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What Bari Weiss Doesn’t Get About CBS News
• Jan 30, 2026

What Bari Weiss Doesn’t Get About CBS News

At an all-staff meeting on Tuesday, CBS News’s editor in chief Bari Weiss—perhaps the record-holder for the fastest the word embattled has ever been appended in front of a new job title—laid out her vision for the network she had taken the reins of only a few weeks earlier. Weiss is decidedly not a journalist and prior to her appointment at CBS hadn’t come within touching distance of the broadcast news industry. Her relatively short media career includes stints editing op-eds at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and founding The Free Press, a website devoted to pressing societal problems such as “people are being mean to J.K. Rowling and the IDF online.” With her new charges in attendance, Weiss finally revealed her vision board for the future of CBS News, and the watchword is “scoops.” “Not scoops that expire minutes later,” she explained. “But investigative scoops. And, crucially, scoops of ideas. Scoops of explanation. This is where we can soar—and where we’ll be investing,” she said. Later that day, Tony Dokoupil, Weiss’s handpicked anchor for CBS Evening News, interviewed his own mother. Here are some questions that the veteran journalists were no doubt asking themselves as Weiss jabbered at them: What are “scoops of ideas” and why are they so crucial? For that matter, what is “a scoop of explanation”? Weiss didn’t offer much in the way of clarity—that’s for the grunts to figure out, after all. But she did provide one hint at the same meeting, when she unveiled a new slate of contributors to CBS News. CBS News has officially announced its roster of 18 new contributors, including: Elliot Ackerman, Peter Attia, MD, Masih Alinejad, Arthur Brooks, Caroline Chambers, Clare de Boer, Niall Ferguson, Roland Fryer, Jr., Andrew Huberman, Coleman Hughes, Mark Hyman, Janna Levin, Casey…— Jeremy Barr (@jeremymbarr) January 27, 2026If you’re looking for “scoops” as they are traditionally understood in journalism—new information that no one else has reported—these luminaries are not exactly a murderer’s row. There is not, as far as I know, a single person on this list who can call themselves a reporter, let alone someone with a track record as a shoe-leather scoophound. It, instead, largely consists of Free Press contributors like Niall Ferguson—who, among many other things, has argued that John Maynard Keynes’s economic ideas were bad because he was gay and that their implementation caused the collapse of the British Empire—and Coleman Hughes, whose most notable contribution to the outlet was an extraordinarily flawed piece that attempted to cast doubt on the notion that George Floyd was “murdered.” Other contributors include Reihan Salam, the president of the Manhattan Institute, the increasingly rabid anti-woke right-wing think tank; RFK Jr. ally and vaccine-skeptic Dr. Mark Hyman; and Derek Thompson, the permitting-reform enthusiast who, at least by the standards of this list, appears to represent “the left.” (He also wasn’t hired by Weiss and said he had signed on as a contributor seven years ago.) At first blush, it’s a group that tells a lot that we basically already knew: Bari Weiss wants to turn CBS News into The Free Press, pushing the editorial product in a rightward direction and shoring up the overall Weissification of the network, which now is more pro-Israel (and more hostile toward its critics) than it was before, more skeptical toward issues related to diversity and identity, and generally more willing to embrace anyone who has received the ire of “the left.” If Bari Weiss has been a lightning rod for controversy throughout her career, she has also never really surprised anyone. This is what people said she would do when she was hired, and that is precisely what she is doing. This is, it seems, what Weiss meant when she shouted, “Let’s do the fucking news!” at CBS’s staff shortly after taking on the role. Weiss seems to be under the impression that she can simply scale up what she was already doing at The Free Press and that this can be easily accomplished by putting the enormous resources of CBS News behind it. Under her leadership, she said, she will transform the network into “the best-capitalized media start-up in the world.” (CBS News is not a start-up.) Many other outlets, including some legacy ones, have embraced this approach in recent years. It’s not clear if Weiss understands that these efforts have yielded subpar results or if she believes that she is simply different from everyone else. She will fail for a simple reason: She doesn’t actually understand the network she’s running. Or, for that matter, journalism.Weiss was installed at CBS because Larry Ellison, the tech billionaire who bought the network last year with his son David, is friends with Donald Trump and wanted someone there who he was confident could shift the network toward MAGA. But if Ellison only wanted to shift the network rightward, there would be many candidates for the job—including many with bona-fide broadcast experience. Weiss is there because she has one neat trick: She has managed to become a preeminent flatterer