#Podcasting Market 2023

[neha24blog]

Podcasting Market Outlook On The Basis Of Genre, Format, Region And Forecast To 2030: Grand View Research Inc.

San Francisco, 1 Sep 2023: The Report Podcasting Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Genre (News & Politics, Society & Culture, Comedy, Sports), By Format (Interviews, Panels, Solo), By Region, And Segment Forecasts, 2023 – 2030 The global podcasting market size is expected to reach USD 130.63 billion by 2030, registering a CAGR of 27.6% from 2023 to 2030, according to a new report by…

[barbarasegalandassociates]

Preparing for the worlds largest commercial design show, NeoCon.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Uncle Sam paid to develop a cancer drug and now one guy will get to charge whatever he wants for it

Today (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. Tomorrow (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

The argument for pharma patents: making new medicines is expensive, and medicines are how we save ourselves from cancer and other diseases. Therefore, we will award government-backed monopolies – patents – to pharma companies so they will have an incentive to invest their shareholders' capital in research.

There's plenty wrong with this argument. For one thing, pharma companies use their monopoly winnings to sell drugs, not invent drugs. For every dollar pharma spends on research, it spends three dollars on marketing:

https://www.bu.edu/sph/files/2015/05/Pharmaceutical-Marketing-and-Research-Spending-APHA-21-Oct-01.pdf

And that "R&D" isn't what you're thinking of, either. Most R&D spending goes to "evergreening" – coming up with minor variations on existing drugs in a bid to extend those patents for years or decades:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3680578/

Evergreening got a lot of attention recently when John Green rained down righteous fire upon Johnson & Johnson for their sneaky tricks to prevent poor people from accessing affordable TB meds, prompting this excellent explainer from the Arm and A Leg Podcast:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/john-green-part-1/

Another thing those monopoly profits are useful for: "pay for delay," where pharma companies bribe generic manufacturers not to make cheap versions of drugs whose patents have expired. Sure, it's illegal, but that doesn't stop 'em:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/competition-enforcement/pay-delay

But it's their money, right? If they want to spend it on bribes or evergreening or marketing, at least some of that money is going into drugs that'll keep you and the people you love from enduring unimaginable pain or dying slowly and hard. Surely that warrants a patent.

Let's say it does. But what about when a pharma company gets a patent on a life-saving drug that the public paid to develop, test and refine? Publicly funded work is presumptively in the public domain, from NASA R&D to the photos that park rangers shoot of our national parks. The public pays to produce this work, so it should belong to the public, right?

That was the deal – until Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980. Under Bayh-Dole, government-funded inventions are given away – to for-profit corporations, who get to charge us whatever they want to access the things we paid to make. The basis for this is a racist hoax called "The Tragedy Of the Commons," written by the eugenicist white supremacist Garrett Hardin and published by Science in 1968:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

Hardin invented an imaginary history in which "commons" – things owned and shared by a community – are inevitably overrun by selfish assholes, a fact that prompts nice people to also overrun these commons, so as to get some value out of them before they are gobbled up by people who read Garrett Hardin essays.

Hardin asserted this as a historical fact, but he cited no instances in which it happened. But when the Nobel-winning Elinor Ostrom actually went and looked at how commons are managed, she found that they are robust and stable over long time periods, and are a supremely efficient way of managing resources:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

The reason Hardin invented an imaginary history of tragic commons was to justify enclosure: moving things that the public owned and used freely into private ownership. Or, to put it more bluntly, Hardin invented a pseudoscientific justification for giving away parks, roads and schools to rich people and letting them charge us to use them.

To arrive at this fantasy, Hardin deployed one of the most important analytical tools of modern economics: introspection. As Ely Devons put it: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Hardin's hoax swept from the fringes to the center and became received wisdom – so much so that by 1980, Senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole were able to pass a law that gave away publicly funded medicine to private firms, because otherwise these inventions would be "overgrazed" by greedy people, denying the public access to livesaving drugs.

On September 21, the NIH quietly published an announcement of one of these pharmaceutical transfers, buried in a list of 31 patent assignments in the Federal Register:

https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2023-20487.pdf

The transfer in question is a patent for using T-cell receptors (TCRs) to treat solid tumors from HPV, one of the only patents for treating solid tumors with TCRs. The beneficiary of this transfer is Scarlet TCR, a Delaware company with no website or SEC filings and ownership shrouded in mystery:

https://www.bizapedia.com/de/scarlet-tcr-inc.html

One person who pays attention to this sort of thing is James Love, co-founder of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit that has worked for decades for access to medicines. Love sleuthed out at least one person behind Scarlet TCR: Christian Hinrichs, a researcher at Rutgers who used to work at the NIH's National Cancer Institute:

https://www.nih.gov/research-training/lasker-clinical-research-scholars/tenured-former-scholars

Love presumes Hinrichs is the owner of Scarlet TCR, but neither the NIH nor Scarlet TCR nor Hinrichs will confirm it. Hinrichs was one of the publicly-funded researchers who worked on the new TCR therapy, for which he received a salary.

This new drug was paid for out of the public purse. The basic R&D – salaries for Hinrichs and his collaborators, as well as funding for their facilities – came out of NIH grants. So did the funding for the initial Phase I trial, and the ongoing large Phase II trial.

As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, the proposed patent transfer will make Hinrichs a very wealthy man (Love calls it "generational wealth"):

https://prospect.org/health/2023-10-18-nih-how-to-become-billionaire-program/

This wealth will come by charging us – the public – to access a drug that we paid to produce. The public took all the risks to develop this drug, and Hinrichs stands to become a billionaire by reaping the rewards – rewards that will come by extracting fortunes from terrified people who don't want to die from tumors that are eating them alive.

The transfer of this patent is indefensible. The government isn't even waiting until the Phase II trials are complete to hand over our commonly owned science.

But there's still time. The NIH is about to get a new director, Monica Bertagnolli – Hinrichs's former boss – who will need to go before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for confirmation. Love is hoping that the confirmation hearing will present an opportunity to question Bertagnolli about the transfer – specifically, why the drug isn't being nonexclusively licensed to lots of drug companies who will have to compete to sell the cheapest possible version.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/19/solid-tumors/#t-cell-receptors

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[spidermaninlove]

Tomdaya Timeline vol. 6

Links to vol. 1, vol. 2, vol. 3, vol. 4, and vol. 5

London

July 2023

TZ spotted having lunch in Wimbledon.  link

July 9, 2023

Tom and Z at The Brothers Trust Event

Brothers Trust Uncharted Screening

Z attended the Brothers Trust Uncharted screening with Tom.  link link2 link3 link4 link5 link6 link7

The Brothers Trust Instagram account included Z in their event stories link link2, and the event recap video they posted features both Tom and Z.  link3

While at the Brothers Trust Uncharted screening, Tom changed from a blue t-shirt into a black Brothers Trust shirt, and during the event, Z was photgraphed holding the blue shirt Tom was no longer wearing.  link

Chiltern Firehouse

TZ arriving at Chiltern Firehouse.  link  After dinner, Tom waited with Z while she took pics with fans outside the restaurant.  link2 link3 link4 link5

July 11, 2023

TZ spotted in Richmond (near Kingston).  link

During the Family Trips with the Meyers Brothers podcast that aired today, Tom talked about the time Z cut her finger while making him dinner in NY and needed stitches.  link  When asked if he could go on a vacation with any family other than his own, he named Z’s fam.  He also mentioned recently golfing with Z.  link2

July 14, 2023

TZ photographed eating in Richmond.  link

July 20, 2023

TZ spotted furniture shopping.  link link2

Tomdaya date night including dinner link and a musical link2 link3.

Portugal

July 2023

Z in Portugal on holiday/vacation with Tom and his family.  link link2

LA

August 2023

Tom with Noon and a tot at Z’s house in Northridge.  

link

August 22, 2023

Tom with Z at a salon in LA.  link

August 23, 2023

Tom and Z were photographed at Target along with Z’s mom, Claire.  link link2

Oakland

TZ were in Oakland August 25-26, 2023.  link

August 25, 2023

Zendaya and Tom at West Oakland Middle School. link link2 link3 link4 link5 link6 link7 link8 link9 link10

Z posted Tom to her story.  link

August 26, 2023

Zendaya and Tom at Lowell Park in Oakland

TZ at Zendaya All-Stars basketball game in Oakland.  link link2 link3 link4 link5 link6 link7 link8 link9 link10 link11 link12 link13 link14 link15 link16 link17 link18 link19 link20 link21

September 1, 2023

Tom posted a photo of Z to his Instagram story, captioned, “My birthday girl 😍”  link and another photo of his three loves, Z, Tessa, and Noon, captioned with “😍😍😍″.  link2

LA

September 4, 2023

Zendaya and Tom at the third night (Beyonce’s birthday) of Beyonce’s Renaissance Tour in LA.  link link2 link3 link4 link5 link6

Z serenading Tom to Love on Top.  link7 link8 

September 5, 2023

Vogue dubbed TZ “Hollywood royalty”.  link

Paris

October 1, 2023

Tom with Z in Paris.  link link2 link3

October 2, 2023

Tom and Z at Bvlgari Hotel in Paris.  link link2

October 3, 2023

TZ at the Van Gogh exhibit at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.  link link2 link3

Zendaya and Tom went to Féerie in Moulin Rouge.  link

October 4, 2023

Tom and Z at the Place Vendôme in Paris.  link

London

October 5, 2023

TZ with their moms at Battersea Dogs & Cats Home.  link

October 6, 2023

Tom and Z “...walking through a park with two bodyguards in west London when they couldn't keep their hands off each other, with Zendaya draping her arm over her boyfriend. Tom kept kissing her hand as they walked along."  link link2

TZ at Petersham Nurseries, a local Michelin Green Star restaurant.  link link2

LA

October 2023

Tom in LA at a restaurant with Z.  link

Tom and Z signed Spider-man posters for The Brothers Trust.  

link

Oakland/LA

October 20, 2023

TZ photographed at the Oakland and Burbank airports.  link

LA

October 23, 2023

“Hollywood’s cutest couple” papped shopping at Erewhon Market in LA.  link link2 link3

Las Vegas

November 5, 2023

Tom and Z in Las Vegas.  link

California

November 12, 2023

TZ spotted in Lemoore, CA.

November 24, 2023

Tom and Z spotted in Sacramento and Vacaville, California.  link

November 25, 2023

According to Claire, Z is in LA.  Note:  Claire had Noon from November 23-25.  

