#the lincoln lawyer season two

[mesillusionssousecstasy]

The Lincoln’s lawyer Season 2 - Part. 2 : Quotes

"- I'm gonna ask them to take me off of it. I'm not getting hooked again. (Mickey) - There's only so much pain a person can handle. They'll wean you off it when it's time." (Izzy - episode 6)

"- This wasn't your fault, Izzy. (Mickey) - Of course it was. You warned me. You saw it, and I couldn't. Wouldn't." (Izzy)

"- Lawyers. They charge you every time you take a breath." (Episode 6)

"- I just think I need to be alone for a while. I gotta figure out my own life before I'm with somebody else. (Izzy) - Hey! Maybe that's a good thing, you know? It is the 21st century. Women don't have to be in a relationship to live a full life. You never know what's gonna happen." (Lorna - episode 6)

"- You did nothing wrong, Izzy. You shouldn't have to pay for someone else's mistake." (Mickey - episode 6)

"- I can see the liars coming from a mile away." (Mickey - episode 6)

"- Well, I'm a lot of things but conventional, that's not one of them." (Mickey - episode 6)

"- Don't tell my doctor. He's got me on a strict diet. No booze, no cholesterol, no carbs, no joy." (Legal - episode 7)

"- Either someone's really trying to help you, or they're really trying to fuck with you. You gotta find out which one. (Legal - episode 7)

"- Your Honour, may I request a brief recess? Just five minutes? (Mickey) - As long as you're not going to be studying the forensics manuel. Yes." (The Judge)

"- He can neither confirm nor deny. It's like a non-denial denial." (Lorna - episode 7)

"- Dad. Slow your roll. I mean, he's cute. That's all. You know, I've got school. I gotta study for my SATs. I am way too busy to get my heart broken. If anything, you should be worrying about him." (Hayley - episode 7)

"- Where's the scotch? (Legal) - In a restaurant your doctor won't let you go to." (Mickey - episode 7)

"- Grand juries are expensive. If you can get this guy to make damning admissions on the stand, so much the better. (Legal) - That's what they want. (Mickey) - The question is, what do you want?" (Legal - episode 7)

"- Why can't I defend myself? (Lisa) - No matter how sincere you are, how honest, the jury will wonder if you're lying. That's why we let other witnesses tell your story for you." (Mickey - episode 8)

"- Andrea needs three things to win her care. Motive, means, and opportunity. Before, she only had motive. Now she has means too. We need more witnesses of our own." (Mickey - episode 8)

"- Your Honour, it's clear what Mr. Haller's game is here. Game? (Andrea) - I'm agreeing with you. (Mickey) - He's trying to prevent me from presenting evidence in a methodical and convincing manner. (Andrea) - So I'm denying your theatrics. I'm sorry. Is that illegal? (Mickey) - I am all for moving things along, Mr. Haller, but I don't want this thrown back in my lap on appeal." (The judge - episode 8)

"- If you're trying to set up an ineffective assistance of counsel appeal, it's working. Stipulation to their worst evidence? (Lorna) - Sometimes it's better not to fight. (Mickey) - That is caca! You attack every witness, you fight every piece of evidence because you never know what's gonna put reasonable doubt in a jury's mind. You take one criminal procedure class and think you can try a case better? (Mickey) - I didn't learn it from class. I learned it from you." (Lorna - episode 8)

"- Why can't I just tell the truth on the stand? (Lisa) - Andrea would magnify any inconsistency and make it look like a lie. (Mickey) - But it's not." (Lisa)

"- Why does Mickey hate his birthday? (Izzy) - His dad always forgot about it, and his mom always made it about her. (Lorna) - Ah. That explains a lot. (Izzy - episode 8)

"- Any call that ends in "whatever" usually isn't good." (Lorna - episode 8)

"- You're right. I'm sorry. It's occupational hazard." (Lorna - episode 8)

"- Okay, if I'm not gonna see you in court, I'm taking Hayley shopping. Lord knows she needs a woman with fashion sense in her life. (Elena - episode 8)

"- Look, I know what I saw. You must have looked away for all the other parts." (Episode 8)

"- It's good that we're telling you that your property manager has engaged in unlawful discrimination, in violation of the federal Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, and a few state laws too." (Lorna - episode 8)

"- You wouldn't want anyone to think that was your idea?" (Episode 8)

"- This isn't a risk, Mickey. You think the rules don't apply to you. (Lorna) - You're right. They don't. I'm a different lawyer now, and this is my call." (Mickey - episode 8)

"- And when I want something, I want it with all my heart." (Episode 9)

"- I sent you the prep questions, and I left a copy on your desk." (Lorna) - There's only so much you can ever prepare anyone. After that, it is what it is." (Mickey - episode 9)

"- Overruled, Mr. Haller. You opened that door. Ms. Freeman is free to walk through it." (The Judge - episode 9)

"- The universe is aligning in my favour." (Lorna - episode 9)

"- Perhaps, but forensics is about the likely probabilities, not the endless possibilities." (Andrea - episode 9)

"- Now, this guy is a total asshat but a predictable asshat. After the motion to quash, we knew we had to play him a bit. You know, stroke his ego, which was plenty inflated to begin with. Right. Well, there was no way to prove it. Not directly, anyway. So we did the next best thing, which was to heavily imply it. (Lorna - episode 9) - It's called circumstantial evidence. I would've hoped somebody might have taught you that." (Legal - episode 9)

"- I am Jacob Zimmer. I represent the witness, and if I could get a moment with my client? (the lawyer) - I see no reason to go down that rabbit hole at the moment. (The Judge - episode 9)

"- Is that what it is, Mr. Grant? That's what it looks like." (Mickey - episode 9)

"- Nemo tenetur seipsum accusare. No man can be made to accuse himself. That goes back to the 16th century. That's why the prosecution can't force the defendant to testify if he doesn't want to. And the jury's not supposed to infer that he's guilty if he doesn't want to answer questions. Usually applies to the defendant, but if the defense puts somebody else on the stand and corners them into taking the Fifth, there's no way the jury's not gonna think that they're guilty of something." (Legal - episode 9)