of right-wing plutocrats. This has allowed her to convince Ellison that she’s the one who can transform CBS, win back millions of viewers who have long tuned out the news, and most of all conjure the specific billionaire-friendly worldview on CBS’s platforms and charm the hoi polloi. There is, for this reason, something delicious about her failure, which is already well on its way: Ellison’s arrogance and Weiss’s smugness have combined into a supernova of stupidity and ineptitude. Her new roster of contributors fits in neatly with some of Weiss’s other brilliant ideas, which include town halls with Vice President JD Vance and sociopathic OpenAI founder Sam Altman, as well as televised “debates” about feminism and religion (sponsored, of course, by Bank of America). What Weiss means when she refers to “scoops of ideas” is, in other words, just more punditry. That’s the big idea. What CBS News needs is less news gathering and more blather. Fewer straight stories and more slant. Who needs facts when a collection of blatherskites can tell you how to feel about the facts?For what it’s worth, punditry has been good to Weiss. She built a name for herself at The New York Times by pushing “heterodox” ideas like “Jordan Peterson is actually cool and smart” and “College students are actually as bad as Trump” onto the newspaper’s editorial pages. When her colleagues pointed out the shallowness of her pieces or simply made fun of her, she spun it into martyrdom. She resigned from the Times, the organ of the American establishment, claiming it was now being run by Marxist social justice warriors. The Free Press, the site she soon built in her own image, catered to people who agreed with her and who believed, preposterously, that the Times was too hard on Israel and too soft on trans children. It turns out that many of the people who hold these beliefs are older and quite wealthy. For a specific type of very rich person, Weiss is a prophet—and in Larry Ellison, she landed a true believer. When critiquing—or even just making fun of—Weiss and The Free Press, it’s hard not to sometimes feel like you’re playing their game: They want to present themselves as blazing truth tellers, heterodox thinkers, and, above all, the enemies of, say, liberal opinion columnists at The New Republic. But make no mistake, there is nothing uniquely dangerous or radical—or even particularly interesting—about anything Weiss is doing. You don’t have to travel far to find someone expressing vaccine skepticism, advocating “colorblind” politics, defending the state of Israel, or expressing concern that kids these days are just a little too “woke.” The Free Press exists for people who believe these things but also want them presented in ways that are familiar to longtime readers of the Times (because they are old and don’t know how to get YouTube on their TV because their grandchildren don’t talk to them).   Weiss’s real strength at The Free Press was flattering people with these hoary views by suggesting that they were actually members of a hunted and intellectually oppressed minority of reasonable, level-headed people with forbidden ideas. The world had gone mad, it had lost its common sense, but the readers of The Free Press got the red pill just in time. Older people have always been afraid of younger people, who they see as dangerous radicals and Jacobins, but Weiss valorized the readers of The Free Press: They understood that, this time, college students really were Jacobins, bent on instituting pogroms and making gender-reassignment surgery mandatory. Those pesky kids would have gotten away with it, if The Free Press hadn’t blogged it. Credit where credit is due: There are a lot of aging reactionaries out there. In a very short time, this posture proved lucrative. The Free Press currently has over 150,000 subscribers and was purchased late last year by Ellison for the ludicrous sum of $150 million. It may be that the narrow success of The Free Press has convinced Weiss that she has discovered the secret sauce for reversing the decades-long decline in trust in the media writ large, instead of what should be obvious to everyone: She successfully exploited a lucrative niche. The manifesto she released earlier this year suggests that she has come to believe the former: It includes bullet points like “We love America” and “We report on the world as it is.” It’s all very high on its own supply—a blunted belief that Weiss can pander her way out of widespread distrust in mainstream media by making the network more overtly patriotic and less inclined to dwell on bad news. (CBS News, for instance, spent considerably less time on Monday covering the murder of Minneapolis VA Nurse Alex Pretti than its competitors.)But Weiss’s new hires suggest that she’s had another brainwave to bring back those who have tuned out the mainstream media: Populate it with content from people who also hate the media. There is little reason to believe that anyone on this new roster is capable of actually winning back viewers with scorched-earth punditry. In fact, the opposite may very well be true. This type of phony debate, as I wrote last year about Weiss’s vision for CBS, is why many people have tuned out mainstream news in the first place. More to the point, Weiss’s vision operates along purely contradictory lines: CBS cannot be more neutral if it is simultaneously elevating a slightly different set of biased, and in some cases shrill, partisan viewpoints. Speaking only for myself, I find many of the ideas that Weiss, The Free Press, and the contributors she has brought on have advanced over the years to be odious—though that might be giving them too much credit; mostly I just find them to be pretty stupid. But even if I agreed with their ideas or thought they were particularly well executed—and again, I don’t—it still wouldn’t work for the task at hand. The problem is that you can get what Weiss wants to bring to CBS News—debate! analysis! shouting!