Bay Area

December 6, 2023

TZ spotted at Target in the San Francisco Bay Area.  link

December 7, 2023

Tom and Z spotted in San Francisco.  link

London

December 13, 2023

Tom and Z visited the Royal Marsden Hospital in London.  link link2 link3 link4 link5 link6 link7 link8 link9 link10

December 19, 2023

Tom and Z were photographed shopping in London.  link

December 20, 2023

TZ were spotted shopping again today -- ‘tis the season.  link

December 21, 2023

TZ with the Hollands at The Little Big Things musical.  link link2 link3 link4 link5 link6

LA

January 14, 2024

During an interview at the Critics Choice Awards, Tom mentioned that he and Z will occasionally watch “Spider-man 1″ (Spider-man: Homecoming) to reminisce.  link

January 23, 2024

Tom posted a photo of Z in Paris to his story.  He also reposted and captioned a video of Z featuring lyrics from Cupid’s Chokehold with “This was made for me 😂” hence, confirming Z is his girlfriend.  link link2

London

February 14, 2024

TZ spent Valentine’s Day with Tom’s family celebrating the twins’ birthday at a pub.  link

February 15, 2024

Tom at the Dune 2 red carpet premiere in London.  link link2 link3 link4 link5

Tom and Z arriving at the Dune 2 after-party.  link link2

TZ leaving the Dune 2 after party together.  link

TZ were both styled in black fits for the event, with Tom dressed in Louis Vuitton, his ambassador girlfriend’s brand.  link

February 21, 2024

Tom posted the second Challengers trailer to his Instagram story.  link

February 2024 

Z said Tom has beautiful charisma and that “it works for me”.  link

Z said, "I think the more I'm around British people and they're my family now..."  link

When asked if she could bring back one thing from the UK, Z said her boyfriend.  link

California

March 17, 2024

TZ at the Indian Wells Open in California.  link link2 link3 link4 link5

Indian Wells Open

London

April 10, 2024

Tom at Z’s Challengers premiere in London.  link link2 link3 link4 link5 link6 link7

April 11, 2024

Tom and Z papped together in London.  link

April 19, 2024

Law once again confirmed tomdaya 1.0.  link

May 10, 2024

TZ photographed holding hands in London.  link

May 23, 2024

Z arriving at the opening night performance of Tom’s Romeo & Juliet on the West End.  link  TZ departed the theater together.  link2 link3 link4 link5

Z took photos of Tom waving to the crowd from inside their ride.  link

TZ attended the Romeo & Juliet after-party.  link

May 29, 2024

TZ papped out and about in London.  link

June 5, 2024

Tom and Z photographed with a fan at the mall in Kingston.  link

June 6, 2024

Zendaya waiting for Tom after his PM Romeo & Juliet performance.  link link2

June 7, 2024

Z attended Tom’s Romeo & Juliet play tonight.  They exited the theater together holding hands.  link link2 link3 link4 link5 link6 link7

June 13, 2024

Zendaya exited the stage door tonight with Tom.  link link2

June 22, 2024

Romeo and Noon at the Duke of York’s Theatre today.  link link2 link3

June 23, 2024

Noon with Tom again tonight at the Duke of York’s Theatre.  link link2

June 28, 2024

Tom walked Noon, sans Zendaya, in Richmond Park.  link

July 1, 2024

Noon once again at the theater with Tom.  link link2 link3

July 13, 2024

Z with Nikki and Claire at Wimbledon.  link

July 19, 2024

Z attended another one of Tom’s Romeo & Juliet performances.  link

July 21, 2024

Tom and Z spotted out and about in Wimbledon.  link

July 27, 2024

Tom was papped walking TZ’s new protection pup, Daphne.  link

July 31, 2024

TZ spotted dining out and kissing in London near the Duke of York’s Theatre.  link link2 link3

August 3, 2024

Zendaya arrived at the Duke of York’s Theatre with a bouquet of roses for Tom’s final Romeo & Juliet performance on the West End.  link link2 link3

August 4, 2024

Tom and Z spotted walking their dogs in Richmond Park.  link

Hotel Castello di Reschio, Umbria Italy (Vacation)

August 6-20, 2024

Tom and Z vacationed at the Hotel Castello di Reschio in Umbria Italy.  link link2

Perugia Italy

August 12, 2024

Tom and Z photographed at the National Gallery in Perugia Italy.  link

August 14, 2024

Z and Tom spotted again in Perugia Italy.  link

August 19, 2024

Another Tom and Z sighting in Perugia.  link

August 20, 2024

Tom and Z spotted at the airport in Perugia.  link

London

August 22, 2024

Z and Tom in Kingston.  link

Scotland

August 26-27, 2024

TZ spotted dining at Gleneagles restaurants in Scotland.  link link2

August 28, 2024

Tom and Z photographed at Glasgow Airport in Scotland link and spotted holding hands.  link2

California

August 30-31, 2024

Zendaya and Tom photographed in LA at the airport and shopping in Calabasas.  link link2 link3 link4 link5 link6

September 1, 2024

TZ were spotted in Berkeley getting frozen yogurt and in San Francisco.  link link2

London

September 7, 2024

TZ at the musical, The Baker’s Wife, at Menier Chocolate Factory in London.  link link2 link3 link4 link5 link6

September 8, 2024

Tom and Z spotted in Surbiton.  link

Cornwall 

September 9-13, 2024, Holland Family Vacation

September 10, 2024

TZ spotted at a supermarket, having breakfast at a small cafe, and on CCTV while on vacation in Cornwall.  link link2 link3 link4 link5

September 11, 2024

Tom and Zendaya at the beach in Cornwall.  link link2

September 13, 2024

Dom Holland blogged about the Holland family holiday in St. Austell in Cornwall England.  link

Tiburon (Bay Area), California

October 5, 2024

TZ spotted having lunch with a group of people in Tiburon, CA.  link link2

October 16, 2024

Tom launched BERO today and one of his three brews is named after his and Z’s dog, Noon.  

October 17, 2024

During a podcast with Rich Roll, Tom mentioned Z and Noon several times:  1) Taking Noon to a meeting with Tom Rothman link, 2) one of his Bero brews is named after his “little dog” (Noon) link2, 3) Z’s kind comments regarding Tom’s TCR hair link3, 4) doing handiwork around Z’s house link4, 5) reading a draft Spider-man 4 script with Z link5, and 6) agreeing to do Romeo & Juliet without discussing it with Z link6.

October 19, 2024

Tom and BERO posted for Noon’s birthday on Instagram, calling him "My birthday boy" and "Tom's furry child," respectively.  link

New York

October 24, 2024

Zendaya in New York with Tom at the official BERO launch party.  link link3 link4 link5 link6  Tom rescued Z from autographers when they returned to their hotel tonight.  link2

BERO launch party, Nine Orchard Hotel, New York

Massachusetts 

Boston 

TZ at Trident Bookstore in Boston.  link

October 31, 2024

Tom spotted in Boston.  Z is in the area filming The Drama.

November 2024

Tom and Z walking Noon while sharing airpods in Boston.  link link2 link3 link4

TZ stopped for hot chocolate.  link link2 Tom was carrying Z’s phone in his pocket. link3

November 2, 2024

TZ spotted in Boston.  link link2 link3 link4

November 7, 2024

Tomdaya out and about in Boston with Noon link link5, and at a bookstore. link2  They were spotted together again tonight. link3 link4

November 8, 2024

Both Tom and Z have been cast in Christopher Nolan’s next movie which will begin filming early next year.

November 9, 2024

TZ photographed at a cafe today in Boston.  link

November 10, 2024

An autumn walk in Boston. link 

November 13, 2024

During an interview with Vanity Fair, Z discussed working with Tom and Noon’s love for Tom.  link

November 24, 2024

TZ out in Boston for BERO at the Foxhole bar.  link

November 27, 2024

Z and Tom with Claire and Noon in Boston.  link  Tom and Z got matching tattoos on their ribcages.  link2  Tom got a “z” and Z got a “t”.  They wanted to make sure they were the same size.  link3

Z’s “t” tattoo

Salem

November 29, 2024

TZ with Claire in Salem, Massachusetts.  link link4 While there, they stopped at the Kakawa Chocolate House  link2  and had their aura photo taken at HausWitch.  link3

Boston

November 30, 2024

TZ spotted with Noon and Claire in Boston.  link

California

Los Angeles

December 17, 2024

Zendaya and Tom were spotted with Noon shopping at Topanga mall.  link link2 link3 link4

Bay Area

January 1, 2025

TZ spotted having brunch in Tiburon, CA.  link

[13thdoctorposts]

At some point 13 fans needs to actually put the numbers to paper on the era's audience numbers, because my recollection is that they're perfectly on par and at times even better than Capaldi's and several of the latest specials. I'm tired of haters whining about 'everyone hated it' when they mean misogynists targeted it and boycotted it from the very instance of a rumour that 13 would be a woman.

Peter Nolan from Blogtor Who did a post on the numbers after the airing of Power of the Doctor, in one section of the post he compares the Whittaker and Capaldi eras…

“It’s remarkable then, that the Whittaker era of Doctor Who is overall on course not only to retain the audience it was given, but actually very slightly grow it. The average Thirteenth Doctor was watched by 4.67m viewers, up 0.12m (2.6%) on the 4.55m average of the Twelfth Doctor. It’s median viewing figure of 4.21m, meanwhile, is 0.34m (7.4%) lower than Capaldi’s, representing the boost Whittaker’s average is given by the large audiences for her first series. But overall, we haven’t seen Doctor Who just do a respectable job all things considered. Rather, it actually got ratings that would be good a decade ago.”

You can check out the whole article here https://www.blogtorwho.com/doctor-who-power-of-the-doctor-viewing-figures/?amp=1

As you can see the Whittier era did quite well especially when considering it had to fight to get through the Pandemic, which people seem to like to act like isn’t a big deal with their revisionist history of how difficult that time actually was. Not only were millions dying and getting sick, people were losing their jobs and lock downs were keeping people at home and a number of parents learnt how hard it was to home school your child even with a teacher on zoom, some while also having to work full time at home. This isn’t to mention the ridiculous amount of restrictions on how they could make the show and keep everyone safe. Sadly they also just didn’t have budget, it was why they needed Disney to come in. In the Who Corner to Corner podcast Chibs talks about how he wanted to do a new years special after Flux but was told there was no budget and he couldn’t do it but he wanted there to be a new year special so he ask if he used monster from the cupboard (a couple daleks they had sitting there) a warehouse and only 2 guest stars could he do it and they still told him they didn’t think so but he told them they were doing it and then we got Eve of the Daleks, one of my fav episodes of the run.

This goes to show the show was struggling to afford to make episodes it had no real money for marketing. If series 12 and Flux got the marketing series 11 did of course we would have seen even bigger numbers but Chibs stated in his Radio Free Skaro podcast from Gally One in 2023 that the only marketing budget they had after series 11 was marketing that could be done on the BBC that’s extremely limiting. They also didn’t have a brand manager unlike all previous eras. If you can afford a brand manager you’re not going to choose to not have one and having one probably would have also help quite a bit.

It’s not 2008 anymore, even Tennent couldn’t pull his 2008 numbers and that was with the big Disney budget to make the show and market the show, and they had a year to market the show and the most well known Doctor, so considering that vs what Chibs had to work with the Whittaker era is a solid era of Doctor Who. It just came at a time when the Budget was struggling, and the TV landscape was changing along with a campaign to try and destroy it before it began simply because they chose a Woman to be the Doctor, as demonstrated by the fact the BBC had to release a press statement backing Whittakers casting and the change to a Female Doctor. And that did have a snow ball effect of people picking everything apart to an insane level they do not do with any of the episodes from the male Doctors episodes a lot of which could be seen as far more problematic.

All this to say could the numbers had been better? Yes, if they had budget to market the show the way it needs to be marketed in a landscape with a million competing shows on far more streaming services than there were regular channels back in the day. But did the show do well with the limited resources it had. Also Yes.

[missingpolinseason]

Shondaland and Netflix ignored a petition signed by over 75K people and said the deleted Polin scenes don't exist. Recently, What a Barb! podcast had acess to scripts and find out a deleted scene and that the dream scene was bigger and included the quote "It has only ever been us" said by Colin. This are the ones we know, plus the reshot scenes we can see because of Luke's wig - including the market scene that was shown as a pic in tudum 2023 and later reshot.

Polin is the ONLY Bridgerton couple to not have a flashback. The Bridgerton couple with less screentime in their own season.

Please, like, share, repost, reblog this post with the hashtag #RestoreThePolinScenes. Feel free to download the pic and post in other social medias too. And let's continue to fight for this beautful stolen polin moments.

[zot3-flopped]

What’s even crazier to me about the uproar over MH’s recent statements is that to me at least, they had nothing to do with Taylor. He made a remark that he would not write about “every casual romantic liaison he had in the past year” during an almost three hour, theory-heavy podcast episode that touched on his current approach to music. And everyone took that to be a dig at Taylor, that he is continuing to “demean, manipulate, humiliate her” as if he didn’t casually date two other women that same year…? (Charlotte Dalessio and Meredith Mickelson). Do swifties not realize that their Queen herself was in three relationships in the year of 2023 as well? But when he talks about his partners, it could only be Taylor right? Nobody has a life outside of her? They also claimed his comments on the way music is currently marketed or created in trope-like scenarios in a capitalistic manner was directed at her. Which, doesn’t it say something that even swifties hear that and immediately think of Taylor? But also ignores that these criticisms have been a central theme of his work his whole life. Doesn’t matter whether we or they like the guy or not. Their ability to make everything about her (and have it all accepted as fact after they have meltdowns on Twitter and tabloids pick it up and report on it) never ceases to amaze me but also doesn’t do her any favors. This is why many fellow artists cannot stand her. Is she worth getting involved with for all this?