"- You gotta be fucking kidding me. (Andrea) - Ms. Freemann. You will conduct yourself with professionalism when you are in my chambers and in my court, is that understood? (The Judge) - Your Honour, he has manipulated the entire trial with this stunt. (Andrea) - Mr. Haller, if I find any evidence that this was premeditated, I will bring you up on disciplinary charges with the bar. (The Judge) - Your Honour, there's no unringing this bell." (Andrea - episode 9)

"- Unbelievable. Excellent work. I give you an A for your presentation. You, on the other hand, I give you a D-minus for legal ethics, but A-plus for strategy." (Legal - episode 9)

" - You used me. (FBI agent) - Well, I think that goes both ways, don't you? You have your job to do, and I have mine. (Mickey) - Well, I'll tell you what the Bureau has. A long memory." (FBI agent - episode 9)

"- We tried to get to the truth, but there are some answers people was unwilling to provide. And if history has taught us anything, it's that people with buried skeletons would do anything to keep them buried." (Mickey - episode 10)

"- Now it's up to the Gods of Guilt. (Mickey) - The Gods of Guilt? (Lisa) - The jury. They have all the power now. Everything that I did was to convince them." (Mickey - episode 10)

"- CNN, LA Times, desperate clients. Let them all go to voice mail." (Lorna - episode 10)

"- I mean, we both know you won't beat me again. Statistically speaking. And unlike your ex, I actually like winning cases, not just proving points. And just know that I'll be ready. Revenge is sweet." (Andrea - episode 10)

"- After a while, I knew you didn't kill Mitchell Bondurant, but just because you're not guilty of something doesn't mean you're innocent of everything. (Mickey) - You don't know anything about my life. Mickey, please. (Lisa) - I know everything I need to know." (Mickey - episode 10)

"- She'd have to be insane. (Izzy) - She is. Certifiable. (Lorna - episode 10)

"Next thing you know, you'll be asking me out to Dan Tana's for Valentine's. Mickey. If you sacrifice too much for this job, you'll end up like me. Alone. Divorced. A couple of kids who barely speak to me. You don't wanna be a male spinster, trust me. It's a terrible Hollywood cliché." (Legal - episode 10)

[deadpresidents]

On the cliffs of Normandy, in a small holding area, the President of the United States was looking out at the English Channel. It was only six weeks ago, on the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings, and President Biden had just finished his remarks at the American cemetery atop Omaha Beach. Guests had been congratulating him on the speech, but he didn't want to talk about himself. The moment was not about him; it was about the men who had fought and died there. "Today feels so large," he told me. "This may sound strange -- and I don't mean it to -- but when I was out there, I felt the honor of it, the sanctity of it. To speak for the American people, to speak over those graves, it's a profound thing." He turned from the view over the beaches and gestured back toward the war dead. "You want to do right by them, by the country."

Mr. Biden has spent a lifetime trying to do right by the nation, and he did so in the most epic of ways when he chose to end his campaign for re-election. His decision is one of the most remarkable acts of leadership in our history, an act of self-sacrifice that places him in the company of George Washington who also stepped away from the presidency. To put something ahead of one's immediate desires -- to give, rather than to try to take -- is perhaps the most difficult thing for any human being to do. And Mr. Biden has done just that.

To be clear: Mr. Biden is my friend, and it has been a privilege to help him when I can. Not because I am a Democrat -- I belong to neither party and have voted for both Democrats and Republicans -- but because I believe him to be a defender of the Constitution and a public servant of honor and of grace at a time when extreme forces threaten the nation. I do not agree with everything he has done or wanted to do in terms of policy. But I know him to be a good man, a patriot and a president who has met challenges all too similar to those Abraham Lincoln faced. Here is the story I believe history will tell of Joe Biden. With American democracy in an hour of maximum danger in Donald Trump's presidency, Mr. Biden stepped in the breach. He staved off an authoritarian threat at home, rallied the world against autocrats abroad, laid the foundations for decades of prosperity, managed the end of a once-in-a-century pandemic, successfully legislated on vital issues of climate and infrastructure and has conducted a presidency worthy of the greatest of his predecessors. History and fate brought him to the pinnacle in a late season in his life, and in the end, he respected fate -- and he respected the American people.

It is, of course, an incredibly difficult moment. Highs and lows, victories and defeats, joy and pain: It has been ever thus for Mr. Biden. In the distant autumn of 1972, he experienced the most exhilarating of hours -- election to the United States Senate at the age of 29. He was no scion; he earned it. The darkness fell: His wife and daughter were killed in an automobile accident that seriously injured his two sons, Beau and Hunter. But he endured, found purpose in the pain, became deeper, wiser, more empathetic. Through the decades, two presidential campaigns imploded, and in 2015 his son Beau, a lawyer and wonderfully promising young political figure, died of brain cancer after serving in Iraq.

Such tragedy would have broken many lesser men. Mr. Biden, however, never gave up, never gave in, never surrendered the hope that a fallen, frail and fallible world could be made better, stronger and more whole if people could summon just enough goodness and enough courage to build rather than tear down. Character, as the Greeks first taught us, is destiny, and Mr. Biden's character is both a mirror and a maker of his nation's. Like Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, he is optimistic, resilient and kind, a steward of American greatness, a love of the great game of politics and, at heart, a hopeless romantic about the country that has given him so much.

Nothing bears out this point as well as his decision to let history happen in the 2024 election. Not matter how much people say that this was inevitable after the debate in Atlanta last month, there was nothing foreordained about an American President ending his political career for the sake of his country and his party. By surrendering the possibility of enduring in the seat of ultimate power, Mr. Biden has taught us a landmark lesson in patriotism, humility and wisdom.

Now the question comes to the rest of us. What will we the people do? We face the most significant of choices. Mr. Roosevelt framed the war whose dead Mr. Biden commemorated at Normandy in June as a battle between democracy and dictatorship. It is not too much to say that we, too, have what Mr. Roosevelt called a "rendezvous with destiny" at home and abroad. Mr. Biden has put country above self, the Constitution above personal ambition, the future of democracy above temporal gain. It is up to us to follow his lead.

-- "Joe Biden, My Friend and an American Hero" by Jon Meacham, New York Times, July 22, 2024.