—literally anywhere, including places that deliver it faster and better. Social media is awash with punditry. Even X, which Elon Musk is transforming into a one-stop shop for child pornography, bespoke racism, and the same 30 viral videos that are endlessly repackaged and tweeted out by scammers, is still awash with “scoops of ideas.” More specifically, cable news has long been a home both for idiots who pass themselves off as experts and the precise form of shallow, performative “debate” Weiss believes she is inventing. Weiss’s only innovation is to Free Pressify the product—and in fairness, I don’t recall CNN airing an hourlong debate about the proper role of religion in society. But this precisely is the kind of thing The Free Press has been doing for years, and it long ago reached its maximum potential. And that’s not nothing, as far as running a blog goes: 150,000 people pay for it. But there is absolutely zero reason to believe that anyone else in the country is clamoring for it. (Even if they were, they can easily get it by searching “religion debate” or “evangelical christian owns sjw atheist” on YouTube.) Weiss’s critique of mainstream media mostly boils down to the fact that it tips the scales in favor of ideas with which she specifically disagrees and excludes the voices it deems “radical” or “dangerous.” It’s true that anti-vaxxers and reactionary cranks are probably underrepresented in mainstream media—though it’s also worth noting that Ferguson and Salam, among other new CBS contributors, have been fixtures on TV for decades. It’s also very true that you can package this vision into a newsletter, snatch up 150,000 people willing to pay for it, and have your lucrative career as a media boss. That doesn’t mean that you can scale that up with the institutional prowess of the Tiffany network. And it could mean that you burn everything down in the attempt.  What Weiss doesn’t seem to realize is that little of what she plans for CBS jibes with the realities of the current media environment. The product she wants CBS to undergo an entire culture shift to pursue can already be obtained elsewhere. Before Weiss took over, CBS was competing with ABC, NBC, and FOX. Now, thanks to Weiss’s brilliant leadership, it’s competing with every podcast and YouTube creator. A lot of people listen to dumb podcasts and watch stupid shit on YouTube, to be fair. But there’s no reason to suggest that they’re hankering to sit down and watch CBS do these things. Weiss is pursuing fool’s gold at the expense of what makes CBS unique and competitive in its own right: its ability to marshal incredible resources to gather news and information no one else has—before Niall Ferguson has the time to form an opinion about it. The tragedy of CBS’s Weiss era is that she is seemingly oblivious to the fact that the network is capable of doing meaningful work that you can’t really get anywhere else. She could be acquiring the news that seeds the punditry of tomorrow, instead of putting her cart in front of another cart and expecting it to start rolling without the help of a horse. There are only a handful of outlets in this country—its aforementioned network news competitors and newspapers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (rest in peace, Washington Post)—that operate on the scale that CBS does or that can devote the kinds of resources it has to cover stories that meaningfully affect people’s lives. Weiss detests reporting because she doesn’t understand it. Her fixation on the way Donald Trump is covered—which she believes is too shrill and partisan—blinds her to the fact that CBS covers a lot more ground. Instead of recognizing that the network’s value comes from that reporting and the depth and breadth it offers, she is reducing the network’s core competencies to reflect the few things she understands, for which she’s already maxed out her audience. She’s destroying a rare, if not quite unique, strength to make CBS more like everything else. You can get punditry anywhere. Not many places do enterprising reporting like 60 Minutes. The fifth data point in Weiss’s manifesto was “We Respect Tradition, but We Also Believe in the Future.” 60 Minutes still has a home at CBS, though it has already been diminished under Weiss’s leadership. “Investigative scoops” still have a place at CBS, but they’re being crowded out in favor of “scoops of ideas” and “scoops of explanation.” Weiss is fully convinced that this is the future. The problem is that it’s already the present—and it sucks. 

