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California’s Republican Party is so weak that no Republican has won statewide office there in 20 years. Yet there’s some danger this fall that the Golden State—where nearly twice as many voters register Democratic as Republican—will elect a Republican governor. It’s even conceivable that the general election will be a contest between two MAGA Republican gubernatorial candidates. Blame California’s top-two nonpartisan primary system, a good-government reform adopted by ballot referendum in 2010 that was supposed to weed out extremist candidates.Let’s agree from the outset that California’s top-two primary, also known as a jungle primary, is not the only reason this year’s governor’s race is a mess. We start with the problem that the candidates have all, in some way, come up short.Until last summer, the Democratic smart money was on former Vice President Kamala Harris. For Harris, running for governor would have been a sensible move—certainly more sensible than running again for president. But in July, Harris removed herself from consideration. That cleared the path for Representative Eric Swalwell. Swalwell was well on his way to becoming front-runner when allegations of rape and other sexual misbehavior compelled him to drop out of the race and resign from Congress. Much of Swalwell’s support then swung to Xavier Becerra, who was health and human services secretary under President Joe Biden. That took many of Becerra’s former colleagues in the Biden administration by surprise, and four of them, speaking not for attribution, told Politico last week that Becerra is kind of an empty suit. Democratic former Representative Katie Porter rode high in the polls for a while, but lately she’s been slipping. Porter got caught on one video being verbally abusive to a staffer (“Get out of my fucking shot”), and on another berating a CBS News reporter in Trumpian fashion (“I feel like this is unnecessarily argumentative. What is your question?”). The other top-polling Democrat, billionaire former hedge fund manager Tom Steyer, has lately been gaining support, but billionaires are in pretty bad odor these days. (To read my contribution to the billionaire-bashing literature, click here.) Cal Matters reports that Steyer is “on track to run the most expensive gubernatorial campaign in California history.” I also feel duty-bound to report that Democratic former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who placed third in the 2018 gubernatorial primary, is running again this year. But he’s been polling at 1 or 2 percent, which is very painful to watch.If the Democratic field is weak, the Republican field is (much like the Republican Party itself) a catastrophe. Swalwell’s departure reduced but didn’t eliminate the risk that a Democratic split would cede the two top spots to Republicans Steve Hilton, a former Fox News blowhard previously known as British Prime Minister David Cameron’s “pint-sized Rasputin,” and Chad Bianco, a Covid-mandate-defying sheriff of Riverside County who recently declared himself “very proud” to be a past member of the Oath Keepers, a paramilitary group implicated in the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Hilton is endorsed by Trump and holds the lead in most polls. The likelihood that at least one of these extremists will end up in the general election makes a mockery of the principal goo-goo argument for the jungle primary, which is that it’s supposed to weed out extremists.The top-two primary system is—as so many California ballot propositions turn out to be—a solution in search of a problem. Its roots, ironically, lay in the highly partisan 2003 recall election of California Governor Grey Davis, which invited voters to choose an alternative candidate, Democrat or Republican, on a single ballot. Davis was recalled, and the actor and bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger was voted in to replace him largely on the basis of name recognition. Schwarzenegger’s single-ballot victory predisposed the Governator to favor Proposition 14, the 2010 ballot measure that ushered in the single-ballot top-two system. “That’s how I got elected,” Schwarzenegger told NPR, “because I appealed to Democrats and Republicans, independents ... everybody.” Actually, the way Schwarzenegger got elected was that a very combative car-alarm magnate named Darrell Issa, later a Republican member of Congress, spent $2 million to throw Davis out of office (and early on hoped to replace Davis himself). Since Schwarzenegger, a fairly moderate Republican, was elected on a nonpartisan ballot, he figured that single-ballot primaries would keep California from electing extremists in the future. But California hadn’t elected many extremists to statewide office before Schwarzenegger. Indeed, during the previous half-century, the only extremist elected California governor had been Ronald Reagan (1967–1975), and once he entered office Reagan’s extremism went into hibernation; Governor Reagan raised taxes and signed a pro-abortion bill into law well before Roe v. Wade. (The Gipper was much more conservative later as president.) I omit Pete Wilson (1991–1999) because Wilson was the opposite of Reagan, an extremist conservative governor elected as a moderate. It’s hard to remember now, but during his 1990 campaign, Wilson’s conservative credentials were called seriously into question. Even if you dispute the foregoing analysis, you’ll surely agree that when Schwarzenegger campaigned for Proposition 14, he wasn’t thinking, “Let’s head off extremists like Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson.” The fact that most Republican and Democratic party leaders very sensibly opposed Prop 14 enhanced its appeal to voters, and the measure became law.One of the arguments for open primaries is that they increase participation, but in 2018 Jamelle Bouie argued in Slate that this hadn’t happened in California. “Because there are no parties choosing nominees,” wrote Bouie, “top two is essentially the first stage of the general election—with much lower turnout because of its timing in June.” A June 2023 report by the nonprofit Unite America Institute disputed this. I have no idea who’s right. But that same report’s conclusion that California’s top-two primary reduces polarization looks pretty silly right now given Steve Hilton’s strong performance in the polls.It’s important to remember that when newspaper reporters and political scientists talk about political polarization, they are mostly talking about Republican extremism. Yes, Democrats have lately shifted a little bit to the left, but Republicans spent most of the past 40 years shifting ever-more rightward, and in the age of Trump, Republicans have adopted a nonideological thuggish authoritarianism best described as Whatever Donald Wants, or WDW. Because Trump has systematically purged the GOP of any conservative or moderate who resists his authoritarianism, the Republican Party has become the WDW Party. With Trump’s ever-declining approval rating down to 38 percent, the best way for Democrats to win is to make clear that they oppose the WDW Party. Jungle primaries are bad at accomplishing this.Strangely, Republicans are better able to grasp the value of single-party primaries. Louisiana, which had a jungle primary similar to California’s, passed a law in 2024 eliminating it for congressional and state Supreme Court elections (while preserving it for statewide and state legislative races). Republicans don’t especially like open partisan primaries, either. I’m of two minds about these. Open partisan primaries free voters from the requirement that they be registered with the party holding the primary, allowing a Democrat, say, to vote in a Republican primary. I find that part a little screwy. But I see the benefit in inviting independents to participate in open primaries, and I have no difficulty believing that doing so increases overall voter participation, which is a very good thing. Republicans not being great fans of voter participation, South Carolina and Colorado Republicans recently sued to go back to restricting primary voters to registered Republicans. The good news is that Democrats are starting to wake up to the problems inherent in top-two primaries. Rusty Hicks, chair of California’s Democratic Party, recently called for the elimination of California’s jungle primary, and Steven Maviglio, a Democratic consultant, recently proposed a statewide ballot initiative to “Undo the Top-Two.” It’s too late for 2026, alas, but moving forward it looks as though Democrats will do a better job of protecting their blue-state majorities.