[mariacallous]

A long trip on an American highway in the summer of 2024 leaves the impression that two kinds of billboards now have near-monopoly rule over our roads. On one side, the billboards, gravely black-and-white and soberly reassuring, advertise cancer centers. (“We treat every type of cancer, including the most important one: yours”; “Beat 3 Brain Tumors. At 57, I gave birth, again.”) On the other side, brightly colored and deliberately clownish billboards advertise malpractice and personal-injury lawyers, with phone numbers emblazoned in giant type and the lawyers wearing superhero costumes or intimidating glares, staring down at the highway as they promise to do to juries.

A new Tocqueville considering the landscape would be certain that all Americans do is get sick and sue each other. We ask doctors to cure us of incurable illnesses, and we ask lawyers to take on the doctors who haven’t. We are frightened and we are angry; we look to expert intervention for the fears, and to comic but effective-seeming figures for retaliation against the experts who disappoint us.

Much of this is distinctly American—the idea that cancer-treatment centers would be in competitive relationships with one another, and so need to advertise, would be as unimaginable in any other industrialized country as the idea that the best way to adjudicate responsibility for a car accident is through aggressive lawsuits. Both reflect national beliefs: in competition, however unreal, and in the assignment of blame, however misplaced. We want to think that, if we haven’t fully enjoyed our birthright of plenty and prosperity, a nameable villain is at fault.

To grasp what is at stake in this strangest of political seasons, it helps to define the space in which the contest is taking place. We may be standing on the edge of an abyss, and yet nothing is wrong, in the expected way of countries on the brink of apocalypse. The country is not convulsed with riots, hyperinflation, or mass immiseration. What we have is a sort of phony war—a drôle de guerre, a sitzkrieg—with the vehemence of conflict mainly confined to what we might call the cultural space.

These days, everybody talks about spaces: the “gastronomic space,” the “podcast space,” even, on N.F.L. podcasts, the “analytic space.” Derived from some combination of sociology and interior design, the word has elbowed aside terms like “field” or “conversation,” perhaps because it’s even more expansive. The “space” of a national election is, for that reason, never self-evident; we’ve always searched for clues.

And so William Dean Howells began his 1860 campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln by mocking the search for a Revolutionary pedigree for Presidential candidates and situating Lincoln in the antislavery West, in contrast to the resigned and too-knowing East. North vs. South may have defined the frame of the approaching war, but Howells was prescient in identifying East vs. West as another critical electoral space. This opposition would prove crucial—first, to the war, with the triumph of the Westerner Ulysses S. Grant over the well-bred Eastern generals, and then to the rejuvenation of the Democratic Party, drawing on free-silver populism and an appeal to the values of the resource-extracting, expansionist West above those of the industrialized, centralized East.

A century later, the press thought that the big issues in the race between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy were Quemoy and Matsu (two tiny Taiwan Strait islands, claimed by both China and Taiwan), the downed U-2, the missile gap, and other much debated Cold War obsessions. But Norman Mailer, in what may be the best thing he ever wrote, saw the space as marked by the rise of movie-star politics—the image-based contests that, from J.F.K. to Ronald Reagan, would dominate American life. In “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” published in Esquire, Mailer revealed that a campaign that looked at first glance like the usual black-and-white wire-service photography of the first half of the twentieth century was really the beginning of our Day-Glo-colored Pop-art turn.

And our own electoral space? We hear about the overlooked vs. the élite, the rural vs. the urban, the coastal vs. the flyover, the aged vs. the young—about the dispossessed vs. the beneficiaries of global neoliberalism. Upon closer examination, however, these binaries blur. Support for populist nativism doesn’t track neatly with economic disadvantage. Some of Donald Trump’s keenest supporters have boats as well as cars and are typically the wealthier citizens of poorer rural areas. His stock among billionaires remains high, and his surprising support among Gen Z males is something his campaign exploits with visits to podcasts that no non-Zoomer has ever heard of.

But polarized nations don’t actually polarize around fixed poles. Civil confrontations invariably cross classes and castes, bringing together people from radically different social cohorts while separating seemingly natural allies. The English Revolution of the seventeenth century, like the French one of the eighteenth, did not array worn-out aristocrats against an ascendant bourgeoisie or fierce-eyed sansculottes. There were, one might say, good people on both sides. Or, rather, there were individual aristocrats, merchants, and laborers choosing different sides in these prerevolutionary moments. No civil war takes place between classes; coalitions of many kinds square off against one another.

In part, that’s because there’s no straightforward way of defining our “interests.” It’s in the interest of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to have big tax cuts; in the longer term, it’s also in their interest to have honest rule-of-law government that isn’t in thrall to guilds or patrons—to be able to float new ideas without paying baksheesh to politicians or having to worry about falling out of sixth-floor windows. “Interests” fail as an explanatory principle.

Does talk of values and ideas get us closer? A central story of American public life during the past three or four decades is (as this writer has noted) that liberals have wanted political victories while reliably securing only cultural victories, even as conservatives, wanting cultural victories, get only political ones. Right-wing Presidents and legislatures are elected, even as one barrier after another has fallen on the traditionalist front of manners and mores. Consider the widespread acceptance of same-sex marriage. A social transformation once so seemingly untenable that even Barack Obama said he was against it, in his first campaign for President, became an uncontroversial rite within scarcely more than a decade.

Right-wing political power has, over the past half century, turned out to have almost no ability to stave off progressive social change: Nixon took the White House in a landslide while Norman Lear took the airwaves in a ratings sweep. And so a kind of permanent paralysis has set in. The right has kept electing politicians who’ve said, “Enough! No more ‘Anything goes’!”—and anything has kept going. No matter how many right-wing politicians came to power, no matter how many right-wing judges were appointed, conservatives decided that the entire culture was rigged against them.

On the left, the failure of cultural power to produce political change tends to lead to a doubling down on the cultural side, so that wholesome college campuses can seem the last redoubt of Red Guard attitudes, though not, to be sure, of Red Guard authority. On the right, the failure of political power to produce cultural change tends to lead to a doubling down on the political side in a way that turns politics into cultural theatre. Having lost the actual stages, conservatives yearn to enact a show in which their adversaries are rendered humiliated and powerless, just as they have felt humiliated and powerless. When an intolerable contradiction is allowed to exist for long enough, it produces a Trump.