Trump’s First National Bank of Scams Is Coming
• Jan 30, 2026

Trump’s First National Bank of Scams Is Coming

Have you heard about the proposed First National Bank of Trump? I get paid to know such things, but this kleptocratic scheme tiptoed past me earlier this month while I was distracted by our invasion of Venezuela, the phony criminal investigation of Jerome Powell, the Greenland invasion scare, ICE’s rising body count (eight dead so far in 2026), and the declining dollar. Among his many other accomplishments, President Donald Trump has altered our traditional experience of time.The bank won’t actually be called the First National Bank of Trump, but it might as well. The Trump family crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, filed an application January 9 with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC, to charter a “trust bank” that will be called World Liberty Trust Company. A trust bank is a bank that doesn’t accept deposits or issue loans. The purpose of the bank would be to manage USD1, a stablecoin that World Liberty Financial created last March. USD1 is already the fifth-largest stablecoin in the world, with a market capitalization (Donald Trump Jr. announced December 28) of $5 billion. If you aren’t a cybercurrency person but nonetheless feel that “USD1” rings a bell, that’s probably because last May the United Arab Emirates purchased, from World Liberty Financial, $2 billion of USD1 to acquire a stake in Binance. Two weeks later, the UAE persuaded the Trump administration to remove a Biden-era national security restriction on the country’s importation of advanced AI chips. The Trump administration agreed to this despite intelligence that the UAE had previously shared technology with China that extended the range of Chinese missiles. So far as we know, the UAE never enunciated any quid pro quo (“Here is the illegal bribe you asked for to send us some AI chips”). But members of the Witkoff family (Steve Witkoff is Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, and also to Ukraine) were involved in both transactions, and so was Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who manages the UAE’s sovereign wealth fund. Six months later, Trump gave Binance founder and convicted money launderer C.Z. Zhao a presidential pardon. When asked about this on 60 Minutes, Trump said, “I don’t know who he is” and then contradicted himself by saying, “He’s highly respected. He’s a very successful guy.” I’ve stated previously (here and here) that the UAE’s USD1-for-AI-chips swap constitutes the biggest political bribery scandal since Teapot Dome, with the caveat that the Supreme Court has so thoroughly decriminalized political bribery in recent years that even if the Justice Department still had a functional public integrity section (which it doesn’t), it isn’t obvious that a prosecutor would win a conviction. Albert Fall, eat your heart out. But I digress.World Liberty Financial was co-founded in December 2024 by Donald Trump, Witkoff, Trump’s sons (Don Jr., Eric, and young Barron), and Witkoff’s sons (Zach and Andrew). Donald Trump and Steve Witkoff are now listed as “co-founder emeritus.” The company is frequently described as “Trump-backed,” but I’ve never encountered evidence that a Trump family member has put so much as a nickel into this venture. The Trumps do, however, extract money from it: according to Bloomberg, at least $890 million thus far. In addition, the Trump family owns World Liberty Financial tokens worth another $3.8 billion. The Trumps started out owning a 75 percent majority stake in World Liberty Financial, but that’s now down to 38 percent. We don’t know to whom the Trumps sold 37 percent of their stake, or how much they got paid for it, even though it seems we kinda should.No Trump names appear on the application to the OCC to create World Liberty Trust Company. The application lists the proposed trust bank’s notional president as Zach Witkoff, who is also chairman and president of World Liberty Financial. The proposed bank’s notional board members include Zach; Zach’s uncle (Steve’s brother) Robert Witkoff; and Scott Alper, who’s president of the Witkoff Group, Steve Witkoff’s real estate firm. The bank would share office space with World Liberty Financial in Bar Harbor Islands, Florida. Why does World Liberty Financial want a trust bank? Because the GENIUS Act passed last July subjected fintech to various options for regulatory oversight, of which the least burdensome is to receive a federal bank charter. According to a recent paper by Georgia State University assistant professor Todd Phillips, a federal bank charter shields the bank from state consumer protection laws and also provides potential access to a master account with the Federal Reserve that allows it to receive electronic funds. A federal bank charter also allows fintech companies like World Liberty Financial, rather than some third party, to be custodian of their own stablecoins, and to easily convert stablecoins to dollars and dollars to stablecoins. Many fintech firms have received bank charters already; the OCC seems to be handing them out like so much penny candy.Unfortunately, Phillips points out, when a proposed trust bank is linked to the president of the United States, that president is liable to pressure the OCC to approve a charter. In a January 13 letter to Jonathan Gould, comptroller of the currency, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said that fear of precisely such a scenario prompted her to vote against the GENIUS Act. Warren also expressed annoyance that when she asked Gould about this possibility in July, he declined to answer “hypothetical questions.” In addition, it seems to me, a president who’s already demonstrated an eagerness to tilt Fed policy to his political advantage probably wouldn’t balk at tilting it also to his commercial advantage (though not being familiar with the mechanics of the Fed’s master accounts, I can’t tell you exactly how).“We have never seen financial conflicts or corruption of this magnitude,” Warren said in her January 13 letter. You can say that again. Constitutional emoluments-clause concerns about Trump’s Pennsylvania Avenue hotel during his first term now seem quaint. The nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, sued Trump back then for violating the emoluments clauses. CREW prevailed in lower courts, but when it got to the Supreme Court the justices quietly set the matter aside until Trump left office so that they could declare it moot. I asked Jordan Libowitz, CREW’s communications director, why CREW didn’t file a new lawsuit when Trump returned to the White House. He said that a legal challenge based on Trump’s crypto holdings would be more difficult because CREW would need to find a fintech company with standing to sue the president, and those don’t grow on trees. (Last time, the District of Columbia had standing because it owned a rival hotel in the District.) “Trump is quite popular in the crypto space,” Libowitz observed. But yes, “the grift and corruption is on a scale way beyond what we saw in the first term.”But surely some effort should be mounted to file an emoluments challenge again, if not by CREW (they’ve done their bit) then by someone else. Our president is totally out of control. A plaintiff with standing must be out there someplace. If you’re reading this and you’re a smart public interest lawyer, please give this half an hour of your time to think through.