In spring 2025, OpenAI rolled out an update of ChatGPT that featured a new image generator. The update proved wildly popular in large part due to how easy this new tool made it for users to produce polished custom images of whatever they could dream to prompt. What wild fabulations would OpenAI’s user base conjure? What feats of imagination might these newly democratized users perform? Turns out, most people just wanted to ask ChatGPT to reproduce celebrities and movie scenes and viral meme formats in the style of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli. Within hours, the internet was flooded with uncanny Ghibliesque images of Kramer from Seinfeld, Mike Tyson, Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at himself on TV.These images say a lot about the state of AI and creative work. They foreground the kind of proud, amoral acts of copyright infringement, or at least copyright edging, that sustain companies from OpenAI to Anthropic. They apply a warm and friendly filter on a technology whose promise is the total transformation (and possible inadvertent annihilation) of society. And, more than that, they appropriate the work of an artist who is repulsed by the rise of this technology: In a clip from 2016 that’s been in active circulation online in the past few years, Miyazaki famously said he was “disgusted” by AI animation. “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself,” he said.[Blank] meets [blank] or [blank] in the style of [blank] has become the signature grammatical structure and logic of genAI content: “Seinfeld in the style of Hayao Miyazaki …” But that prompt format is age-old: It’s been the structure of the Hollywood elevator pitch since forever. And, in TV’s private equity era, it’s become the rigid refrain of the risk-averse executive. The creative logic of an increasingly derivative media environment mirrors the corporate logic of an industry rooted in derivation. In many ways, the imaginative grammar of genAI itself descends from this lowest-common-denominator vision of art practice.Recently, it’s been tempting to point this out when a thinly, cynically conceived show flops. This show feels like a ChatGPT prompt! But it’s also true that many of the greatest TV writers now working have been forced to adapt their skills to this combinative mode, to become prompt hackers. Severance is The Office meets Lost. Andor is The Wire in the style of The Mandalorian. Simple ways to make risks look safe, to make a complicated idea seem easier to swallow. Culture right now, we are often told, is stuck, directionless, stale, deliberately stagnated, preprocessed. On TV, this looks like the constant churn of reboots, religious fidelity to existing IP, algorithmically synthesized protein bars of content.Sometimes, though, a show comes along that’s such an extravagant bespoke amalgam of forms, such a whirligig of influence and reference that all of its overlapping echoes turn into a single, caterwauling, startlingly new sound. Welcome to Widow’s Bay, which feels a lot like somewhere you’ve never been before.The easiest way to describe Widow’s Bay, now on Apple TV, is that it’s a New England Gothic Parks and Recreation. The show’s creator, Katie Dippold, in fact spent years chronicling the municipal bureaucracy of Pawnee, Indiana, and has gone on to work on a string of action comedies from The Heat to the gender-swapped Ghostbusters reboot. But that combination of references doesn’t quite sum up this show. It’s also The Andy Griffith Show by way of Twin Peaks. Possibly it’s The X-Files in the style of Veep. Is it Stranger Things meets The Lowdown? Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark? if it was written entirely by Matthew Weiner in dream sequence mode? Damon Lindelof’s Goosebumps? Stephen King’s The Good Place? Rob Reiner’s Halloween?The point of listing all these references is to say that, while attentive viewers will surely notice them bobbing and weaving through this show’s 10 episodes, Dippold and her writers are never beholden to them, never seemingly constrained or confused by this revolving door of contrasting tones and styles. Indeed, the most impressive part about Widow’s Bay—to my mind, the sole contender for best new show of the year at this point—is how in control it is. It takes a formula that’s optimized to produce the smug smirk of recognition, the comforting thrall of nostalgia, the feeling of a successful Easter egg hunt, and, instead, surprises us again and again.Widow’s Bay is a small island off the coast of New England. Neither a tourist trap nor a luxury destination, it’s mostly the home of a salty crew of townies who make up its rotting driftwood foundations. Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) is something of an outsider, a mainlander, who married a native Widow’s Bay woman in his youth and stayed. When we meet him, he himself is a widower whose rambunctious, stir-crazy son Evan (Kingston Rumi Southwick) wants nothing more than to leave the island behind forever. For reasons both mundane and mysterious: He can’t. Tom is trying as hard as he can to turn Widow’s Bay—too late—into the kind of bustling coastal destination that his son might be proud to call home, but he is beset on all sides by the locals who hate him (he ran unopposed), the City Hall staffers who don’t respect him, and the powerful occult forces of ancient evil that lurk deep in the heart of the island. The show is Jaws, from the perspective of the mayor of Amity Island.Widow’s Bay is a horror-comedy that manages to be both an incredibly funny and dense laugh-out-loud joke machine and a genuinely scary and menacing fright fest. Neither generic marker takes precedence over the other; they are mutually, ecstatically intertwined. It’s an incredibly difficult tonal balancing act, and one of the thrills of the early episodes is watching the show’s writers and directors pull it off with such aplomb. The major obstacle to Tom’s dream of turning Widow’s Bay into the next Martha’s Vineyard is that the island is obviously, excessively cursed. Demons, ghosts, witches, zombies, serial killers, unholy monsters, natural disasters, haunted houses, haunted hotels, haunted bookmobiles—Widow’s Bay has it all. And while visiting tourists are charmed by the deep well of island lore and superstition (an early plot point is Tom’s successful campaign to get The New York Times to run a glowing travel feature about Widow’s Bay), locals know it to be more than folksy legend.So, the show’s horror aspects provide the madcap “situations” for its sitcom aspects to feast upon. And they do. One episode is an extended, slapstick final girl chase sequence performed with perfect comic precision by Kate O’Flynn, who steals every scene she’s in; another episode is a supernatural, shipboard Jaws homage that unfolds with the farcical rhythm of Frasier.In an early standout episode, Tom spends the night as a guest at the island’s haunted inn to prove to the islanders that it isn’t haunted, occasioning a cascade of brackish humor and jump scares. There are faintly audible screams coming through the vents in his room; the man in the hotel welcome video wanders off out of frame never to return; Tom befriends the affable traveling businessman in the room next to his only to be stalked and attacked by him later.The show’s writers are adept at sight gags, and the hotel is stacked to the ceiling with them. At one point, Tom picks up a dusty board game from an ancient-looking cupboard. The cover simply says TEETH, and when he opens it, the box contains only a single pair of pliers. Every joke in this show feels handcrafted, a box with something startling inside. The viewer, then, is encouraged to pay extra attention to the surroundings, scanning for what’s hidden in every frame—the same way, incidentally, that you might watch a horror movie.Is it yet too banal an observation to say that the fatal flaw of AI-generated content is its lack of humanity? [Blank] in the style of [blank] is an equation, not an idea. The resulting products might be diverting or clever or even lovable, but they are, at the same time, cold, lifeless, inhumane. The same can sometimes be true of creative works built on that model. To conceive of a television show or a film as a mere contraption, the network of references as a kind of electrical wiring, is to miss the point—the conscious or unconscious act of recognition, on the part of the viewer, a spark. The prompt format can be helpful as a marketing tool to describe a work of art; it is deadly to conceive of one that way.Widow’s Bay might well have been a chilly recitation of recognizable images and forms if it hadn’t been for the care of its writers, the virtuosity of its directors (from TV visionary Hiro Murai to buzzy auteurs like Ti West and Andrew DeYoung), and, most of all, the miraculous intercession of its casting director. O’Flynn as Tom’s socially inept right-hand woman is the show’s secret weapon, ably dropping deadpan one-liners. Stephen Root does what he does best as an old salt, and so does the incredible character actress Dale Dickey. Kevin Carroll, as the skeptical sheriff, is a welcome sight since his days on The Leftovers (another show whose crackpot depiction of grief is detectable as DNA here), and you know a show is working with a deep bench when the legend Jeff Hiller is just hanging around in the background.But the thing that makes all of this hold together is Matthew Rhys, giving what’s easily his best performance since his Emmy-winning turn on The Americans. TV writers and filmmakers have struggled to figure out how to harness his uniquely charismatic qualities in the intervening years. He’s been cast for his soft menace and smothered rage (The Beast in Me, Death Comes to Pemberley), and he’s been cast for his hapless depressive manner (Perry Mason, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood). But these casting decisions somewhat misremember what was so great about his performance on The Americans. Yes, he could be menacing, and yes, he could be depressive. But he could also be very, very funny. Much like his prestige TV contemporary Elisabeth Moss, Matthew Rhys has had a hard time getting cast in comic roles, despite the fact that his ability to seamlessly cross-fade between comedy and tragedy, between sitcom dad and killer, was what defined his early breakout. Widow’s Bay is a show built around that ability to switch between modes. It’s an ingratiating, instantly unmissable performance, an actorly feat of alchemy, a hilariously, terrifyingly human thing.