As much as television was the essential medium of a dozen bygone Presidential campaigns (not to mention the medium that made Trump a star), the podcast has become the essential medium of this one. For people under forty, the form���typically long-winded and shapeless—is as tangibly present as Walter Cronkite’s tightly scripted half-hour news show was fifty years ago, though the D.I.Y. nature of most podcasts, and the premium on host-read advertisements, makes for abrupt tonal changes as startling as those of the highway billboards.

On the enormously popular, liberal-minded “Pod Save America,” for instance, the hosts make no secret of their belief that the election is a test, as severe as any since the Civil War, of whether a government so conceived can long endure. Then they switch cheerfully to reading ads for Tommy John underwear (“with the supportive pouch”), for herbal hangover remedies, and for an app that promises to cancel all your excess streaming subscriptions, a peculiarly niche obsession (“I accidentally paid for Showtime twice!” “That’s bad!”). George Conway, the former Republican (and White House husband) turned leading anti-Trumper, states bleakly on his podcast for the Bulwark, the news-and-opinion site, that Trump’s whole purpose is to avoid imprisonment, a motivation that would disgrace the leader of any Third World country. Then he immediately leaps into offering—like an old-fashioned a.m.-radio host pushing Chock Full o’Nuts—testimonials for HexClad cookware, with charming self-deprecation about his own kitchen skills. How serious can the crisis be if cookware and boxers cohabit so cozily with the apocalypse?

And then there’s the galvanic space of social media. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, we were told, by everyone from Jean Baudrillard to Daniel Boorstin, that television had reduced us to numbed observers of events no longer within our control. We had become spectators instead of citizens. In contrast, the arena of social media is that of action and engagement—and not merely engagement but enragement, with algorithms acting out addictively on tiny tablets. The aura of the Internet age is energized, passionate, and, above all, angry. The algorithms dictate regular mortar rounds of text messages that seem to come not from an eager politician but from an infuriated lover, in the manner of Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction”: “Are you ignoring us?” “We’ve reached out to you PERSONALLY!” “This is the sixth time we’ve asked you!” At one level, we know they’re entirely impersonal, while, at another, we know that politicians wouldn’t do this unless it worked, and it works because, at still another level, we are incapable of knowing what we know; it doesn’t feel entirely impersonal. You can doomscroll your way to your doom. The democratic theorists of old longed for an activated citizenry; somehow they failed to recognize how easily citizens could be activated to oppose deliberative democracy.

If the cultural advantages of liberalism have given it a more pointed politics in places where politics lacks worldly consequences, its real-world politics can seem curiously blunted. Kamala Harris, like Joe Biden before her, is an utterly normal workaday politician of the kind we used to find in any functioning democracy—bending right, bending left, placating here and postponing confrontation there, glaring here and, yes, laughing there. Demographics aside, there is nothing exceptional about Harris, which is her virtue. Yet we live in exceptional times, and liberal proceduralists and institutionalists are so committed to procedures and institutions—to laws and their reasonable interpretation, to norms and their continuation—that they can be slow to grasp that the world around them has changed.

One can only imagine the fulminations that would have ensued in 2020 had the anti-democratic injustice of the Electoral College—which effectively amplifies the political power of rural areas at the expense of the country’s richest and most productive areas—tilted in the other direction. Indeed, before the 2000 election, when it appeared as if it might, Karl Rove and the George W. Bush campaign had a plan in place to challenge the results with a “grassroots” movement designed to short-circuit the Electoral College and make the popular-vote winner prevail. No Democrat even suggests such a thing now.

It’s almost as painful to see the impunity with which Supreme Court Justices have torched their institution’s legitimacy. One Justice has the upside-down flag of the insurrectionists flying on his property; another, married to a professional election denialist, enjoys undeclared largesse from a plutocrat. There is, apparently, little to be done, nor even any familiar language of protest to draw on. Prepared by experience to believe in institutions, mainstream liberals believe in their belief even as the institutions are degraded in front of their eyes.

In one respect, the space of politics in 2024 is transoceanic. The forms of Trumpism are mirrored in other countries. In the U.K., a similar wave engendered the catastrophe of Brexit; in France, it has brought an equally extreme right-wing party to the brink, though not to the seat, of power; in Italy, it elevated Matteo Salvini to national prominence and made Giorgia Meloni Prime Minister. In Sweden, an extreme-right group is claiming voters in numbers no one would ever have thought possible, while Canadian conservatives have taken a sharp turn toward the far right.

What all these currents have in common is an obsessive fear of immigration. Fear of the other still seems to be the primary mover of collective emotion. Even when it is utterly self-destructive—as in Britain, where the xenophobia of Brexit cut the U.K. off from traditional allies while increasing immigration from the Global South—the apprehension that “we” are being flooded by frightening foreigners works its malign magic.

It’s an old but persistent delusion that far-right nationalism is not rooted in the emotional needs of far-right nationalists but arises, instead, from the injustices of neoliberalism. And so many on the left insist that all those Trump voters are really Bernie Sanders voters who just haven’t had their consciousness raised yet. In fact, a similar constellation of populist figures has emerged, sharing platforms, plans, and ideologies, in countries where neoliberalism made little impact, and where a strong system of social welfare remains in place. If a broadened welfare state—national health insurance, stronger unions, higher minimum wages, and the rest—would cure the plague in the U.S., one would expect that countries with resilient welfare states would be immune from it. They are not.

Though Trump can be situated in a transoceanic space of populism, he isn’t a mere symptom of global trends: he is a singularly dangerous character, and the product of a specific cultural milieu. To be sure, much of New York has always been hostile to him, and eager to disown him; in a 1984 profile of him in GQ, Graydon Carter made the point that Trump was the only New Yorker who ever referred to Sixth Avenue as the “Avenue of the Americas.” Yet we’re part of Trump’s identity, as was made clear by his recent rally on Long Island—pointless as a matter of swing-state campaigning, but central to his self-definition. His belligerence could come directly from the two New York tabloid heroes of his formative years in the city: John Gotti, the gangster who led the Gambino crime family, and George Steinbrenner, the owner of the Yankees. When Trump came of age, Gotti was all over the front page of the tabloids, as “the Teflon Don,” and Steinbrenner was all over the back sports pages, as “the Boss.”