Netflix’s Conquest of Hollywood is Complete
• Jan 30, 2026

Netflix’s Conquest of Hollywood is Complete

It was hardly a surprise to anyone when, in December, Bloomberg broke the news that Warner Bros. president and CEO David Zaslav had agreed to sell the historic studio. Ever since Zaslav took over the company in 2021, the former cable television lawyer showed seemingly no interest in running the place as a profitable business. Zaslav buried films like Clint Eastwood’s excellent Juror #2, sending it to fewer than 50 theaters for just two weeks, despite sold-out screenings and critical acclaim. He canceled releases of already finished projects, like the documentary series Peltz Beckhams vs. the Wedding Planners, about Nicola Peltz Beckham’s lawsuit against her wedding planners, as a favor to Zaslav’s racist billionaire friend Nelson Peltz, Nicola’s father. Even as the studio floundered, Zaslav pillaged Warners for hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, while issuing countless rounds of layoffs. By 2024, he was publicly begging the next presidential administration to allow for more deregulation and mergers.What was shocking about the Warner Bros. sale was that the company that won the bid was Netflix. Just weeks earlier, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters had played down his company’s interest in Warner Bros., stating at a media conference that Netflix preferred building businesses to buying them. “One should have a reasonable amount of skepticism around big media mergers,” he said. “They don’t have an amazing track record over time.”For months, Paramount, and its new owner, David Ellison, had been widely projected to be the front-runner in the Warner Bros. auction. Zaslav had only put his company up for sale after Ellison, in his mad quest to own all media, made an unsolicited bid for the studio in September. Ellison had the money and political capital to complete the deal. Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle and David’s father, had put $12 billion of his own fortune into his son’s $108 billion bid. He was also a friend of Donald Trump and uniquely positioned to help Paramount avoid scrutiny from the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission. (In 2020, Larry went so far as to join a call with Sean Hannity and Lindsey Graham about overturning the election in Trump’s favor.)But as it soon emerged, Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s other CEO, had been forging his own ties with the president. In November, Sarandos visited Trump at the White House to discuss a Netflix–Warner Bros. merger. He reportedly left convinced that Trump wouldn’t stand in his way. Combined with the strength of Netflix’s financing, this meeting of minds was apparently enough to assure Zaslav and the Warner Bros. board that Netflix’s smaller $72 billion bid, which excludes Warners legacy television networks like TNT and CNN, was more likely to succeed.Now on the precipice of success, Sarandos is threatening to create one of the most damaging media conglomerates in the history of motion picture entertainment. The result will be more layoffs in Hollywood, fewer and lower-quality movies in theaters around the world, and at higher prices. The deal, which is motivated first and foremost by greed—Zaslav stands to earn $567 million from the sale, potentially making him a billionaire—should not just be blocked. Both companies should be broken up for parts, their streaming platforms spun off. The fact that the merger has even been agreed upon proves that a much deeper, more sinister takeover has already been completed: The studios are willingly charting a different future for entertainment.For years, Sarandos has claimed that traditional Hollywood studios like Warner Bros. were dinosaurs whose business models were “completely out of step with the consumer.” So why merge with one?Netflix wants Warner Bros. for two reasons. Foremost is that the merger will help Netflix improve its reputation. Despite growing from a small DVD-by-mail startup into the most powerful Hollywood studio to ever exist, Netflix has never been fully embraced by top talent, rank-and-file guild members, critics, or anyone in Hollywood who doesn’t already work for Netflix. When the company inaugurated its streaming platform in 2007, Hollywood executives viewed the streamer as a company of useful idiots who were getting their pockets picked for free: Netflix would license films and shows from legacy studios, then pay the studios handsomely, as it embraced a growth strategy built around cheap subscriptions and eye-popping spending.Even when Netflix found success in 2013 with the television show House of Cards, the company’s first original hit series, executives touted themselves to the media as the innovators of “binge watching,” a new way to consume unhealthy amounts of television that derived its name from an eating disorder. In an industry where reputation and relationships with talent can supersede the most sober financial decision-making, Netflix’s reputation as a band of tasteless interlopers seeking the destruction of Hollywood’s way of life always posed an awkward problem for the company.Giant bags of money helped smooth things over. Netflix got a foothold in television by giving large checks to producers and talent, who were paid up front and guaranteed a profit in lieu of back-end residuals. Around 2016, when Netflix moved into distributing and producing original movies, the company acquired independent films from top festivals, and eventually funded established auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Jane Campion, and Noah Baumbach, giving them limited theatrical releases. But by the end of the decade, just as Netflix had achieved market dominance, the streamer pulled back on spending. The large, up-front checks disappeared. Independents at festivals found that Netflix no longer wanted to buy their films. Instead of auteurs, Netflix focused on pumping out as much cheap content as possible with little evident regard for quality.A decade and change into its pivot into original content, Netflix has become the de facto home for half-baked, glorified TV movies, which get dumped on the company’s platform and are never seen nor heard from again. Aside from a few gems (Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, Todd Haynes’s May December, and Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague), the company’s film library is mostly forgettable, oversaturated, poorly directed, high-def digital mush, with stupid titles that insult great cinematic achievements. (See: a romance about an American rehabbing his Italian villa, called La Dolce Villa.)The Warner Bros. archive, on the other hand, which had absorbed MGM and RKO’s pre-1986 fabled libraries in previous mergers, includes Meet Me in St. Louis, The Big Sleep, Citizen Kane, and thousands of other masterpieces and classics. Ted Sarandos once defended Netflix’s low-quality films by claiming his company, a newcomer, was at a disadvantage by having to “make up for not having 90 years of storytelling.” By acquiring Warner Bros.’ more than 100 years of storytelling, Netflix believes it won’t have to make up for anything ever again.The other reason Netflix wants Warners is that it will help kneecap movie theaters, one of the streamer’s key competitors. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Sarandos tried to assuage fears over his company’s hostility to theaters by promising to maintain Warner Bros.’ 45-day theatrical window—the period where films play exclusively in theaters before they’re available to stream or purchase at home.But for at least a decade Sarandos has been advocating for shorter theatrical windows, which would devastate exhibitors. He’s routinely told journalists that theatrical exhibition, and windowing specifically, are “outmoded,” too expensive, and no longer worth the hassle. “If you’re fortunate enough to live in Manhattan, and you can walk to a multiplex and see a movie, that’s fantastic,” he said in April. “Most of the country cannot.”Claims like this, which Sarandos loves to make, are misleading. Recent data shows that theatrical exhibition is not only a viable business, but is growing in popularity with young people. Sarandos is of course not wrong to identify that some kinds of theatergoing have become expensive, soul-sucking torture chambers: The theatrical industry is dominated by oversize multiplexes that program bad movies, charge too much money, and are in inconvenient malls and suburban lots that can only be reached by car.But what Sarandos fails to say is that legacy Hollywood studios like Warner Bros. are largely responsible for creating this paradigm. Ever since the release of Jaws in 1975, studios and theater owners have oriented moviegoing around blockbusters that premiere on thousands of screens around the world. The largest theater chains soon built out their multiscreen theaters into souped-up multiplexes with dozens of screens, which benefited from economies of scale.Netflix has taken advantage of multiplex misery by attempting to wind down theatrical exhibition altogether. But it’s clear this isn’t what audiences want. Newer distributors like A24, Neon, and Mubi have responded to multiplex immiseration with great success by pushing good movies for the independent and art house circuits. Warner Bros., for its part, has managed to find continued success with theatrical releases, both blockbuster franchises (the DC universe) and auteur-led one-offs (Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar front-runner One Battle After Another). Netflix’s attempt to buy the company that accounts for 20 percent of North American box-office receipts bodes poorly for exhibitors. Acquiring these bargaining chips will give Netflix enormous leverage over theater owners as it aims to cut down theatrical windows and make theater-going unrecognizable.Netflix is the largest streamer in the world. HBO Max, the streaming platform owned by Warner Bros., is the fourth-largest. Combining these businesses, according to the antitrust scholar Tim Wu, likely violates Section 7 of the Clayton Act, which prohibits mergers that substantially decrease competition. According to Justice Department and FTC guidelines, any merger or acquisition that pushes a company’s market share past 30 percent in a given market is presumptively illegal. “At the 101 law student level, look at the guidelines and look at this merger,” Wu told me. “It looks a lot like driving 65 in a 50 zone.”Should the Trump administration attempt to block the merger, the outcome of any litigation will likely depend on how Netflix’s market is defined by the courts. Despite producing thousands of original movies and shows and wielding more studio power than Jack Warner could have ever dreamed of, Netflix continues to insist that it’s not a Hollywood studio at all. Instead, the company likes to argue, Netflix is more like YouTube, whose number of monthly visitors is 10 times the size of Netflix’s entire subscriber base. Netflix executives have been obfuscating like this for years, playing a shell game with the press about who it’s really competing with. (Sometimes these arguments accidentally swing back around into bracing honesty. In 2017, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings claimed that the streamer’s chief rival was the biological need for sleep.)Netflix wants audiences to believe that there is no difference between watching a movie and watching one of the three million videos uploaded to YouTube daily. To Netflix, it’s all “content,” which can be consumed from any device, in any location, and at any point in the day. In a sense, Netflix is right: One of the streamer’s greatest achievements was to cheapen Hollywood by flooding it with films and shows that are as artful, entertaining, and disposable as the zero-budget garbage served up by the YouTube algorithm, and pushing every other Hollywood studio to do the same. Still, there are crucial and obvious differences between the two companies. YouTube lets anyone upload to its website. It doesn’t produce, distribute, and exhibit original films and television shows with stars that compete for awards. Just because audiences might pay attention to YouTube at the expense of Netflix doesn’t change the fact that the two companies are in fundamentally different industries, rely on different economies, and employ different people.“It’s a weak argument,” Wu said of Netflix’s YouTube defense. For him, the company’s position is analogous to the idea of McDonald’s buying Burger King and then claiming that its main competitor is every restaurant in the world, not other fast-food chains. “Netflix and its defenders have been effectively making an argument like, ‘oh, everything is a restaurant. Anything you’re spending your attention on is our competition,’” Wu said. “It looks like a loser to me.”As is the case with so many tech platforms, Netflix has simply re-created twentieth-century technology for the digital age, and made it worse.In truth, Netflix is a global television company. As America’s go-to provider for low-level, mass entertainment, the streamer is no different from any of the major broadcast networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox), except that Netflix is more powerful, unconstrained by geography and the physical limits of coaxial cable lines, and totally unregulated. By law, the networks have always had to broadcast their over-the-air signal to Americans for free, the cost of which was paid for by advertising. Despite now showing ads, Netflix has no free signal or stream. The company has raised its standard price by 100 percent over the last 14 years and will likely raise it significantly if the merger is completed. As is the case with so many tech platforms, Netflix has simply re-created twentieth-century technology for the digital age and made it worse.While Netflix’s ultimate goal is to smash the film and television industries into one and take control of the wreckage, Netflix’s executives, as always, are playing the long game. Sarandos understands that theaters aren’t going away in the near or even medium-term future. Instead, they are devolving, especially in rural and suburban regions that face more closures and decreased projection quality. Acquiring Warner Bros. will give Netflix the tools to shore up its beleaguered film unit, collect major profits as the industry contracts, and launder its reputation through a historic studio that comes without Netflix’s reputational baggage. If the merger is completed, It would not be surprising if Netflix moved its auteur films inside Warner Bros. to give it a better shot at winning an Academy Award for best picture, Hollywood’s ultimate symbol of legitimacy, which academy voters have thus far never been able to bring themselves to confer on Netflix.By selling itself to Netflix, Warner Bros. has confirmed a truth about Hollywood that had long been apparent but is now unignorable: The studios have no competing vision for the future of entertainment. To them, the cinema is just a headache they’d rather be rid of. Netflix might have once been viewed as a threat to their business models, but the merger shows just how much the streamer has succeeded, having not only conquered Hollywood’s balance sheets, but now the imaginations of studio executives. For Zaslav, the relief has never been more comforting.