Perhaps 'casual romantic liaison' IS how Matty sees his 30 day relationship with Taylor? It makes a lot more sense than acting like they were soulmates.

Taylor has a 15-year history of taking very short relationships far too seriously, and the fandom falls into line every time and acts like she is writing about a failed marriage.

[itsmyfandomandilikeit]

What we actually know about the renewal of Star Trek: Prodigy

Ok so there's been some speculation going around that Prodigy is or is not being renewed. The fact is that there has been zero news on the topic, official or otherwise, and anyone claiming to know differently is wrong or lying.

That being said, there are some things we do know:

1. Netflix is of course notorious for canceling things. I am an Inside Job fan. I know. However, they almost never leave things ambiguous. They aren't shy. When things are canceled, they make a clear public statement saying that it's canceled. Usually within two weeks of airing.

2. All of the clear public statements we've gotten from Netflix and the Prodigy crew have been consistent: Netflix will decide when they get more data. Recently, Aaron Waltke said on a podcast that they will review the viewing numbers from the first six months after season 2 was released, which occurred on July 1. This lines up with Netflix's data release schedule, which collates viewing data from the first and second halves of the year.

3. They are also waiting on a few other things. Namely, Netflix still commissions Paramount to create seasons of Prodigy. The sale of things like DVDs, Blu-Rays, digital downloads, and those new ship models that are coming out this December, affect the price of a season of Prodigy. Merchandise sales and licensing pay for a portion of it, and Netflix has to cover the rest of the cost. I'm sure the new theme park ride affects this as well. The cost to commission a season of Prodigy is determined by a number that is very much, at the moment, in a state of flux because of the upcoming physical media and merchandise releases, which could do well or not.

4. It was announced that the Hagemans have been added to a LEGO Ninjago project, and there has been some speculation that they will be unable to work on Prodigy because of this. This is irrelevant. The Hagemans have stated repeatedly that they typically work on 2 or 3 projects at once. To my knowledge, Aaron Waltke was working on Transformers One during the production of Prodigy season 2. This is just normal. They're getting work because their work has done well.

5. Prodigy costs the least of any Star Trek project to produce, but it is also the only Star Trek project that Netflix has access to. If, say, Section 31 does extremely well, Netflix can't get any portion of that success except for through Prodigy. Netflix also knows that very few new users are actually signing up for Paramount+, and indeed many users are leaving the platform, so Prodigy remains a good investment for Netflix. No matter how well this season of Lower Decks does, Netflix can't buy it because it's not for sale.

6. Data from 2023 indicated that Prodigy outperformed all of the rest of Star Trek on Netflix (admittedly, the US is not counted in this). What's especially notable about this is that it was only available for one week in 2023. In the first half of 2024, Prodigy continued to do well on the Netflix platform, despite it effectively only playing reruns during that time. Netflix will not release numbers for the second half of 2024 until next year.

7. Prodigy has the budget and appeal of a children's show, but it also has an avid adult audience. Many adults are watching it just because it's Star Trek or because they want to keep up with the overall story. Anyone who wants to maintain Star Trek completion must watch Prodigy, which is only available through Netflix.

8. Marketing is typically the lion's share of the cost of any media, but no marketing was done for Prodigy. It relied on word of mouth and the Star Trek brand. This affects how expensive it is to Netflix.

9. Finally this is not about the show itself but I just don't think that the story is over because plotlines in Star Trek never really end. Watching TAS is like the Leo Dicaprio pointing meme of seeing how Discovery was designed from a ton of these episodes. Every detail of the older shows is spun into entire plotlines in NuTrek. Whether or not Prodigy is renewed, these characters and species have been added to the canon and more than likely it will never let them go. If there isn't a new season, there will be video games, books, comic books, theme park attractions, stupid hats (that I'll buy), sunglasses, t-shirts, board games, markers, branded blankets, posters, and anything else you can think of. I kinda don't know how I feel about this but it is what I think. No matter how many seasons of Prodigy there actually will be, I'm sure the characters and settings will be brought back thirty years from now for better or worse.

[thoughtroomba02]

TS Film Thoughts Masterpost

As promised.

Let's start things off -

Breaking News - Headlines about the film

Dec 9 2022 - her film contract makes headlines

From what I can find, this is the first that anyone knows she is producing a film. There are no details released other than it's a script she wrote and she will be directing the film.

The next we hear is Dec 7, 2023 from the Tennessean --

It's been crickets, essentially. There are no public details I can find about the film anywhere including cast list, release date, content, ETC.

Interestingly, two days ago -- though uncertain of validity of source -

I don't have access to puck so cannot confirm what the article says; but this was recent! So; in theory, she finishes her Eras tour and moves directly in to film.

More on how Disney+ ties in our next section...

Who is Searchlight Pictures?

Created April 29, 1994 - formerly known as Fox Searchlight/under 20th/21st Century Fox

Biggest success: Slumdog Millionaire 187 Academy Ward Nominations with 46 wins; 5 Best Picture since 2009 117 Golden Globe Nominations; 51 wins 66 Screen Actors Guild Award Nominations; 55 wins 137 Independent Spirit Awards, 54 Wins

Other Notable Films: 12 Years A Slave; Black Swan; Napoleon Dynamite;

20th century fox, prior to the creation of Searchlight, was prominent in the specialty and independent films market in the 1990s; it carried this interest into Searchlight, at least initially.

In 2012, it was incorporated into Murdoch's 21st Century Fox. Barf.

On Dec 14, 2017 Disney put their first bid out on 21st Century Fox/Fox Searchlight. On March 19, 2019 the companies merged and Disney acquired Fox Searchlight; Fox News notoriously split independently. Disney dropped the name Fox; so now we have just Searchlight Pictures. There is also a Searchlight Pictures TV and shorts production, which for the sake of time I will not get into.

For Funsies, here is a short film (Jun 18 2019, after Disney acquired) produced by them called....LAVENDER. About a gay man who has a relationship with a married gay couple. Can't make it up.

Anyway, since merging with Disney especially, the company seems to be LGBTQ friendly.

And yes, Joe Alwyn has worked with Searchlight, with tweets I found dating back to 2018 with Searchlight UK. Make of that what you would like, I have no real objective commentary on the matter.

Taylor as a Director

She also directed the Long Pond Studio Sessions and Miss Americana.

Most of her directorial work has been since the Lover debut. Most of which is very queer coded/sapphic.. and again, make of that what you will.

Appearances/Pap Walks, ETC

Since her split from JA, we have seen her with multiple friends in the film industry. Among these: Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Selena Gomez, Keleigh Teller, Miles Teller, Sophie Turner, Emma Stone...

And dare I say.... Travis Kelce, who seems to want to break his way into the entertainment industry?

(aside from this headline; his failed dating show, his podcast, his multiple PR deals like with ZenWater... etc. I rest my case).

We also know there has been some B roll footage taken at the Chiefs Games.

Additionally, the media coverage of this relationship has been an absolute f*cking circus; with constant headlines of the two and their "engagement" / relationship dynamics. On Taylor's end, we have had constant references to Bejeweled (where she Ghosts); including Keleigh Teller giving her the opal ring.

The Speculation

Yall, this is my opinion - you can agree, disagree, etc; but I have no insider information. Just thoughts.

She makes her film directorial debut with Searchlight - recently acquired by Disney, who is pro-LGBTQ; and is clearly in deep with business deals with them, as seen on Taylor Nation and her Eras Tour Film.

We have rumors of her beginning her film production at the end of the ERAS tour, along with knowledge of her currently with B roll footage from chiefs games. We have multiple highly papp'ed appearances with her + TK; but also with multiple film stars, including Blake Lively (still not over that photo), Sophie Turner (I do think there's altruism here tbh on TS's end), and Keleigh. If you believe Keleigh is her stand in invisible bride.... Holy shit. Between the opal ring shutdown of the media circus as well as her and TS literally taking a page out of TSHOEH and dressing in character...

My ultimate suspicion is that she's using actual experiences of her current life-highly papp'ed - to tell her story. And that Keleigh is her stand in muse in this film.

I also think the @spade-riddles we've been getting about a final act ending, etc, pertain to her film. I don't have evidence aside from speculation.

I rest my case. Enjoy this post and make of it what you will.

[pandorasword]

Chaeri as the 8th and youngest member of BTS

CHAERI'S MASTERLIST

CHAERI'S LOVE LIFE IN A TIMELINE

Love interests - 2015 to present

A summary of dating, rejections and any romantic interaction between Chaeri and others

The night market - april 2013

In which Chaeri and Jungkook sneak out of the dorms during the trainee period

Chaeri and Jungkook as babysitters - march 2017

In which a little girl is asked to keep Chaeri and Jungkook's biggest secret

Isn't it wrong so good? - April 2017

In which Chaeri and Jungkook need some time alone

How the members reacted to Chaeri and Jungkook's relationship

A love letter - summer 2017

In which Chaeri and Jungkook have a sneaky little date

Clingy Jungkook [a private Instagram post] - april 2018

Red gardenias - october 2018

In which a bouquet of flowers can be worth more than a thousand words

Chaeri's Bodyguard Betrayal - early 2019

In which we learn why Chaeri's bodyguard betrayed her

Silver lips 1/2 | Silver lips 2/2 - november 22, 2021, American Music Awards

In which Chaeri has an incredible urge to be the first to kiss her ex-boyfriend, Jungkook, who has just had his lip pierced

2 a.m. decisions - december 2021

In which a kiss leads Chaeri to a forced hiatus and, when she returns to Korea for New Year's Eve, Jungkook decides to visit her

A look through Chaeri and Hoongjoong's relationship - 2022 to present

BTS and ATEEZ's reaction to Chaeri and Hongjoong - 2022

Chaeri and Hongjoong first times - january/february 2022 to june 2022

Hongjoong and Chaeri caught in intimate moments - june 2022

In which Chaeri and Hongjoong end up on the front pages of local gossip papers

Fire mouth - june 2022

In which Hongjoong finds himself addicted to something he dislikes, only because he tastes it from Chaeri's lips (+ a video about them parenting Ateez)

The Price of Love in the Public Eye - july 2022

In which Hongjoong experiences being in a public relationship as a kpop idol

How Hongjoong and Chaeri's relationship broke all the logics of the KPOP industry - second half of 2022

In which Hongjoong and Chaeri break all the logic of KPOP by being overly public with their relationship

When night comes - July/August 2022

In which Chaeri stays overnight at Hongjoong's for the first time

If by Chance - august 2022

Snippets of Jungkook's perspective on the relationship between Hongjoong and Chaeri

Checkered Flag for Love - september/october, 2022

In which Chaeri takes Hongjoong to a GP

Trip Vlog - Stockholm - october 2022

In which Chaeri and Hongjoong go to Stockholm for a vacation

Romantic Hongjoong [an instagram post] - november 2022

Jungkook's 03.03.2023 live - live moments recalling January/February 2023

In which fans, during the live, notice obvious references of Chaeri and Jungkook during January and February 2023

Jungkook's 14.03.2023 live - live moments recalling January/February 2023

In which Jk's live on 14.03.23 is nothing more than a summary of his time with Chaeri at the beginning of the year

Eden's wedding - late january, 2023

In which Hongjoong cannot help but notice the way Jungkook looks at Chaeri

Calvin Klein 1/3 | Calvin Klein 2/3 | Calvin Klein 3/3 - march 2023

In which posing for Calvin Klein turns out to be a more challenging job than she'd ever thought it would be

Seoul Love On tour 1/2 | Seoul Love On Tour 2/2 (Two Ghosts) - march 20, 2023

In which Harry Styles' post-concert doesn't go as planned for Chaeri, as Jungkook has something to tell her

Calvin Klein Event - may 10, 2023

In which fans receive informations about Chaeri and Jungkook's argument

A Break-up? Speculation and theories - june, 2023

In which medias speculate about a possible breakup between Chaeri and Hongjoong

Chaekook to LA - june, 2023

K-talk: More speculations about a possible Break-up - july, 2023

In which a podcast talks about a possible breakup between Chaeri and Hongjoong

Seven - july, 2023

In which Chaeri is the guest star in Jungkook's new MV

Why do you love? - august, 2023

In which Hongjoong releases a song about a love that has ended, and the fans turn against Chaeri

You came - december 11, 2023

The night before Jungkook's enlistment

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Social Security is class war, not intergenerational conflict

Today, Tor.com published my latest short story, "The Canadian Miracle," set in the world of my forthcoming (Nov 14) novel, The Lost Cause. I am serializing this one on my podcast! Here's part one.