Steinbrenner was legendary for his middle-of-the-night phone calls, for his temper and combativeness. Like Trump, who theatricalized the activity, he had a reputation for ruthlessly firing people. (Gotti had his own way of doing that.) Steinbrenner was famous for having no loyalty to anyone. He mocked the very players he had acquired and created an atmosphere of absolute chaos. It used to be said that Steinbrenner reduced the once proud Yankees baseball culture to that of professional wrestling, and that arena is another Trumpian space. Pro wrestling is all about having contests that aren’t really contested—that are known to be “rigged,” to use a Trumpian word—and yet evoke genuine emotion in their audience.

At the same time, Trump has mastered the gangster’s technique of accusing others of crimes he has committed. The agents listening to the Gotti wiretap were mystified when he claimed innocence of the just-committed murder of Big Paul Castellano, conjecturing, in apparent seclusion with his soldiers, about who else might have done it: “Whoever killed this cocksucker, probably the cops killed this Paul.” Denying having someone whacked even in the presence of those who were with you when you whacked him was a capo’s signature move.

Marrying the American paranoid style to the more recent cult of the image, Trump can draw on the manner of the tabloid star and show that his is a game, a show, not to be taken quite seriously while still being serious in actually inciting violent insurrections and planning to expel millions of helpless immigrants. Self-defined as a showman, he can say anything and simultaneously drain it of content, just as Gotti, knowing that he had killed Castellano, thought it credible to deny it—not within his conscience, which did not exist, but within an imaginary courtroom. Trump evidently learned that, in the realm of national politics, you could push the boundaries of publicity and tabloid invective far further than they had ever been pushed.

Trump’s ability to be both joking and severe at the same time is what gives him his power and his immunity. This power extends even to something as unprecedented as the assault on the U.S. Capitol. Trump demanded violence (“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”) but stuck in three words, “peacefully and patriotically,” that, however hollow, were meant to immunize him, Gotti-style. They were, so to speak, meant for the cops on the wiretap. Trump’s resilience is not, as we would like to tell our children about resilience, a function of his character. It’s a function of his not having one.

Just as Trump’s support cuts across the usual divisions, so, too, does a divide among his opponents—between the maximizers, who think that Trump is a unique threat to liberal democracy, and the minimizers, who think that he is merely the kind of clown a democracy is bound to throw up from time to time. The minimizers (who can be found among both Marxist Jacobin contributors and Never Trump National Review conservatives) will say that Trump has crossed the wires of culture and politics in a way that opportunistically responds to the previous paralysis, but that this merely places him in an American tradition. Democracy depends on the idea that the socially unacceptable might become acceptable. Andrew Jackson campaigned on similar themes with a similar manner—and was every bit as ignorant and every bit as unaware as Trump. (And his campaigns of slaughter against Indigenous people really were genocidal.) Trump’s politics may be ugly, foolish, and vain, but ours is often an ugly, undereducated, and vain country. Democracy is meant to be a mirror; it shows what it shows.

Indeed, America’s recent history has shown that politics is a trailing indicator of cultural change, and that one generation’s most vulgar entertainment becomes the next generation’s accepted style of political argument. David S. Reynolds, in his biography of Lincoln, reflects on how the new urban love of weird spectacle in the mid-nineteenth century was something Lincoln welcomed. P. T. Barnum’s genius lay in taking circus grotesques and making them exemplary Americans: the tiny General Tom Thumb was a hero, not a freak. Lincoln saw that it cost him nothing to be an American spectacle in a climate of sensation; he even hosted a reception at the White House for Tom Thumb and his wife—as much a violation of the decorum of the Founding Fathers as Trump’s investment in Hulk Hogan at the Republican Convention. Lincoln understood the Barnum side of American life, just as Trump understands its W.W.E. side.

And so, the minimizers say, taking Trump seriously as a threat to democracy in America is like taking Roman Reigns seriously as a threat to fair play in sports. Trump is an entertainer. The only thing he really wants are ratings. When opposing abortion was necessary to his electoral coalition, he opposed it—but then, when that was creating ratings trouble in other households, he sent signals that he wasn’t exactly opposed to it. When Project 2025, which he vaguely set in motion and claims never to have read, threatened his ratings, he repudiated it. The one continuity is his thirst for popularity, which is, in a sense, our own. He rows furiously away from any threatening waterfall back to the center of the river—including on Obamacare. And, the minimizers say, in the end, he did leave the White House peacefully, if gracelessly.

In any case, the panic is hardly unique to Trump. Reagan, too, was vilified and feared in his day, seen as the reductio ad absurdum of the culture of the image, an automaton projecting his controllers’ authoritarian impulses. Nixon was the subject of a savage satire by Philip Roth that ended with him running against the Devil for the Presidency of Hell. The minimizers tell us that liberals overreact in real time, write revisionist history when it’s over, and never see the difference between their stories.

The maximizers regard the minimizers’ case as wishful thinking buoyed up by surreptitious resentments, a refusal to concede anything to those we hate even if it means accepting someone we despise. Maximizers who call Trump a fascist are dismissed by the minimizers as either engaging in name-calling or forcing a facile parallel. Yet the parallel isn’t meant to be historically absolute; it is meant to be, as it were, oncologically acute. A freckle is not the same as a melanoma; nor is a Stage I melanoma the same as the Stage IV kind. But a skilled reader of lesions can sense which is which and predict the potential course if untreated. Trumpism is a cancerous phenomenon. Treated with surgery once, it now threatens to come back in a more aggressive form, subject neither to the radiation of “guardrails” nor to the chemo of “constraints.” It may well rage out of control and kill its host.

And so the maximalist case is made up not of alarmist fantasies, then, but of dulled diagnostic fact, duly registered. Think hard about the probable consequences of a second Trump Administration—about the things he has promised to do and can do, the things that the hard-core group of rancidly discontented figures (as usual with authoritarians, more committed than he is to an ideology) who surround him wants him to do and can do. Having lost the popular vote, as he surely will, he will not speak up to reconcile “all Americans.” He will insist that he won the popular vote, and by a landslide. He will pardon and then celebrate the January 6th insurrectionists, and thereby guarantee the existence of a paramilitary organization that’s capable of committing violence on his behalf without fear of consequences. He will, with an obedient Attorney General, begin prosecuting his political opponents; he was largely unsuccessful in his previous attempt only because the heads of two U.S. Attorneys’ offices, who are no longer there, refused to coöperate. When he begins to pressure CNN and ABC, and they, with all the vulnerabilities of large corporations, bend to his will, telling themselves that his is now the will of the people, what will we do to fend off the slow degradation of open debate?