Jane Birkin and the Art of Authenticity
• Jan 30, 2026

Jane Birkin and the Art of Authenticity

In 2022, Charlotte Gainsbourg brought her mother, Jane Birkin, to her deceased father’s apartment in Paris’s 7th arrondissement and recorded the visit in her documentary, Jane by Charlotte. She was preparing to transform the residence into a museum—which is now open to the public, a walk-through memorial to the legendary pop singer Serge Gainsbourg. The scene does not serve as particularly glowing publicity. As mother and daughter reminisce over where the piano used to be and their memories of the first nine years of Charlotte’s life, one is struck by the darkness of the space, how it lacks light and air. Gainsbourg surrounded himself with expensive art objects, liquor bottles, and nudes of his female collaborators, including an enormous picture of Brigitte Bardot’s and Birkin’s headless busts. As Marisa Meltzer aptly notes in It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin, the place is “like a version of Bluebeard’s castle,” full of trophies commemorating his prowess. It doesn’t need to be transformed into a museum. Everything is already dead and under glass.I try to imagine the two women there as they would have been in 1971, a 24-year-old mother with her newborn, trying to comfort or feed or carry her daughter while tiptoeing around Gainsbourg’s drinking. Nine years later, shortly before she left him, Birkin would confess in her journals, which she maintained throughout her life, that she wanted a house full of sunlight and a garden for her girls to play in—the opposite of the material conditions dictated by her partner. Birkin, of course, contributed to Gainsbourg’s music too. She was his most famous collaborator, her breathy, girlish voice contrasting with his raspy innuendo. In the 1970s, they were a cultural lodestar, heralding artistic and sexual freedom, which Gainsbourg proclaimed in his lyrics and Birkin showed with her barely there miniskirts and transparent tops. Yet the glamor covered up the fact that Birkin was constantly on the back foot in the relationship, as would become known with their increasingly volatile fights in public. Gainsbourg told her what to wear, wrote and produced the songs, and pitted her against fellow starlets in order to get her to sing for him. He profited from her youth (there was an 18-year age gap), her looks, her hipness, her love of rock and roll (he had been educated on the piano), while pocketing the money and receiving all the credit. When Birkin passed on July 16, 2023, so closely was her name associated with the role of muse—she is also known for inspiring her Hermès namesake bag, and had children with two other influential male artists, composer John Barry and director Jacques Doillon—that a flurry of articles surfaced lamenting the title, calling it unfair and out of touch. Yet in these interventions, Birkin is rarely if ever cited on what she thought about her work and life. There is a vague call to move past the alluring images of her in her twenties, the ones constantly recycled on Instagram capturing her trademark style: high-waisted jeans; white T-shirts; Mary Janes; the famous, pre-Hermès basket bag containing her signature clutter. I still didn’t see much engagement with the movies she wrote and directed, even if they weren’t blockbusters, or her collaborations with French female director Agnès Varda, or her quips revealing painful self-awareness. It is easy to say a muse was voiceless, powerless, and left no trace; it means you don’t have to try to look for her.As the muse of muses, Birkin was still being used to make a point, even in this reconsideration of the gendered power dynamics of art-making. It is easy to say she was voiceless, powerless, and left no trace; it means you don’t have to do your homework and try to look for her and what she wrote and thought about the subject.In It Girl, Meltzer went ahead and did this. Birkin is typically described as a creative eccentric, given opportunities via powerful men. The most repeated actions on her Wikipedia page are she met, she appeared in, she performed in, she had a role. She sang like she talked, and acted naturally in front of the camera, as if playing herself. “What exactly Birkin is doing so well comes across so effortlessly, it’s like she’s not performing at all,” Meltzer writes about her appearance in the 1972 cult hit The Swimming Pool, pointing out that it would be all too easy to attribute her fame to the preternatural beauty of her youth, her gap tooth, awkward physicality, and distanced reverie giving her the air of a fawn or a colt, long legs awry. Her performances, taken separately, as they often are, seem to be the haphazard result of good timing and talented collaborators. But in Meltzer’s telling, a portrait emerges of an artist with a vision, a distinctive way of seeing the world. Birkin’s genius was in her life and in her actions just as much as in her look. It’s the reason why her cool translates across time; why we continue to exclaim over the way she wore her T-shirts and always looked a little messy, a little undone. Her daughter Lou Doillon described it as “total freedom, and a freedom that does not care about the judgments of others.” The fact that Doillon was talking about her mother’s decisions with her family rather than her wardrobe goes to show that Birkin insisted on such liberty on many fronts. I thus disagree with Meltzer’s pronouncement that “we can dress like her,” or even the idea that Birkin makes Frenchness accessible to the outsider, given her transplant status from Britain and her penchant for ready-to-wear. Copy her clothes as you will, you cannot replicate her style. She does not inspire an exact following of her outfits, but rather the identification of the structures that let you live, just as she found them for herself.“It” is a notoriously difficult quality to pinpoint, especially in an age of niche internet celebrities and nepo babies who lack “it,” who fail to launch into the collective imaginary with an aura transcending the commonplace. I like Joseph Roach’s definition in the book by the same name, “the power of apparently effortless embodiment of contradictory qualities.” Birkin was so good at walking these paradoxical lines of innocence and experience, glamor and humility, courage and vulnerability, feminine and masculine. Every time someone tried to typecast her talent, she went out of her way to contradict them—as when Gainsbourg suggested she wear her hair in curls in 1987 for her first concert and she responded by asking to borrow his nail scissors so she could give herself a choppy bob. Birkin could have become the darling of auteur film in France, or played into boomer nostalgia with her Gainsbourg retrospective concerts, or shot campaigns for the innumerable companies who would have loved to use her as their face. This would have allowed her to turn herself into a brand, her image into a product with a predictable fanbase. But she did not, guided instead by a loyalty seemingly pledged to herself over any kind of capital. Some might call this naïve; others principled—the very reason why she is so loved. Meltzer points out that Birkin, despite her eccentricities, was still “an ectomorph born from a family of thinness and wealth,” upholding the