok and the United Negro College Fund hosted an event in Washington to connect HillmanTok instructors with Capitol Hill lawmakers and bring awareness to inclusive education and Black history preservation. While there, Barlow conducted TikTok interviews with the Democratic senator Raphael Warnock and the representative Jasmine Crockett for her class. Crockett implored her students to “take advantage of this moment and realize we don’t have a million Leahs running around. Please value her and value your education.”HillmanTok continues a tradition of Black self-determination through education that dates back to the flouting of anti-literacy laws during slavery. “We always find a way, regardless of what is happening – we, meaning Black people,” says Barlow. “We have always been resilient, autonomous and used agency to get information where it needs to go.”View image in fullscreenThe Hillman brand wasn’t always such an easy sell. Where The Cosby Show was largely written and produced by white people for white audiences as a showcase for Black respectability, A Different World boldly entrusted young Black creatives with the task of relating the cultural experiences that young Black students were having in real time. A Different World faced bitter critical reception when it debuted. One newspaper reviewer called it “a greed-motivated sitcom” in a slam of the show’s creator, Bill Cosby – who patterned the college after the women’s HBCU Spelman College, where he was once a major benefactor.After that rough first season, control over the sitcom was passed to the Fame alumna Debbie Allen (sister of The Cosby Show matriarch Phylicia Rashad) – who not only brought her own college experience at Howard into the production process, but also an army of Black writers and consultants. She empowered actors to give feedback and introduced clauses into their contract that freed them up to write and direct episodes, adding to the show’s diverse perspectives. For a kicker, Allen enlisted Aretha Franklin to record the theme song.Also in the middle of that first season, Bonet became pregnant with her first child, Zoë, with her then husband Lenny Kravitz. Cosby, scoffing at the cultural optics of Denise being portrayed as an unwed mother in college, had Bonet written off the series and reabsorbed into The Cosby Show. “I thought that show just wasn’t going to come back because she was and is the star,” Guy said. But after reconfiguring around the romance between Whitley (Guy) and Dwayne (Kadeem Hardison), A Different World became a ratings colossus alongside The Cosby Show and a mainstay in Black households for generations.Among others, the sitcom introduced the world to Jada Pinkett Smith and the Oscar winners Halle Berry and Marisa Tomei – who took the role playing Bonet’s white roommate after Meg Ryan passed. (It certainly worked out for the both of them.) And unlike with The Cosby Show, the disgraced Cosby’s involvement has not dinted A Different World’s popularity over the years. (He only appears briefly in the pilot.) Last fall, the cast reunited for a national HBCU tour to spark enrollment and scholarship fundraising and found that many of the students who remain inspired by the show had been born long after its initial 144-episode run.In February, A Different World finally made its debut on Netflix – six months after the streamer announced the development of an Allen-produced sequel that would focus on the Hillman experience of Whitley and Dwayne’s daughter, with the pilot to begin shooting over the summer. It remains to be seen whether this new version of the series will address Magaworld’s assault on Black education. It wouldn’t be the same show if it didn’t. “The issues we were dealing with then,” said the series co-star Dawnn Lewis, “we’re still dealing with in some shape or form today.”HillmanTok roll call: five to follow

      @amfamstudies Clip highlights from North Carolina A&T’s Leah Barlow from her actual African American studies course.

      @toureshow The music journalist offers a deep rewind on the prehistory of hip-hop.

      @dr.clo.flo The University of Oklahoma education studies professor Christy Oxendine unpacks the history of US education.

      @drdre4000 The Holy Cross chemistry professor Andre Isaacs puts the fun in functional groups.

      @iamalawyerinreallife The Atlanta defense attorney Danielle Obiorah shows civil servants how to protect themselves against Doge cuts in Federal Employee Rights 101. More