The very instant the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, American conservatives (in both parties) began lobbying to destroy it. After all, a reserve army of forelock-tugging plebs and family retainers won't voluntarily assemble themselves – they need to be goaded into it by the threat of slowly starving to death in their dotage.

They're at it again (again). The oligarch-thinktank industrial complex has unleashed a torrent of scare stories about Social Security's imminent insolvency, rehearsing the same shopworn doom predictions that they've been repeating since the Nixonite billionaire cabinet member Peter G Peterson created a "foundation" to peddle his disinformation in 2008:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.O.U.S.A.

Peterson's go-to tactic is convincing young people that all the Social Security money they're paying into the system will be gobbled up by already-wealthy old people, leaving nothing behind for them. Conservatives have been peddling this ditty since the 1930s, and they're still at it – in the pages of the New York Times, no less:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/opinion/social-security-medicare-aging.html

The Times has become a veritable mouthpiece for this nonsense, publishing misleading and nonsensical charts and data to support the idea that millennials are losing a generational war to boomers, who will leave the cupboard bare:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/27/opinion/aging-medicare-social-security.html

As Robert Kuttner writes for The American Prospect, this latest rhetorical assault on Social Security is timed to coincide with the ascension of the GOP House's new Speaker, Mike Johnson, who makes no secret of his intention to destroy Social Security:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-10-31-debunking-latest-attack-social-security/

The GOP says it wants to destroy Social Security for two reasons: first, to promote "choice" by letting us provide for our own retirement by flushing even more of our savings into the rigged casino that is the stock market; and second, because America doesn't have enough dollars to feed and house the elderly.

But for the New York Times' audience, they've figured out how to launder this far-right nonsense through the language of social justice. Rather than condemning the impecunious olds for their moral failing to lay the correct bets in the stock market, Social Security's opponents paint the elderly as a gerontocratic elite, flush with cash that rightfully belongs to the young.

To support this conclusion, they throw around statistics about how house-rich the Boomers are, and how much consumption they can afford. But as Kuttner points out, the Boomers' real-estate wealth comes not from aggressive house-flipping, but from merely owning a place to live. America's housing bubble means that younger people can't afford this basic human necessity, but the answer to that isn't making old people homeless – it's providing a lot more housing, and banning housing speculation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

It's true that older people are doing a lot of consumption spending – but the bulk of that spending isn't on cruises to Alaska to see the melting glaciers, it's on health care. Old people aren't luxuriating in their joint replacements and coronary bypasses. Calling this "consumption" is deliberately misleading.

But as Kuttner points out, there's another, more important point to be made about inequality in America – the most significant wealth gap in America is between workers and owners, not young people and old people. The "average" Boomer's net worth factors in the wealth of Warren Buffett and Donald Trump. Older renters are more rent-burdened and precarious than younger renters, and most older Americans have little to no retirement savings:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2023/10/28/the-new-york-times-greedy-geezer-myth/

Less than one percent of Social Security benefits go to millionaires – that's because the one percent constitute one percent of the population. It's right there in the name. The one percent are politically and economically important, but that's because they are low in numbers. Giving Social Security benefits to everyone over 65 will not result in a significant outlay to the ultra-wealthy, because there aren't many ultra-wealthy people in America. The problem of inequality isn't the expanding pool of rich people, it's the explosion of wealth for a contracting pool of rich people.

If conservatives were serious about limiting the grip of these "undeserving" Social Security recipients on our economy and its politics, they'd advocate for interitance taxes (which effectively don't exist in America), not the abolition of Social Security. The problem of wealth in America is that it is establishing permanent dynasties which are incompatible with social mobility. In other words, we have created a new hereditary aristocracy – and its corollary, a new hereditary peasantry:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste

Hereditary aristocracies are poisonous for lots of reasons, but one of the most pressing problems they present is political destabilization. American belief in democracy, the rule of law, and a national identity is q function of Americans' perception of fairness. If you think that your kids can't ever have a better life than you, if you think that the cops will lock you up for a crime for which a rich person would escape justice, then why obey the law? Why vote? Why not cheat and steal? Why not burn it all down?

The wealthy put a lot of energy into distracting us from this question. Just lately, they've cooked up a gigantic panic over a nonexistent wave of retail theft:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/31/the-retail-theft-surge-that-isnt-report-says-crime-is-being-exaggerated-to-cover-up-other-retail-issues/

Meanwhile, the very real, non-imaginary, accelerating, multi-billion-dollar plague of wage theft is conspicuously missing from the public discourse, despite a total that dwarfs all retail theft in America by an order of magnitude:

https://fair.org/home/wage-theft-is-built-into-the-business-models-of-many-industries/

America does have a property crime crisis, but it's a crisis of wage-theft, not shoplifting. Likewise, America does have a retirement crisis: it's a crisis of inequality, not intergenerational conflict.

Social Security has been under sustained assault since its inception, and that's in large part due to a massive blunder on the part of FDR. Roosevelt believed that people would be more protective of Social Security if they thought it was funded by their taxes: "we bought it, it's ours." But – as FDR well knew – that's not how government spending works.

The US government can't run out of US dollars. The US government doesn't get its dollars for spending from your taxes. The US government spends money into existence and taxes it out of existence:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/14/situation-normal/#mmt

A moment's thought will reveal that it has to be this way. The US government (and its fiscal agents, chartered banks) are the only source of dollars. How can the US tax dollars away from earners unless it has first spent those dollars into the economy?

The point of taxation isn't to fund programs, it's to reduce the private sector's spending power so that there are things for sale to the public sector. If we only spent money into the economy but didn't take any out of the economy, the private sector would have so many dollars to spend that any time the government tried to buy something, there'd be a bidding war that would result in massive price spikes.

When a government runs a "balanced budget," that means that it has taxed as much out of the economy as it put into the economy at the start of the year. When a government runs a "surplus," that means it's left less money in the economy at the end of the year than there was at the beginning of the year. This is fine if the economy has contracted overall, but if the economy stayed constant or grew, that means there are fewer dollars chasing more goods and services, which leads to deflation and all kinds of toxic outcomes, like borrowing more bank-created money, which makes the finance sector richer and the real economy poorer.

Of course, most governments run "deficits" – which is another way of saying that they leave more dollars in the economy at the end of the year than there was at the start of the year, or, put another way, a deficit probably means that your economy got bigger, so it needed more dollars.

None of this means that governments can spend without limit. But it does mean that governments can buy anything that's for sale in their own currency. There are a lot of goods for sale in US dollars, both goods that are produced domestically and goods from abroad (this is why it's such a big deal that most of the world's oil is priced in dollars).

Governments do have to worry about getting into bidding wars with the private sector. To do that, governments come up with ways of reducing the private sector's spending power. One way to do that is taxes – just taking money away from us at the end of the year and annihilating it. Another way is to ration goods – think of WWII, or the direct economic interventions during the covid lockdowns. A third way is to sell bonds, which is just a roundabout way of getting us to promise not to spend some of our dollars for a while, in return for a smaller number of dollars in interest payments:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#payfors

FDR knew all of this, but he still told the American people that their taxes were funding Social Security, thinking that this would protect the program. This backfired terribly. Today, Democrats have embraced the myth that taxes fund spending and join with their Republican counterparts in insisting that all spending must be accompanied by either taxes or cuts (AKA "payfors").

These Democrats voluntarily put their own policymaking powers in chains, refusing to take any action on behalf of the American people unless they can sell a tax increase or a budget cut. They insist that we can't have nice things until we make billionaires poor – which is the same as saying that we can't have nice things, period.

There are damned good reasons to make billionaires poor. The legitimacy of the American system is incompatible with the perception that wealth and power are fixed by birth, and that the rich and powerful don't have to play by the rules.

The capture of America's institutions – legislatures, courts, regulators – by the rich and powerful is a ghastly situation, and to reverse it, we'll need all the help we can get. Every hour that Americans spend worrying about their how they'll pay their rent, their medical bills, or their student loans is an hour lost to the fight against oligarchy and corruption.

In other words, it's not true that we can't have nice things until we get rid of billionaires – rather, we can't get rid of billionaires until we have nice things.

This is the premise of my next novel, The Lost Cause, which comes out on November 14; it's set in a world where care and solidarity have unleashed millions of people on the project of maintaining the habitability of our planet amidst the polycrisis:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

It's a fundamentally hopeful book, and it's already won praise from Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben and Kim Stanley Robinson. I wrote it while thinking through and researching these issues. Conservatives want us to think that we can't do better than this, that – to quote Margaret Thatcher – "there is no alternative." Replacing that narrative is critical to the kinds of mass mobilizations that our very survival depends on.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/intergenerational-warfare/#five-pound-blocks-of-cheese

This Saturday (Nov 4), I'm keynoting the Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, CA.

[hexpositive]

Hex Positive, Ep. 038 - Creating Your Personal Grimoire

Since magic and writing first existed together, there have been books of magic. Grimoires and other mystical tomes dot the historical record, from illuminated manuscripts to beloved props of modern pop culture. For the modern witch, a grimoire is as much a personal reference guide as it is a self-written textbook of the craft. This month, we’ll discuss how to build your own grimoire, with tips for staying organized, suggested topics, and a journaling exercise to get you started!

Partial Transcript

Additional Resources:

Wikipedia Article - Grimoire

Wikipedia Article - Book of Shadows

Wikipedia Article - Key of Solomon

Wikipedia Article - Pseudepigrapha

Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, Owen Davies, Oxford University Press, 2010.

Cited Podcast: Historical Blindness, Ep. 116 - The Key to the Secrets of King Solomon (May 02, 2023)

Visit Here Comes The Witch on tumblr for more grimoire inspo!

Harvest Witch Market

Sunday, Sept 17 2023, 12pm-6pm Diversity Richmond, 1407 Sherwood Ave, Richmond VA Hosted by River City Witch Markets

⁠Hex Positive is now on YouTube⁠!

Check my ⁠Wordpress⁠ for full show notes, as well as show notes for past episodes and information on upcoming events. You can find me as @BreeNicGarran on TikTok, Instagram, and Wordpress, or as @breelandwalker on tumblr. For more information on how to support the show and get access to early releases and extra content, visit my ⁠Patreon⁠.

Visit the ⁠Willow Wings Witch Shop⁠ to purchase my books and homemade accoutrements for your craft!

Proud member of the ⁠Nerd and Tie Podcast Network⁠.

MUSIC CREDITS

“Spellbound” & “Miri’s Magic Dance” Ad - "Danse Macabre - Violin Hook" and “Feelin’ Good” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

[wavygrayvy]

What's Sherlock and co? TV? Twitter? Email? I'm confused

It’s a podcast!! It’s created from the angle that John Watson is documenting his adventures in crime solving with Sherlock in the format of a true crime podcast. All the characters are played by actors so it’s best described as an audio drama. It’s been running since October and as of yesterday it’s on episode 15. It’s created by a group called Goalhanger and it just won Pod Bible’s best audio drama podcast of 2023!