Trump will certainly abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and realign this country with dictatorships and against NATO and the democratic alliance of Europe. Above all, the spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his beliefs—very much like the fascists of the twentieth century in being a man and a movement without any positive doctrine except revenge against his imagined enemies. And against this: What? Who? The spirit of resistance may prove too frail, and too exhausted, to rise again to the contest. Who can have confidence that a democracy could endure such a figure in absolute control and survive? An oncologist who, in the face of this much evidence, shrugged and proposed watchful waiting as the best therapy would not be an optimist. He would be guilty of gross malpractice. One of those personal-injury lawyers on the billboards would sue him, and win.

What any plausible explanation must confront is the fact that Trump is a distinctively vile human being and a spectacularly malignant political actor. In fables and fiction, in every Disney cartoon and Batman movie, we have no trouble recognizing and understanding the villains. They are embittered, canny, ludicrous in some ways and shrewd in others, their lives governed by envy and resentment, often rooted in the acts of people who’ve slighted them. (“They’ll never laugh at me again!”) They nonetheless have considerable charm and the ability to attract a cult following. This is Ursula, Hades, Scar—to go no further than the Disney canon. Extend it, if that seems too childlike, to the realms of Edmund in “King Lear” and Richard III: smart people, all, almost lovable in their self-recognition of their deviousness, but not people we ever want to see in power, for in power their imaginations become unimaginably deadly. Villains in fables are rarely grounded in any cause larger than their own grievances—they hate Snow White for being beautiful, resent Hercules for being strong and virtuous. Bane is blowing up Gotham because he feels misused, not because he truly has a better city in mind.

Trump is a villain. He would be a cartoon villain, if only this were a cartoon. Every time you try to give him a break—to grasp his charisma, historicize his ascent, sympathize with his admirers—the sinister truth asserts itself and can’t be squashed down. He will tell another lie so preposterous, or malign another shared decency so absolutely, or threaten violence so plausibly, or just engage in behavior so unhinged and hate-filled that you’ll recoil and rebound to your original terror at his return to power. One outrage succeeds another until we become exhausted and have to work hard even to remember the outrages of a few weeks past: the helicopter ride that never happened (but whose storytelling purpose was to demean Kamala Harris as a woman), or the cemetery visit that ended in a grotesque thumbs-up by a graveside (and whose symbolic purpose was to cynically enlist grieving parents on behalf of his contempt). No matter how deranged his behavior is, though, it does not seem to alter his good fortune.

Villainy inheres in individuals. There is certainly a far-right political space alive in the developed world, but none of its inhabitants—not Marine Le Pen or Giorgia Meloni or even Viktor Orbán—are remotely as reckless or as crazy as Trump. Our self-soothing habit of imagining that what has not yet happened cannot happen is the space in which Trump lives, just as comically deranged as he seems and still more dangerous than we know.

Nothing is ever entirely new, and the space between actual events and their disassociated representation is part of modernity. We live in that disassociated space. Generations of cultural critics have warned that we are lost in a labyrinth and cannot tell real things from illusion. Yet the familiar passage from peril to parody now happens almost simultaneously. Events remain piercingly actual and threatening in their effects on real people, while also being duplicated in a fictive system that shows and spoofs them at the same time. One side of the highway is all cancer; the other side all crazy. Their confoundment is our confusion.

It is telling that the most successful entertainments of our age are the dark comic-book movies—the Batman films and the X-Men and the Avengers and the rest of those cinematic universes. This cultural leviathan was launched by the discovery that these ridiculous comic-book figures, generations old, could now land only if treated seriously, with sombre backstories and true stakes. Our heroes tend to dullness; our villains, garishly painted monsters from the id, are the ones who fuel the franchise.

During the debate last month in Philadelphia, as Trump’s madness rose to a peak of raging lunacy—“They’re eating the dogs”; “He hates her!”—ABC, in its commercial breaks, cut to ads for “Joker: Folie à Deux,” the new Joaquin Phoenix movie, in which the crazed villain swirls and grins. It is a Gotham gone mad, and a Gotham, against all the settled rules of fable-making, without a Batman to come to the rescue. Shuttling between the comic-book villain and the grimacing, red-faced, and unhinged man who may be reëlected President in a few weeks, one struggled to distinguish our culture’s most extravagant imagination of derangement from the real thing. The space is that strange, and the stakes that high. ♦

[nartml]

Just finished the lincoln lawyer season 3.

1) Arguably one of the most fire TV shows ever.

2) YOU EXPECT ME TO WAIT TWO (2) MORE YEARS FOR THE NEXT SEASON?? NUH UH

[coochiequeens]

Good news for Women’s sports!

By WDTV News Staff Published: May. 2, 2024

CLARKSBURG, W.Va (WDTV) - Judge Thomas A. Bedell has granted a preliminary injunction, allowing the four students who sued the Harrison County Board of Education to continue playing after their protest on April 18th.

The ruling came after more than three hours of testimony from school officials, a parent, and two of the five girls who participated in the protest.

Judge Bedell addressed the court to specify this hearing was not addressing the issue of transgender athletes in sports. Instead, it was focused on whether there was a violation of due process and if the school prohibited free speech.

Much of the plaintiffs’ case hinged on whether an unwritten rule could be enforced. According to Lincoln Middle School Track Coach Dawn Riestenberg, she adopted the “scratch rule” four years ago, one year after taking on coaching the team.

According to Riestenberg, if a student opted out of participating in an event voluntarily, they wouldn’t be allowed to compete in that same event at the next meet. Importantly, that rule was never written down, nor given to the student athletes in writing.

Instead, Riestenberg testified that she tells the student athletes of her scratch rule at the beginning of the season. The two students testifying disputed that claim.