Voters are heading to the polls for this year’s midterms, but the electoral maps are shifting under their feet in real time. Last month, the Supreme Court narrowed a provision in the Voting Rights Act that allowed states to consider race when redrawing maps. That decision set off a mad scramble by GOP state legislatures […]

Austin Sarat ScheerPost As the school year winds down on college campuses across the country, it seems clear that 2025-26 was not a great time for free speech in the academy, witness last month’s disruption of a speech by a member of the Trump Administration at the University of California, Los Angeles. This incident was […]

Jonathan Cook Substack [First published by Middle East Eye] There are two conclusions to be drawn from last week’s momentous local elections in Britain. The first, and most obvious, is that two-party politics in the UK is now finished. After a century of being at the centre of British political life, Labour’s time is over. It […]

By Lauren Hepler and Marisa Kendall, CalMatters The Quality Inn & Suites building along Conejo Boulevard stands vacant in Thousand Oaks on Feb. 26, 2026. Photo by Julie Leopo-Bermudez for CalMatters This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. As COVID-19 tore through California, Jennifer Hark Dietz had a decision to […]

Jim Naureckas FAIR You ever wonder why people who make AI talk about how AI might destroy humanity—but still keep making AI? Brian Phillips of the Ringer (5/6/26) has a plausible explanation. Writing about Anthropic’s announcement that it wasn’t going to release a new product, Claude Mythos, to the public because it was too dangerous, Phillips notes: The AI industry […]

Seven in 10 Americans say they oppose building data centers where they live.

His confirmation as Federal Reserve Chair, expected Wednesday, will start the clock on presidential pressure.