For marketing/immersion, someone at Goalhanger runs a twitter account (@/DocJWatsonMD) and an email account (docjwatsonmd@gmail.com). They’re both in character as John, and he does shoutouts on the podcast in character as well, so they’re doing a very good job of making him feel like a real guy.

If you’ve ever enjoyed any Sherlock Holmes media, I’d really recommend giving Sherlock & Co a listen. I’ve been describing it to people as BBC Sherlock but good. There’s still that good Sherlock and John banter, but they’re nicer to each other and clearly care about each other. Sherlock is canonically autistic (among other things) and both that and John’s PTSD are handled very well in both my and other fans’ opinions. The audience also gets to hear all the clues, and Sherlock explains a lot of his deductions, so the mystery solving feels very satisfying. The show is funny and charming, and the theme song is an absolute banger. If you do end up giving it a listen, I’d love to hear what you think!

[mariacallous]

The price of bitcoin went over $100,000 for a few hours on Dec. 5, peaking at $103,400. The financial press can’t resist constructing a hand-waving story of market forces, so bitcoin going past $100,000 has been attributed to a market reaction to President-elect Donald Trump’s lining up a slate of pro-cryptocurrency cabinet, advisory, and regulatory picks after the crypto industry put more money into funding Republican candidates in this last election cycle than anyone had previously put into an election in history.

But crypto trading is thin and almost entirely unregulated—perfect conditions for commodity market manipulation. The public image of cryptocurrency is still shaped by the 2023 trial of Sam Bankman-Fried of the failed FTX crypto exchange, culminating in his conviction—and not to mention the hangover from the NFT fiasco. Crypto is seen as the domain of cheap scammers. Ordinary people are not flocking into crypto.

Coincident with the bitcoin price news was the collapse of the Hawk Tuah crypto token. Haliey Welch, who told an oral sex joke that went viral on YouTube, leveraged her momentary fame into a career as an influencer and podcaster. This culminated in the meme-coin cryptocurrency $HAWK, marketed entirely on amusement value, which crashed on launch in what looked very like a pump-and-dump—tokens were dumped on ordinary buyers soon after launch, crashing the price.

Welch denied that insiders had dumped her token and blamed automated snipers who bought the token the moment it was released, then dumped immediately. The Hawk Tuah-token fiasco only strengthened crypto’s image as a place where fools lose their money being foolish.

The price of bitcoin has recovered since the November 2021 peak of the last bubble—but actual-dollar retail trading volumes have not. Coinbase’s retail trading volumes are $127 billion so far in 2024—much better than 2023’s $75 billion, but nothing like the 2021 bubble’s $545 billion.

Bitcoin remains a strangely useless asset that doesn’t do anything. All you can do with it is buy, sell, or hold. The only use for cryptocurrency other than pure zero-sum speculation is bitcoin’s original use case: evading regulations, most often for illegal purchases, money laundering, or dodging sanctions. One might be justified in evading some regulations in some cases—but most are there for good reason.

The largest actual-U.S.-dollar crypto exchange is Coinbase. But price discovery takes place at the venue with the largest trading volume: the offshore exchange Binance. This exchange admitted a string of money laundering offenses in 2023, was fined over $4 billion, and was placed under stringent compliance monitoring by the U.S. Department of Justice and FinCEN.

But the Binance trading floor itself remains an unregulated free-for-all as long as U.S. entities are not caught trading there. Every market manipulation that would be illegal in the United States happens at Binance and similar unregulated, offshore floating crypto casinos—wash trading, flash crashes, delayed settlements, spoofing, and the exchange trading against its own customers.

Bitcoin trading volume is substantially against two dubious U.S.-dollar stablecoins: tether and FDUSD. These are minted in round billions at a time. It is frankly not plausible that anyone put billions of U.S. dollars into tethers or FDUSD to buy bitcoins on an offshore exchange with above-board intentions. They could have just used the money to buy bitcoins directly at a U.S.-dollar crypto exchange or, safest of all, to buy bitcoin ETF shares from any securities broker. The purpose of buying billions of tethers is to manipulate the price of bitcoin.

Each stablecoin is supposedly backed by a U.S. dollar held in a bank account—except when it isn’t. Tether Inc. has long created tethers out of thin air as loans, with the listed backing asset being the loan itself. Banks do this, too, but banks are regulated. Eighteen billion tethers have been created just since Trump’s election on Nov. 5, bringing the total issuance to 135 billion. How far could you pump the price of bitcoin with 18 billion instant pseudo-dollars?

The other use case for tethers is crime. Zeke Faux’s Number Go Up details the value of tethers as a dollar substitute for those too crooked to get dollars—it’s the favored currency for “pig-butchering” romance scams run by human traffickers. The U.K. National Crime Authority and the U.S. Treasury recently cracked an international money-laundering ring that used tethers to serve drug dealers, ransomware groups, Russian espionage operations, and sanctioned entities; the NCA called tether, not bitcoin, the “cryptocurrency du jour.” The news of the bust came out just before bitcoin hit $100,000. Tether-fueled bitcoin pumps seem to coincide with bad news mentioning tethers.

Tether Inc. is sensitive to the criminal use case for its coin and frequently freezes tainted tethers on the requests of the Office of Foreign Assets Control and FinCEN—but only after the fact. This requires Tether Inc.’s operations to be much more organized than they have been previously—such as during the years when the reserve was tracked, not in proper accounts but in a shared spreadsheet that was often out of date. Despite its compliance efforts, Tether Inc. is the subject of an ongoing federal criminal investigation by the Manhattan office of the Southern District of New York into possible anti-money-laundering and sanctions failures.

Tether Inc. has worked to mend its reputation in the corridors of power. The company does not operate in the United States, but it does keep much of the cash portion of its reserve in U.S. Treasury bills. These are custodied by Cantor Fitzgerald, whose CEO, Howard Lutnick, wanted to become Trump’s new Treasury secretary and will be brought in for commerce. Cantor Fitzgerald recently bought a share in Tether Inc.

After the crypto industry’s success with directing unheard-of quantities of campaign funding to the cause of electing Trump, we should anticipate further such attempts to curry favor. The Trump family’s own crypto project, World Liberty Financial, was set to fail until crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun, proprietor of offshore crypto exchange HTX, dived in and bought $30 million of its WLFI coin—taking World Liberty over the threshold so Trump would get a $15 million payout from the project.

Sun is given to flashy stunts, like purchasing Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana artwork Comedian (with cryptocurrency) and then eating the banana on stage. These give the media something to talk about other than Sun’s legal and regulatory issues, most recently the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s ongoing suit against Sun for securities violations. Sun looks forward to a more “friendly” U.S. crypto market under the new administration, with the pro-crypto Paul Atkins as Trump’s planned SEC chair.

One of the greatest channels for payback to his crypto allies may be Trump’s proposal at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in June for a U.S. strategic bitcoin reserve, apparently on the basis that the nation needs a store of this speculative commodity largely used for crime. Trump originally proposed that the government hold onto bitcoins that had been seized as proceeds of crime, rather than sell them off.

The current proposal to bolster crypto is Senator Cynthia Lummis’ Bitcoin Act of 2024, in which the Treasury and the Federal Reserve would buy 200,000 bitcoins each year for five years. The U.S. government would become the bitcoin holder of last resort, and the beneficiaries would be the crypto industry—and not ordinary Americans.

The incoming U.S. administration wants to clear “experts” from the bureaucracy. If the incoming executive branch wants crypto to operate freely, it will do its best to force crypto through and remove all possible impediments. Crypto’s perennial issues with fraud and impoverishing retail investors, and regulator’s fears of the risk of contagion from crypto to the wider economy, are likely to be glossed over so as to ensure market opportunities for administration insiders.

But in the end, gravity still works, and a balloon can be inflated only so much. The bitcoin bubble is an artifact of market manipulation and has no more economic substance than the Hawk Tuah coin does. The U.S. government may be ripe for plunder, but other nations need to take steps to shield themselves from the impact of rug-pulling on a global scale.

[leveloneandup]

The RE—CAP Show: Tobin & Christen Contextualize the Expansion Draft

Today's conversation was one of emotional highs and lows as our hosts unpack the drama and trauma of the NWSL Expansion Draft. In this episode, Tobin and Christen discuss the heartbreaking yet hopeful realities of playing in the American sports market. Christen dives into the topic of treating players like human beings, while Tobin gets personal and takes us through her experience with the expansion draft.

Want to hear how this episode's community questions segment got rebranded into Community Questions Gone Wrong? Tune into the latest episode of The RE—CAP Show to get the scoop!

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

Vanity Fair's Wild About Harry Mea culpa for launching MeGain Markle & publishing her propaganda

"Inside Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s Big Business Ambitions, 5 Years After Their Royal Exit | Vanity Fair"

FEBRUARY 2025 ISSUE

Inside Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s Big Business Ambitions, 5 Years After Their Royal Exit

Ensconced in their cozy Montecito mansion, the Sussexes are living the American dream. By all accounts, the love is real. But their foray into moguldom has not always been a smooth ride.

BY ANNA PEELE

JANUARY 17, 2025

The house proved it: The Duke and Duchess of Sussex could have it all. Their Montecito home offered all the fresh promises of a 21st-century California mansion and the cloistering of a gated neighborhood from which they could emerge on their own terms. In the house’s 13 fireplaces, described as “mostly centuries old examples brought over from France,” there was even some European history, stripped of any potentially uncomfortable context.

At $14.65 million for more than 18,000 square feet, half the current median price per square foot in Montecito, Rockbridge was a steal. The oligarch owner’s romantic relationship had deteriorated to the point where he was compelled to offload far below market value, according to a source with knowledge, and the property seemed just right for the duke and duchess, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. It was the perfect launchpad for Archewell, their nonprofit and entertainment studio—an approximation of a part noblesse oblige, part aspiring independently wealthy mogul model, one that Elizabeth, Charles, and William rejected by fiat during the January 2020 “Sandringham Summit.”

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex during the Royal Salute Polo Challenge, to benefit Sentebale, at the USPA National Polo Center in Wellington, Florida, on Friday April 12, 2024.PA IMAGES/ALAMY.

This January marks five years since that failed parley. Leaving the royal family has brought tests for the couple—legal, financial, reputational, personal, and practical. Going from divinely chosen (or at least chosen by someone else who was divinely chosen) members of a 1,200-year-old institution to start-up founders in exile is a tough adjustment. But there has also been opportunity. Over many months, Vanity Fair spoke with dozens of people who have worked with and lived alongside the couple to understand the impact they’ve had on their new coastal California community, the challenges of enacting the ambitions of two first-time CEOs, and how their experience with the monarchy foreshadowed some of their current difficulties. (Harry and Meghan declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Harry still works closely with the charities he founded: the Invictus Games Foundation and Sentebale, an organization focusing on “mental fitness” and the impact of poverty and HIV/AIDS in southern African countries. “He has real gravitas when he speaks about his work in Africa,” says someone inside the couple’s circle. And he is free from “Willy,” as well as the future king’s supposed dominion over that continent, as Harry confessed in his 2023 memoir, Spare. “Africa was his thing,” Harry said. Archewell also encompasses Meghan’s efforts to empower and educate young women, like the 40x40 initiative, where for her 40th birthday she asked 40 well-known friends, such as Melissa McCarthy and then first lady of Canada Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, to each spend 40 minutes on Zoom mentoring a woman returning to the workplace in the wake of the pandemic. On March 14 of last year, the fourth anniversary of their flight to California, Meghan rejoined Instagram to announce American Riviera Orchard, a home goods and sundries line. The Sussexes have announced Meghan’s second podcast, though not the title or premise of it. Archewell Productions also recently produced two high-profile Netflix series—a docuseries called Polo, which premiered December 10 and features the world of Harry’s buddy Nacho Figueras, and the reality show With Love, Meghan. The latter is a hospitality endeavor that, according to the Netflix promotional language, “reimagines the genre of lifestyle programming, blending practical how-to’s and candid conversation with friends, new and old.” Three days before her show’s scheduled premiere date of January 15, Meghan announced that the series would be pushed to March 4 “as we focus on the needs of those impacted by the wildfires in my home state of California.” The couple has been volunteering amid the crisis in Los Angeles and donating to people displaced by the fires, as well as taking in friends who had to evacuate their own homes.