A lawyer with the Harrison County Board of Education claimed that the students’ free speech rights were not infringed upon by following the scratch rule. Multiple people testified that there were other forms of protesting the issue of transgender athletes in sports throughout the season.

Riestenberg, LMS Principal Lori Scott, and a student all testified that multiple students wore “SWS” shirts -- short for “save women’s sports” -- at meets and were not reprimanded. They only reason, the BOE’s lawyer argued, that the students were not allowed to participate in the next meet was because they violated their coach’s scratch rule.

In the end, Judge Bedell said that both sides made good points, but was going to grant the plaintiff’s preliminary injunction motion.

That means the students will be allowed to compete in their next (and final) two matches of the season, regardless of whether they protest by violating Coach Riestenberg’s scratch rule.

All parties agreed that should the scratch rule want to be enforced in the future, it would need to be in writing.

Riestenberg and Scott committed to making that happen for next season.

Attorney General Patrick Morrisey issued the following response on Judge Bedell’s ruling.

“I want to say to these students and their parents: I have your backs. You saw unfairness and you expressed your disappointment and sacrificed your personal performances in a sport that you love; exercised your constitutionally protected freedom of speech and expression. These girls didn’t disrupt anything when they protested. They should be commended, not punished. We need to teach them that it is noble to stand firm in their beliefs and address their grievances within the protections guaranteed by our constitution. They need not to be silent. They have won by having their voices heard. So glad we were able to weigh in on behalf of these courageous young girls and that they are able to play.”

[storkmuffin]

VOGUE US March 2024

On His Terms

by Sarah Crompton

With his red cap pulled down over horn-rimmed glasses, Tobias Menzies walks into a London hotel with the wariness of a man who might just be recognized. It's his face that would catch him out, those deep lines running from eyes to chin. "He had those even as a young man," says his friend the theater director Rupert Goold. "It's like someone has taken a knife and carved them. And I feel those lines run deep inside him as well. He's grown into his face like a lot of actors do."

Menzies's smile is warm and his handshake firm, and though he lives not far from here in north London's Crouch End, he is dressed more as a country dweller than a man-about-town, in jeans and blue gilet zipped over a soft mustard-and-red-checked shirt. Only his Grenson trainers, white and red and with flashes of the same yellow, suggest he might belong to an artier milieu.

"I don't get recognized on any intrusive level, but it's not a part of [the job] that I love," he admits as we settle down to talk. "I like to watch people—I don't like them to watch me." I've asked him about the experience he's having at 49—that of a talent stepping into his prime. Blame it on The Crown, in which he played the second incarnation of Prince Philip across two seasons (a role that won him an Emmy), and last year's wry, acclaimed comedy You Hurt My Feelings, in which he starred opposite Julia Louis-Dreyfus ("He's one of the most warm and present actors I've worked with," says its director, Nicole Holofcener). And now, he's appearing in two leading-man roles, as Edwin Stanton, Abraham Lincoln's secretary of war, in Apple TV+'s series Manhunt in March, and he's currently onstage in The Hunt, an adaptation of the 2012 Thomas Vinterberg film directed by Goold, playing at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn five years after its London premiere.

"I've got to be honest, I really liked it," Menzies says of the status he enjoyed in Manhunt. "Being in the engine room of it and part of the storytelling decisions." The series is part thriller and part history lesson, set over the 12 days following Lincoln's assassination in 1865 as Stanton attempts to track down the president's killer, John Wilkes Booth (it's based on historian James L. Swanson's 2006 bestseller). Episodes skip forward and backward, tracing the story of a tumultuous time and the ideological schisms that caused the Civil War and continued long after it. Stanton, a brilliant lawyer and strategist, is at the center of everything, clashing with Lincoln's successor, President Andrew Johnson, as he attempts to preserve the late president's legacy.

As gripping as any detective story, Manhunt addresses painful facts of America's past: "The implications of losing Lincoln and what that meant for African American people," says showrunner Monica Beletsky, who spent four years developing the project and who has followed Menzies's career since they overlapped as students at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London (she on a stint studying there from the US). "You could argue in a way that the Confederates won the peace," Menzies points out. "What is important about Monica making the show is that she is a person of color, and arguably the big fallout from Lincoln's assassination was that Reconstruction was lost until 100 years later and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Voting rights, land rights—they didn't happen. A lot of the things that African Americans have been fighting so hard for, for so long, were on Stanton's agenda."

Menzies studied carefully for the role ("He prepares months in advance," says Beletsky), working to find Stanton's voice and make his accent seem effortless, but also reading widely about the Civil War and its aftermath. Doris Kearns Goodwin's classic history Team of Rivals was a particularly rich source: "It takes you into this very disparate group Lincoln collected around him," Menzies says. "There was such a diversity of opinion and a lot of antagonism, but that was part of the power of it." Menzies also studied Gregory Peck's towering performance as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. "I was thinking of those archetypes that American literature and film are full of," he says. "Because it's such a whirlwind story with so many different characters floating through it—so you need a moral compass."

The key to the character became a combination of "stoicism and radicalism," Menzies says—and as an actor, he's exceptionally good at playing men who are fighting such opposing impulses, with strong currents of feeling running beneath an impassive surface. "He is one of those rare actors who does a lot with silence," Beletsky says. "He makes you believe you can feel what he is thinking, and he can do those things without saying a word."

Goold, who has directed Menzies many times onstage—including as Hamlet, as Valentine in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, and as Edgar in King Lear—thinks this quality has become stronger as Menzies has grown older. "He's got this wonderful physical expressiveness, but there's a slightly remote quality to him, I suppose," Goold says. "The quality I find really compelling in him is his committed curiosity. It's quite rare, especially for British actors, to keep their craft developing, to become more rigorous and investigative, and I think Tobias is an outlier on that."

Menzies is attracted to roles that conceal depths. "There is a certain magic about that. Part of the maths is that there is more on the inside than on the outside"

Their most recent collaboration is The Hunt, a haunting story in which a small-town teacher becomes ostracized when a six-year-old child accuses him of abuse. Menzies will be reprising his devastatingly observed performance from the play's 2019 London premiere. "When we put it on, we felt it to be about false accusations and the way that cancel culture was creating pariahs," says Goold. "But it is as much about someone who is shut out from their community because they choose to live apart. There is part of Tobias that is like that."