status quo. Her mother was an actress, her father a Royal Navy lieutenant commander. Winston Churchill’s daughter was Birkin’s godmother. Birkin’s own daughters, meanwhile, continue to promote a glamorous image of the Parisienne much like their mother’s. She was refreshingly unique, in a way that’s difficult to approximate today. She did not formulate her image to maximize clicks and likes and engagement. Yet, however much of Birkin’s success depended on a cocktail of privilege and childhood wounds, she was refreshingly unique, in a way that’s difficult to approximate today. She did not formulate her image to maximize clicks and likes and engagement. She never shaped her persona to game an algorithm. Yes, we see her through the eyes of the men who photographed and wrote for her, and this dynamic was unquestionably exploited behind the scenes. Yet when she looks at us, her gaze still feels relational, intimate, as if she is seeing, responding, engaging with someone, rather than an abstraction of what an audience might want. While the death of the muse and reciprocal rise of the influencer have made certain gains for feminism, there are nevertheless losses in this trade, ones less easily determined than the question of who holds the camera.Meltzer appropriately captures Birkin’s breezy style, her self-avowed ignorance when it came to the stunts she pulled off as Gainsbourg’s accomplice, bemused by the exclamations over her taste for courting controversy. Of their infamous collaboration “Je t’aime … moi non plus,” in which she unequivocally implies sex through her moaning, Birkin said, “I don’t know what all the fuss was about.… I’m still not sure they know what it means.” When talking about a photo shoot for the men’s magazine Lui, in which she was cuffed to a bed at Gainsbourg’s request, she laughed. “I was very moral,” she said, in response to the backlash. “I didn’t ask for payment or to intervene in the choice of photos that were published. I don’t find naked girls indecent, nor do the gentlemen.”Of course the lack of self-awareness was necessary for the ploy, for the audience to read her as the ingenuous “woman-child,” as Meltzer puts it. Birkin was rewarded for showcasing her bodily freedom—which demanded genuine daring at the time, in revolt against Dior petticoats and bullet bras—yet could only do so by downplaying her own savvy and experience. Meltzer relates the time when director Jacques Deray (of The Swimming Pool) threw a tantrum when Birkin brought her daughter to the set, whereas, tellingly, the toddlers of her male co-stars were given free rein. She responded by locking herself in the bathroom with her child, refusing to come out until Deray apologized.Yet, despite her grit, it’s also evident that there is a thread of hurt running through her life, especially when it comes to her romantic partners. While Birkin remained almost completely silent on the subject of physical abuse in her journals, Gainsbourg openly admitted to it: “When she gave me an earful, I didn’t like it: two seconds too much and bam! … she took it on the chin with me.” She became addicted to sleeping pills when her first husband started giving them to her because he didn’t want to listen to her talk. In this light, her jokes and self-directed put-downs seem less endearing and more like a learned trauma response, after being told by the people she loved that she was better off staying quiet. Doillon was not much better. Birkin’s namesake Hermès bag came about when a company executive spotted her signature straw purse in pieces; Doillon had run it over with his car, yelling at her that she shouldn’t be known for her “object.” The Birkin legend reads almost like a Greek myth, in which the seed of her greatness is planted through repeated acts of violence. Meltzer’s biography  leaves room for others to try to tease out Birkin’s internal monologue, one full of contradictions that both break her muse status and let us relate to her struggle.  Meltzer is skilled at both conjuring the heady ambiance of 1970s Paris and telling it straight, holding up Birkin’s highs and lows. She resists over-speculation, except perhaps when concluding a chapter. Too many end with affirmations: “She wanted to work,” “she was moving on,” “she was in on the joke all along,” she was “ready to focus back on her own self.” Some days Birkin lived up to such pronouncements, a modern-day Joan of Arc—her dream role, and one she self-avowedly never played because of her imperfect French. Like the saint, Birkin did what she did despite the disbelief of everyone around her, on the basis of a vision she alone could see, while the rest of culture breathlessly tried to keep up. This is how she became an icon; it is what is captured in the photos that continue to circulate; it is what we keep admiring and trying to imitate. Yet sometimes she failed to live up to her promise. She was afraid of speaking up, afraid of rejection, afraid of being alone. While Meltzer’s biography gives us so much, she leaves room for others to try to tease out Birkin’s internal monologue, one full of contradictions that both break her muse status and let us relate to her struggle.   At the time of her breakup with Doillon, Birkin finally realized her wish for an idyllic family home, buying a modest house in Britanny on France’s northwest coast. As seen in Charlotte Gainsbourg’s documentary, it is full of sunlight with an enormous garden in the back. A year before she passed, while struggling with cancer at the age of 75, Birkin shows her granddaughter how to plant morning glory seeds, still full of the same rapturous optimism of her early years. Her house feels both alive and lived in, full of food and dogs, collected mementos, bursting at its seams. This is the kind of museum I want to go to, as opposed to Gainsbourg’s lair. Then again, I don’t know how her home could be turned into a memorial dedicated to her person, since she wouldn’t be there. Hers was the art that can’t be staged or bought with a ticket, the kind that disappeared when she did.

Trump-GOP Panic Over ICE Grows as MAGA Goes Off Rails: “Race Traitor!”
• Jan 30, 2026

Trump-GOP Panic Over ICE Grows as MAGA Goes Off Rails: “Race Traitor!”

President Trump and the GOP are in a growing panic over ICE. Trump’s advisers are sinking into recriminations. Republican officials are publicly admitting that his immigration agenda “seems to be not working” and that the GOP is “losing” the political battle over it. Others are suggesting that Alex Pretti’s killing was “murder” and that it’s time to “recalibrate.” Yet MAGA figures are pulling in the other direction. Media Matters has a good roundup: Many are urging Trump to escalate, with white supremacist Nick Fuentes labeling Pretti a “race traitor.” MAGA doesn’t want to let the GOP even appear to moderate. We talked to Jennifer Rubin, editor in chief of The Contrarian, who has a new piece urging Democrats not to let up. We discuss how MAGA’s white nationalist brutality has landed “moderate” Republicans in a trap, why this provides an opening to divide the Trump coalition, and what Democrats can do to demonstrate that they side with the American people against Trump-MAGA’s violent lawlessness. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

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