“They have this naivete and their hopefulness about what’s possible in terms of storytelling and good works and all those things,” says producer Jane Marie, who collaborated with the couple while they developed audio projects at Archewell and later produced a podcast with Michelle Obama. “I wish I had that kind of optimism.”

Optimism abounded as the couple embarked on their Spotify deal in 2020, both for them and for those who were coming in to help do the work. “I thought that I had the role of a lifetime,” says a person who worked in media projects, who was a “fan” going in and eager to make the type of life-changing content Harry and Meghan seemed to want to create. “I thought I was gonna be besties with Meghan and Harry and we were gonna, like, run around the world saving people.”

Interest in the couple was unslakable. But it remained to be seen whether they were actually interesting, beyond Harry’s uniquely difficult upbringing and Meghan’s years of defending herself from shoddy treatment and racism, whether in the British press or from members of her husband’s family. As one former Spotify employee put it, “The thing you’re escaping is the reason you’re compelling.”

Those stories would be meted out in different media: breathless reports of a $20 million Penguin Random House contract (Spare) and $100 million partnership with Netflix (Harry & Meghan). (According to a representative for Netflix, “We don’t disclose our financial deals with talent, but I can confirm to you on the record that the $100M figure is not correct.”) On the August 2022 cover of The Cut Meghan did to promote her first—and only—Spotify podcast, Archetypes, she said, “I’m, like, so excited to talk,” and “It’s like I’m finding—not finding my voice. I’ve had my voice for a long time, but being able to use it.” When repeatedly asked by the interviewer what she wanted to say with her newly free voice, Meghan demurred. “I have a lot to say until I don’t. Do you like that? Sometimes, as they say, the silent part is still part of the song,” she said, noting, “I’ve never had to sign anything that restricts me from talking. I can talk about my whole experience and make a choice not to.” (One of the people who spoke with VF for this story says they signed a nondisclosure agreement to be employed by Harry and Meghan.) A person who worked closely with the couple and “loves them” says, “I have no idea what [Harry’s] interests are beyond polo. No clue what his inner life is like.”

The development process was challenging. The former Spotify employee says, “They had this idea to do a podcast because they knew celebrities did them,” a category differentiated between celebrities who get a lot of money to begin podcasting, like Harry and Meghan, and celebrities who get large deals after proving themselves to be capable podcasters, like Smartless’s Will Arnett, Sean Hayes, and Jason Bateman. The former Spotify employee says Harry and Meghan “didn’t do what celebrities do on podcasts, which is turn on the mic and talk. They wanted a big theme that would explain the world, but they had no ideas.” Someone who worked closely with them on audio projects disputes this version, lamenting that because of Meghan and Harry’s insistence on silence from employees and their own reticence, the public doesn’t know about good projects that had to be abandoned for practical reasons. “It feels like the only story is ‘They didn’t satisfy their contract,’” she says. “It’s not like work wasn’t being done.”

As time passed—it would be nearly two years between the couple’s deal being signed and the premiere of Archetypes—Spotify began applying pressure to produce something (anything!) that people might listen to.

People involved with production say the couple did trial runs on some big ideas, like a This American Life–style show where Harry and Meghan took turns hosting and talking to interesting civilian guests. As Bloomberg reported, Harry wanted to host a series where he interviewed powerful men with complicated stories, like Mark Zuckerberg, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump. The concept wasn’t just that the men shared challenging early lives; it was that their experiences made them into sociopaths, or so Harry envisioned, one person familiar with the ideation process says. (The person who worked in media confirms there was a “sociopath podcast.”) The person who worked closely with the couple on audio projects recalls Harry saying, “I have very bad childhood trauma. Obviously. My mother was essentially murdered. What is it about me that didn’t make me one of these bad guys?” To implore a season’s worth of world-famous sociopaths to talk about how they developed sociopathy would be what is referred to in access journalism as “a booking challenge.”

As time passed—it would be nearly two years between the couple’s deal signing and the premiere of Archetypes—Spotify began applying pressure to produce something (anything!) that people might listen to. The former Spotify employee says Harry came to the Los Angeles office once and asked for a cup of cocoa. There was none in the office, so employees scrambled to obtain some. An idea was pitched to Harry—what if he reviewed a hot chocolate every week while chatting with a different friend?—which he and his team considered and rejected. Another concept was that Harry would “fix” something every week, ranging from a flat tire to global warming. “He wanted to do a podcast about disabled people who compete in the Invictus Games,” the former Spotify employee says. “But there’s no crossover between the audience who would listen to that and people who want to hear about Harry’s life.” (Harry and Meghan did produce a 2023 Netflix docuseries called Heart of Invictus, which significantly underperformed Harry & Meghan.)

The former Spotify employee says it was challenging to engage Harry, and a person who interviewed for a job with the couple says, “I just felt like he kind of didn’t want to be there doing that at this time.... My expectation was ‘charming receiving line.’ And it was clear he wasn’t that person. At least that day.” And at least in the context of a hiring manager: A person who worked on an event during Harry’s book tour says he has the “greatest manners I’ve ever seen. Hands down. Like I can’t believe his knees are as supple as they are. He was getting up and down anytime somebody walked into a room.... He was unfailingly kind and friendly to everyone.”

During the interview, the potential employee says, Harry’s attitude was either “Well, why should I do this?” or “Why are we doing this?” The interviewee says they wondered, “Didn’t Spotify pay you a lot of money to do this?” The person inside the couple’s circle says, “He looks like the kind of guy who would, frankly, happily work for charities for the rest of his life and would be very happy if Meghan made all the money and he didn’t need to.”

On his self-titled podcast, Bill Simmons described his own experience working with the Sussexes at Spotify. “The Fucking Grifters. That’s the podcast we should have launched with them,” Simmons said. “I have got to get drunk one night and tell the story of the Zoom I had with Harry to try and help him with a podcast idea. It’s one of my best stories.… Fuck them. The grifters.”

Harry and Meghan became increasingly nervous about how their content would impact them. Marie says, “I can say that they had really great ideas for shows, interesting pitches, interesting guests. But them as the deliverers or either of them as the hosts of these more kind of edgy ideas would have been like…they would have had to move again. I think it’s a combination of self-censorship for good reason and the corporate powers that be that run podcasting that don’t know what that is [to create valuable shows]. In combination, those things make it really hard to make good stuff.” The person who worked in media projects imitates the thought process behind any decision about the couple’s projects: “Well, he has a million things that he has to protect, and he has the book, and they have the documentary, and they don’t want to make the queen upset, and their public image.…”

That source says the idea for Archetypes came from another employee—not Meghan—though the employee didn’t own any of the intellectual property. Archetypes began production in January 2021. Though the former Spotify employee says the initial expectation was that Archewell would handle production for the series, the process took so long that Spotify’s studio Gimlet was called in. A source familiar with the production of Archetypes says this required additional cost to and resources from Spotify, though a current Spotify employee refutes that the extra support was a burden. (Virtually the entire Gimlet team would be laid off in the year following Archetypes’s release, but employees blame mismanagement at Spotify rather than any individual project.)

The former Spotify source says, “Archetypes was complicated as a podcast concept. You had to explain what the archetype was, then why the woman embodied it, but also how it wasn’t true about her. Every episode was like, ‘This is my friend who has been called that archetype but is not that archetype.’” These archetypes—actually stereotypes—included diva (Mariah Carey) and bimbo (Paris Hilton and Iliza Shlesinger). As for those “friends,” there was an expectation that Meghan would be able to use her personal Rolodex to book the show, the way hosts like Simmons and the Pod Save America guys do. The person who worked in media projects says the assumption was, “Meghan’s gonna be on the phone with the pope tomorrow.” The former Spotify employee says in addition to Taylor Swift, they heard rumors that Beyoncé and Megan Thee Stallion were asked to come on the show and declined. (Other people who worked on the podcast also say they heard those names mentioned, though a source close to the situation says Megan Thee Stallion’s team knew nothing about any request.)

According to the source in media projects, Meghan would agree to provocative ideas and then walk them back. In one episode, she wanted to actually say the word bitch because, as the source remembers Meghan saying, “You hear it all the time.” It ended up with Meghan calling it “the B-word.” An episode titled “Slut,” intended to center on how trans women’s sexuality is used against them, was retitled “Human, Being” by Meghan and had to be completely reimagined late in production. “Every episode got more and more watered down and further away from actual conversation,” the source says. “It felt like very Women’s and Gender Studies 101 taught in 2003.” (Though the Spotify contract has widely been reported as worth $20 million, two sources told VF such deals are generally not paid out in lump sums; in other words, the couple would not likely have received the full amount without meeting benchmarks beyond making one 12-episode season of a podcast. Spotify does not comment on deal terms.)

The issues extended into the actual workplace. Terry Wood, an executive vice president at Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions, was brought in to be what Meghan would later call her “right hand” when Archetypes won a People’s Choice Award in 2022. The source familiar with the production of Archetypes describes Wood’s anger, saying that she yelled at Spotify staffers when Meghan changed her mind about episodes. (Wood did not respond to VF’s request for comment.)

The source who worked in media projects says Meghan’s own relationships with employees tended to follow a familiar pattern. She would be warm and effusive at the beginning, engendering an atmosphere of professional camaraderie. When something went poorly, often due to Meghan and Harry’s own demands—such as a teaser for Archetypes being released five months before the show premiered and before there was any tape to promote—Meghan would become cold and withholding toward the person she perceived to be responsible. The source says it was “really, really, really awful. Very painful. Because she’s constantly playing checkers—I’m not even going to say chess—but she’s just very aware of where everybody is on her board. And when you are not in, you are to be thrown to the wolves at any given moment.” In practice, they say, that manifested as “undermining. It’s talking behind your back. It’s gnawing at your sense of self. Really, like, Mean Girls teenager.” Marie had a different experience with Meghan: “She’s just a lovely, genuine person,” she said.

The person who worked in media projects read stories in the tabloids about Meghan “bullying” palace aides and couldn’t imagine such behavior actually happened. After working with her, though, this person realized, “Oh, any given Tuesday this happened.” While it beggars belief that Meghan actually shouted at a palace aide, as has been reported, a person who interacted with her professionally says, “You can be yelled at even if somebody doesn’t raise their voice. [It’s] funny that people don’t differentiate between the energy of being yelled at and literally somebody screaming at you.”

Two sources say a colleague with ties to Archetypes took a leave of absence after working on three episodes, then left Gimlet altogether. Several others described taking extended breaks from work to escape scrutiny, exiting their job, or undergoing long-term therapy after working with Meghan. The person who interacted professionally with her says, “I think if Meghan acknowledged her own shortcomings or personal contributions to situations rather than staying trapped in a victim narrative, her perception might be better.” They added, with the soggy laugh of a plebe rendering judgment on the Duchess of Sussex, “But who am I to criticize Meghan Markle? She’s doing great.”

It’s hard to imagine how someone who seems so earnestly intent on being kind and engaging in world-improving (if also brand-building) activities could wind up engaging in revanchism with people so below her in status. A partial answer might be found in an episode of Archetypes in which Meghan interviews Mindy Kaling, who assumed Meghan was popular as a child. While attending Immaculate Heart Catholic school in Los Angeles, Meghan tells Kaling, “I never had anyone to sit with at lunch. I was always a little bit of a loner and really shy and didn’t know where I fit in. And, and so I just became, I was like, okay, well, then I’ll become the president of the multicultural club and the president of sophomore class and the president of this and French club. And by doing that, I had meetings at lunchtime. So I didn’t have to worry about who I would sit with or what I would do because I was always so busy.” (It brings to mind Swift’s “Mastermind” lyrics: “No one wanted to play with me as a little kid / So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since / To make them love me and make it seem effortless.”)

In other words, Meghan was a good person trying to do good things in spite of—and at times because of—unkind people. The person familiar with the production of Archetypes says at least one employee who had a terrible experience got a handwritten thank-you note and gift from Meghan. Is it any surprise that a sense of victimhood and righteousness could continue to exist in a person who had been treated so horribly by the press and her husband’s family? (Not to mention those little B-words at Immaculate Heart.) That people whom Meghan may have perceived as enemies or interlopers—members of the loathsome media, or insiders at the palace, or people who actually knew how to make a podcast, or her pitiable father and half sister selling her secrets and history to tabloids for cash—might have seemed more powerful than her in some way, despite her immense fame and wealth and privilege? And then whatever happened to them, well…they shouldn’t have gotten between Meghan and her good work. As Harry knows, trauma can warp your perspective.

Spare, Harry’s best-selling and beautifully written (by J.R. Moehringer) memoir, chronicles the prince’s lonely former life with MRI-level self-examination—if not always top-tier self-awareness. Harry recounts an anti-poaching trip to Namibia in which he insisted on sleeping outdoors despite his team telling him, “We just saw proof that there are lions out here, boss.” Harry claims everyone with him—including a bodyguard, local police, a ranger, and Namibian soldiers who were all there to protect him—went to bed in their tents or trucks rather than staying up to ensure he wasn’t eaten by lions in the night. The book also discusses in great detail Harry’s issues with his family, opening on his reunion with now King Charles and Prince William, who in addition to “beloved brother” Harry describes as his “arch nemesis,” possessing a “familiar scowl” and “alarming baldness.” It doesn’t get more flattering for Willy in the ensuing pages.

At an event in 2023, someone privately asked Harry if he’d heard from his family. He said he hadn’t. This person asked Harry if he thought he was going to, and he said he hoped so. “That’s sort of what made me so sad,” the source says. “His hope seemed very genuine. And I was just kind of like, ‘Oh, no.’ ” The source believed Harry hadn’t absorbed the gravity of what it would mean to sell millions of copies of a tell-all book about a famously insular and circumspect family in the middle of a years-long public relations crisis. “The power of the written word, and the power of the narrative…” this person went on. “I don’t know if that’s something he understood while he was doing it.”

In addition to painting Dorian Gray–style personal portraits of family members, in Spare, Harry accuses the offices of his brother, father, and Camilla of briefing the press against Harry to distract from or trade away negative stories about themselves. Harry sued the publisher of the Daily Mail for libel for publishing an article in 2022 that said Harry tried to conceal his efforts to obtain taxpayer-funded security, but the prince ultimately dropped the case, and a judge ordered Harry to pay the Mail’s publisher nearly 50,000 pounds in legal fees.

Harry is currently involved in two other lawsuits that further alienate him from his home country and its tabloid media. He is moving forward with an invasion of privacy case against Sun publisher News Group Newspapers, which follows a settlement from Mirror Group Newspapers for a phone-hacking charge. But more isolating is the suit regarding state police protection for him and his family when they are in Britain, which Harry, Meghan, and their older child, Archie, were stripped of when they left the UK in 2020. There are clear dangers to the family’s safety—a person who worked closely with them says strangers take Lyfts to their house, and in 2023 the couple was involved in what a spokesperson called a “near catastrophic car chase” with paparazzi. (There were no injuries, collisions, or charges filed.) The person who interacted with Harry in 2023 also described a “very scary paparazzi situation” after employees at the hotel where Harry was staying allegedly tipped off photographers to his presence. Nevertheless, the High Court in London twice struck down the UK lawsuit. Harry is appealing.

According to someone familiar with Harry and Meghan, the legal case was at least part of the reason Harry didn’t attend the June wedding of his longtime friend Hugh Grosvenor, ​​Duke of Westminster. The source says if he’d come back for the event, it could have imperiled his claim that he needs government-funded protection. “‘Well, you were here in May and you were absolutely fine attending a wedding,’” the source says, imagining the response in court. “So I’m sure a lot of the decisions about time in the UK are also being made based on how it looks for the case.”

Of course, there’s also Willy. The source says that after invitations went out, Harry and Grosvenor had a conversation. (Vanity Fair has also reported that Harry may not have formally been invited.) The source says they discussed Harry’s discomfort at the thought of being re-mired in the familial claustrophobia of Windsor turf. “It suddenly becomes all about the brothers, and did they look at each other, and how close were they stood?” the source says. Which is exactly what happened at Charles’s 2023 coronation and their uncle Lord Robert Fellowes’s funeral in August.

You can imagine the Zapruder-footage-level scrutiny by the press. The source says they miss Harry, or at least the person they pretended he was in their papers. “I think with a lot of the reporters they like the version of Harry that they helped create,” they say, describing how they would reminisce about when Harry would come over and pal around with them. “Yes, but he also, when you left, would make fun of you all behind your backs and hated you guys.”

“They are so hot for each other,” according to a person who worked closely with the couple. “Like, you know how you meet those couples where you’re like, the way they’re looking at each other, I should probably not be here right now?”

But who is the real Harry, now that he’s been released from the zoo in which he was raised? By one telling, the person who interacted professionally with Meghan says he’s socially marooned beyond his nuclear family. “She was up-front about the fact that Harry hadn’t made many friends yet,” the source says of Meghan’s assessment of her husband. The person who worked in media projects with the couple also has a guess. “I think Harry doesn’t know what he wants because he grew up in a fishbowl, and so he doesn’t know what real life really is,” they say. “I think he probably wants to be left alone and be able to go kiss babies every once in a while but not have to worry about money. I don’t think he wants to be famous the way Meghan wants to be famous.”

Harry and Meghan are, in the estimation of everyone Vanity Fair spoke with, deeply in love. “They are so hot for each other,” the person who worked closely with them said. “Like, you know how you meet those couples where you’re like, the way they’re looking at each other, I should probably not be here right now?” When Harry is solo, the person inside the couple’s circle says, “he’s very personable, he’s very at ease with people, quite like Diana... he just has this way of, like, making people feel very comfortable.” When he’s in public with Meghan, “there is a circus,” the source says. “He’s so protective of her because people are so nasty to her.... It’s a whole different experience.”

Harry has explicitly drawn parallels between his wife and his late mother. “My deepest fear is history repeating itself,” Harry wrote in a 2019 statement about Meghan’s treatment by the press. “I’ve seen what happens when someone I love is commoditised to the point that they are no longer treated or seen as a real person. I lost my mother and now I watch my wife falling victim to the same powerful forces.”

While Harry is vigilant about Meghan’s safety, the person who worked closely with them says Meghan’s role in their dynamic is caregiver and facilitator; she’s the one who makes things happen. “Pre-Meghan,” says the person familiar with the couple, “Harry would just pop in [to the palace press office], ask a few questions, and leave, like he was a little bored but also very keen.” It’s almost impossible to imagine today’s Harry willingly engaging with the media in search of purpose. The source who worked with Harry and Meghan says, “I can picture him meeting Meghan and being just a deep breath of, like, ‘I’ve been so exhausted, and you make everything so easy.’... I don’t want to be like, oh, it’s an Oedipus thing or whatever, but it kind of feels like she’s reparenting him in a way.”

It’s easy to imagine a folie à deux emerging from the singular blend of circumstances: a need to believe in each other and the primacy of their relationship in the face of shared trauma and the real obstacles they encountered as they idealistically endeavored to break the wheel, while occasionally breaking the spirits of those tasked with executing their shared vision. “You don’t” tell them no, the person who worked in the couple’s media projects said. “I left because I couldn’t live with myself anymore.”

This intracouple permission to stray from other people’s realities may have led to some of the points of contention that people bring up when questioning Meghan’s fidelity to emotional truth above literal truth: her assertions that she neither googled Prince Harry nor looked up the etiquette for meeting the Queen of England and didn’t know she was supposed to curtsy until the ride over.

“Meghan is the type of woman who would check a menu out online before going to a restaurant to pick what she was going to eat,” says Tom Fitzgerald, a fashion and cultural commentator who, with his husband, Lorenzo Marquez, comprise the brand Tom and Lorenzo. (A resident of Montecito who ate lunch in the same restaurant as Meghan said the server told her Meghan had called ahead to ask about the privacy of the seating arrangement.) “So the idea that she didn’t know she was supposed to curtsy for the queen, I just didn’t find it particularly believable, because [based on] everything she ever told us about herself, I cannot imagine that she went into meeting the royal family completely cold, with no research whatsoever.” Fitzgerald also points to Meghan’s repeated claims that she was forced to wear neutrals during her time in the palace in order to avoid upstaging or competing with Queen Elizabeth and other senior members of the family, noting that Meghan’s wardrobe is now primarily composed of that palate.

A royals reporter believes that Meghan assumed her husband’s vision rather than researching the job of being a royal, and the reporter has a more positive view of the folie. “Oh, that’s such a good idea for a successful marriage,” the reporter says. “It’s a terrible idea for a job, but...if you’re joining this big network of people, you’ve got to see this through your husband’s eyes, be your husband’s advocate in it. And it’s no wonder this relationship works, even if the family business part of it fell apart.”

It’s a charming (if Freudian) dynamic—a husband and wife who organize each other’s lives and well-being, who flirt and hold hands and want the world to be a better place, even to the exclusion of evidence that suggests their well-meaning way of disrupting institutions is not always the best approach. That instinct to do things as Harry and Meghan believed they should be done, rather than how they are typically accomplished, was exacerbated during their time as senior working royals. It led to conflict with Harry’s family and palace staff, the reporter says, because Harry “doesn’t understand himself. He doesn’t understand a monarchy. His family didn’t do a very good job of inculcating him into the family legend partially because he didn’t care; partially because he was just kind of abandoned at the age of eight.”

However, the couple’s regal charisma while effortlessly changing the world has been showcased to great effect on their most successful reimagining of monarchy x Markle: Harry and Meghan’s common royal tours, to Nigeria in May and Colombia in August. “Invictus Games for sure is a very clear product, a brand, an organization that Harry spent a decade building, which is why in many ways I think the Nigerian tour worked,” says Elaine Lui, the celebrity commentator behind Lainey Gossip. “When they appear together in non-Invictus circumstances, that’s when people are like, I’m not really clear what they’re representing here.” That’s contrasted with an actual royal tour, when individuals are acting on behalf of the sovereignty and its various causes; or, as Lui points to, an independent actor like Angelina Jolie, who went to places like Afghanistan and Ukraine with the backing of the United Nations Refugee Agency. (In September, Harry appeared in front of a small group at the United Nations in New York to highlight issues in Lesotho, one of the countries where his charity Sentebale focuses its efforts.) Lui says, “She could leverage the history and the reputation of a very established philanthropic organization to say, ‘Hey, I’m lending my celebrity to this cause and in raising this awareness, we can actually attach the effect or the results to the UNHCR.’ ” With the gauzier parts of Meghan and Harry’s tours—what Harry called the “reasons to meet the people at the heart of our work”—Lui says the question is how are they helping anyone, and how is Archewell distinguishing itself from any other foundation? After raising more than $13 million in 2021, according to public disclosure forms, the charity grossed $2 million in 2022. The nonprofit has not yet shared its 2023 or 2024 revenue. “Yes, it has them as spokespeople,” Lui says. “But they haven’t had yet—because it’s still quite new—a track record of being able to make philanthropic achievements independent of the palace.”

How complete that independence is is another point that rankles people about Meghan and Harry. If you still use a title and descend upon commonwealth or developing countries and let little girls curtsy to you, as one did to Meghan in Colombia, it doesn’t seem like you’ve totally left the monarchy behind. It also doesn’t give you a lot of room to critique it.

The Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan litigates in painstaking detail Harry’s and Meghan’s mental health declines as she was bullied at the very least in sight of, and by many accounts at the behest of, an imperialist establishment. Yet this doesn’t seem to sour them to the idea of participating in a hereditary bloodline. In the doc, Harry says that during their last week as working senior royals, the couple, ruing the circumstances of their exit, kept telling each other, “We would have carried on doing this for the rest of our lives.” When Charles ascended the throne after Elizabeth’s death, the couple’s children became Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet. Some people familiar with the production of Archetypes and Harry’s book tour said they were instructed to address the couple as sir or ma’am, though the request was dropped in one instance after the person pushed back. (Other people say they were encouraged by Harry and Meghan to call them by their first names.) “I think ultimately it’s cachet and sets them apart as different and special,” the source familiar with the couple says. “In the US, success, money, fame, all of that stuff exists out here. But a blood title, it’s few and far between.” (Many members of Meghan’s current inner circle—which includes Kaling; Figueras’s wife, socialite Delfina Blaquier; Tracy Robbins, the fashion designer and wife of Paramount Global co-CEO Brian Robbins; and parenting influencer and activist Kelly McKee Zajfen—are basically living by the rules of “American aristocracy,” according to Lui. They “stay behind the scenes…wield their power quietly…[and] look down on people who are very public, too thirsty.” On the other hand, all of the aforementioned are slated to appear on With Love, Meghan.)

A Black studies scholar who is also an African American woman noted the way racism is discussed in Harry & Meghan: as the one-off actions of Princess Michael of Kent wearing a blackamoor brooch to a brunch where Meghan was present, or the distant colonialism that still furnishes the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster and the jewels in the family’s tiaras, or Harry saying that the royal family merely had “unconscious bias.” “It’s a very common discursive move,” the scholar says. “Locating racism in individual bad actors or locating it in the past.... Queen Elizabeth becomes a kindly grandmother. She’s in the back of a car [or] her carriage, under a blanket. There’s that story, which is really kind of sweet that Meghan tells in the documentary, but [it] can’t connect that with the larger ideology of England—and thereby Queen Elizabeth—being like, ‘We are the natural rulers of the world.’ And that includes the segregation of people of color.” The cultural critic says this framing makes it so Meghan and Harry “can tell the story of being victims of the system, but it’s all about them being disenfranchised from whiteness and white privilege.”

The couple repeatedly expressed frustration in Harry & Meghan that Meghan wasn’t tapped as an asset for upholding the crown’s international interests in an era when Prince William was tasked with expressing “profound sorrow” for the “appalling atrocity of slavery” during a tour to Jamaica. As historian David Olusoga says in the docuseries, “Part of what makes the inability of the palace to defend Meghan an even bigger disaster is that the center of the argument for the monarchy in this country is the commonwealth. The commonwealth is 2.5 billion, mainly Black and brown people. Here was a woman who looked like most of the people in the commonwealth.” Harry speaks shortly after and says the palace and its denizens “have already missed an enormous opportunity with my wife and how far that would go globally.” The source familiar with the couple says it’s important to note that Harry isn’t an anti-monarchist. “He just didn’t like the way things were run within the institution,” he says. “His issues are about people and behaviors, not tradition.”

The source, who is also a person of color, defends Meghan’s right to want a piece of the empire for herself. “If I was in the same position and I was treated the way I was by the institution, it wouldn’t stop me from still feeling that that title is mine and deserved,” they say. “If anything, it would feel like you’re giving in to the pressure to exclude you in the first place. So actually it would probably make me want it even more. Damn well I’m going to slap it on my kids’ names too.”

Natalie Portman, Jeff Bridges, John Carradine, Kirk and Michael Douglas, Jonathan Winters, Gwyneth Paltrow, Adam Levine, Jimmy Connors, T.C. Boyle, Leonardo DiCaprio, Neil Young and Daryl Hannah, Michael Keaton, and of course Oprah are among the many celebrities who have peacefully coexisted with other locals in Montecito, an unincorporated part of Santa Barbara County. When a Montecitan’s labradoodle ran up to a child and licked their ice cream, the kid’s father—Kardashian affiliate Scott Disick—ran up to the pet owner with concern; not because he was upset that the cone was ruined but to reassure the person that the ice cream was vegan and wouldn’t upset the dog’s stomach. Katy Perry has, per usual, had some legal real estate issues, and Ellen DeGeneres has become unpopular for her immaculate, usually off-market flips that have supposedly driven house prices up. “I think everyone, including the A-list celebs, would prefer that it’s not on the map like it is,” the Montecitan says. It’s a place where no one would ever “bother” a famous person beyond saying hello at the coffee shop, as they would to anyone else. One resident says Montecito’s defining characteristics are “quiet” and “neighborliness.”

The prince and “the starlet,” as the Montecitan calls her, have become local villains, according to several people who spoke with VF. They attribute the increase in housing prices to them as much as DeGeneres and point to out-of-towners coming in, driving too fast, and taking up all the street parking by local trails like the one Meghan was photographed hiking on while Harry was in the UK for Charles’s coronation. You can’t just walk into Lucky’s for dinner anymore. While the Montecitan says neither he nor his friends have ever met the couple (two others mentioned Harry biking in town), they popped up in the video for DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi’s vow renewal, and the Montecitan saw photos of Harry playing polo at a nearby field, which will also be featured in Harry’s Netflix docuseries. Meghan’s Netflix project was filmed at a house near theirs.

American Riviera Orchard—which on Instagram has a logo styled with a royal-looking crest and written in Meghan’s perfect calligraphy and is known internally as ARO—is located in Montecito. Though an 1898 book published by the Southern Pacific Company rail line states, “The Montecito is known as the American Riviera,” today that honor is understood to belong to Santa Barbara; no one Vanity Fair spoke with had ever heard Montecito referred to by the name. “It’s such a kind of hucksterism,” one resident says. “It’s just finding every way she can to monetize something.” And in doing so, bringing more attention to the place where the Sussexes say they want to be left alone. “I still think they’re the most entitled, disingenuous people on the planet,” the Montecitan says. “They moved away from England to get away from the scrutiny of the press, and all they do is try and get in the press in the United States.” Lui says the most common criticism she hears about Meghan (though she notes it’s true of Harry as well) is “you can’t cherry-pick the good parts and leave out the bad parts” of fame. However, she points out, “all celebrities do this. ‘Don’t take photos of me. Oh, but here, let me step out, conveniently, and get papped. Only give me good reviews of my movie or my album. And if you don’t like my music, I’m gonna post on Instagram that you’re so shitty as a reviewer.’ ”

Whether American Riviera Orchard will be well-received—or received at all, at least in name—remains to be seen. On August 31, the US Patent and Trademark Office rejected the trademark application: “Registration is refused because the applied-for mark is primarily geographically descriptive,” the response read. In other words, you can’t claim a place. (Tell that to Queen Victoria.) The same day, according to the New York Post, the office reportedly received a complaint from storied pear purveyor Harry & David regarding the similarity in name to its Royal Riviera line. As far as the substance of the brand, Lui says Meghan’s first lifestyle effort, The Tig, was popular in Lui’s circle in Toronto while Meghan was filming Suits there. However: “American Riviera Orchard to me is giving 2014. It’s not giving 2024,” she says. “Fame arrests you at the moment it arrives. And I wonder if that is your health-and-wellness-lifestyle version of that, where she had to suspend The Tig and quit it the moment that she became Harry’s girlfriend, then fiancée, and then his wife. American Riviera Orchard is maybe picking up from where The Tig left off.”

The source familiar with the couple says, “I think there’s one thing that no one could take away from Meghan is how hard she works, how much effort goes into everything that she does. Ultimately that’s all she needs. And I think that’s why American Riviera Orchard probably will be a massive success. Even if in two years’ time it doesn’t exist anymore and she’s on to the next, it will have that moment. There’ll be no way that you can say that it wasn’t successful.”

A few years ago a rumor began circulating around the book world about another prospective project for Meghan. This story, which a person with knowledge confirms the broad details of, was that Meghan’s team had a conversation with a publishing house to gauge interest in the idea for a potential book. The concept, for which there was no written or formal proposal, was post-divorce. Not a general book on life after marital dissolution, or one about Meghan’s past experience. (She was married to producer Trevor Engelson from 2011 to 2014.) This book—this notion of a book, really—might center on a post-Harry divorce. Not that there was actually one in the works! Just…if this a priori divorce ever came to be, would this publisher theoretically be interested in a book that took place in its aftermath? Another source with knowledge says, “If that’s true to any degree, she would have been approached and not vice versa.” No offer was ever made, and no manuscript was produced. After all: There was no divorce.

The source familiar with the couple says Meghan’s metabolism for campaigns that she can move on from—Archetypes, the ephemeral 40x40 mentorship program, the forthcoming lifestyle line and show, the wisp of a possible book about a divorce that might never happen—are part of why she’s better suited to celebrity outside the palace. “The royals don’t work like that,” the source says. “How many years has Kate been talking about early childhood development, like 11 now, 12? We still haven’t really seen anything.” (Princess Catherine launched Shaping Up, a campaign focused on “increasing public understanding of the crucial importance of the first five years of a child’s life.”)

In that time, Meghan has gone from star of a syndicated cable series to paradigm-changing princess to her husband’s conduit out of royal life to the founder of a hybrid charity–Hollywood start-up. She has earned as much faith in her own force of will as a sovereign might have from believing that they were anointed by God to lead.

As for what she’ll do with that power, look at what it means for her to make the world a better place, which she and Harry genuinely seem to want to do. Jameela Jamil, Chrissy Teigen, and Omid Scobie, the author of Finding Freedom (about Harry and Meghan’s time in and departure from royal life) and Endgame (about the ensuing years within the Windsor dynasty), have all publicly discussed Meghan unexpectedly reaching out during difficult times in their lives and offering solace, even though they weren’t close. Lui sees it as something Meghan took from her royal years, just as Harry has taken his impeccable manners and the ability to patronize the fuck out of a charity. “That’s what they do,” Lui says. “They bless you with their royalness, and that’s the gift. It’s not like Princess Diana was ever best friends with all the people that she visited in the hospital.”

“I think that they don’t know what ‘change the world’ means,” says the person who worked in media projects. “They want to be people who are looked at as people who want to change the world.” Maybe that’s why Meghan has continued—on Nick News, in The Tig, on panels, on Archetypes, in Colombia in August—to bring up the story of writing a letter to Procter & Gamble about a sexist soap ad, taking credit for them changing the spot so that it no longer suggested women should be the ones doing dishes. Procter & Gamble declined many requests from VF to confirm that Meghan was the impetus for the switch, and in 2021 the company partnered with Archewell with the goal of “elevat[ing] the voices of adolescent girls to ensure their point of view and lived experience is heard at the tables where decisions are made.” Whether or not Meghan’s letter is what prompted the change, the fact that more than 30 years later she continues to speak up about having spoken up suggests it’s the kind of mission she aspires to. Marie, who has worked with many celebrities, says of the Sussexes’ aspirations, “I think it’s actually better than where most people start out.”

To point out the modesty of that world-bettering feels like contributing to the essential problem of Harry and Meghan: No matter what they do, they just can’t win. (If, I guess, you don’t count the overwhelming portion of their beautiful lives that exists outside of Daily Mail headlines and blog comment sections.)

If Harry’s burden is the soft oppression of no expectations, Meghan’s might be the opposite: the betrayal of not living up to an unachievable ideal. “I think the whole world was waiting for her to be that person, and then she never jumped,” the source who worked in media says. “Diana walked amongst land mines. Meghan couldn’t even say the word slut.”

Anna Peele is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Her culture writing looks seriously at subjects that are sometimes considered frivolous. Anna spent the first eight years of her career as an editor at men’s magazines, where she wrote a widely read Esquire cover story of Miles Teller

© 2025 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Vanity Fair may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.