Menzies acknowledges that he is attracted to roles that conceal depths. "It's partly a taste thing," he says. "I like the kind of acting where I can't see the performance, I can't see how it is happening. There is a certain magic about that. Part of the maths is that there is more on the inside than on the outside, there's a kind of mystery there."

Menzies was born in London, his father a radio producer for the BBC, but after his parents separated when he was six, he lived with his mother, a drama teacher, and his brother in Kent. On their regular cultural outings, he was inspired by contemporary dance and the experimental theater companies he saw: Pina Bausch, Complicité, Shared Experience, Cheek by Jowl. "I was interested in companies that were making their own work," he says, "and I tried to go to train with [the radical movement coach] Jacques Lecoq in Paris; but I didn't have the money for that, so I went to RADA."

He never dreamed of being a famous actor. "My obsession as a kid was tennis," he says, with a grin. He was good enough to be on the fringes of the team for the county of Kent but gave it up when he realized he would never be truly first-class. He stopped playing for a long time. "Periodically I would pick up a racket and try to play a bit, and my game had completely fallen apart and it made me so angry. It was so frustrating. A few years ago I thought, Let's start again, do my 10,000 hours, and let's fix it." He approached the task with "monomaniacal" intent, working for a year on his forehand, and a year on his backhand, then adding his serve. Now he plays three times a week at a local tennis club, either with a coach or taking on other members in clay court matches. "I'm pretty obsessive about it," he says. "I just find it fascinating. It is such a mental game—a very interesting microcosm of one's brain."

His hero is Novak Djokovic. "He has less natural flair than Nadal or Federer but there is an epic quality to his tennis. He is able to endure and suffer, and so he can do it all in some way. There is a sort of purity to what he is doing. I think only if you have struggled with tennis do you realize that even though it looks plain, what's going on, the footwork, the ability to get to that ball and then hit it—it's just rather remarkable."

Menzies admits that his attitude to life mirrors his tennis. "I am probably on the methodical end of things, yeah," he says, with another low laugh. I ask about his film roles, which have been getting bigger and richer of late. He loved filming in New York with Holofcener on You Hurt My Feelings—"It was definitely bucket list"—and is currently appearing alongside Brad Pitt in the as-yet-untitled Formula 1 drama directed by Joseph Kosinski, which is filming scenes at Grand Prix around the world.

Before the actors' strike interrupted production, they had shot two scenes at Silverstone in the UK. "It was bonkers because we are in amongst everything else. So we did this scene on the grid before the race and the grid is live: real drivers, real cars, celebrities wandering around." He pauses, then adds: "It was like theater on steroids—really, really fun." He has nothing but praise for Pitt—"a lovely, lovely person, very collaborative, very nice to act with, and supersmart"—but working with him brought Menzies face-to-face with a level of fame that he doesn't aspire to. "How does he go out? It is very constraining to have that level of visibility."

Partly from a desire to preserve his anonymity as much as he can, Menzies took an early decision never to talk about his private life. "Is that old-fashioned of me?" he asks. "I'm going to stick to my guns. It's partly natural shyness on my part. But to be a bit more grandiose about it, the idea of celebrity moving into the arts and acting does have an effect on how we watch."

Through it all Menzies is genial and engaged, asking a lot of questions, yet there is something formal about him too. This is someone who is deeply serious about acting, pursuing projects that interest him and then immersing himself in them. I ask if being able to choose work of quality and interest is part of this new level of success, and Menzies says that it has come at a good time. "The question for me would have been whether as a younger person I would have handled it very well," he tells me. "I just think at some base level, it has taken me time to get really good." He laughs gently. "If I'd had a lot of exposure early on, I don't think I'd have been ready. I know I am a lot better now than I was 10 years ago. Acting keeps you very humble because you never quite know day-to-day. You can do all the work in the world and try the best you can, and sometimes it just lifts off and sometimes it doesn't."

[gothamxwattpad]

I want to binge watch season two of the Lincoln Lawyer on Netflix.

But I also want to write.

I cannot do both. I’ve tried.

[scottst]

FULL NAME . vivian marie costello . NICKNAMES . vi , viv , vivi ( by close friends & siblings ) . AGE . twenty-seven . DATE OF BIRTH .   october 11th . TITLE . the saccharine . INFP . the mediator . MORAL ALIGNMENT . chaotic good . 3w2 . the enchanter . OCCUPATION . first year orthopedic surgery resident . MUSIC . after love - anyma , delilah montagu .  PINTEREST. ಇ

CHAPTER ONE : FOUNDATION .

SHE NEVER KNEW HER MOTHER’S NAME.  or her father’s face . she’d never known that her mother had a beautiful singing voice or that her father was a natural athlete . she only knew that they were sixteen when she was born , and that teenagers didn’t make good parents .  vivian only learned so much when she was thirteen , though she’d known for quite some time that she didn’t quite look like she fit in her family . children , after all , could be cruel , and they never hesitated to point it out after her parents came around . not that she ever minded . in fact , when she ultimately asked her parents , it was out of curiosity more than anything else .

it wasn’t like she was going to complain , either . she was adopted when she was an infant . . . and this life was all she’d ever known . it was a good one , too . they lived in lincoln city in a darling blue house with a literal white picket fence . she shared a bathroom with her sister , but never had to share her room . she got new school supplies every year and new school clothes every august and january . the big trees in the front yard changed with the seasons , and the costellos were keen on decorating for every holiday . there were three costello kids : vivian , xavier  , and lydia . . . the youngest of the three being the only biological child . the baby . the favorite . though all three of them were worthy of praise in one way or another .  vivian was creative . . . and insanely smart . elijah was a powerhouse in the hockey field . and lydia ? well , lydia was perfect . perfect blonde curls . perfect blue eyes . perfect sweet disposition . the costellos were known around town for their perfect , perfect family .

only . . . things weren’t really all that perfect , were they ? no , that was just a mere image that reflected nothing of what went on behind that white picket fence . her parents’ marriage was strained at best , financial troubles putting a crushing weight on their shoulders . that pressure trickled down , and perfect became a requirement in the costello household . perfect grades . perfect attendance . first prize . first place . top of your class . top university . required . xavier’s natural talent and dazzling work ethic soon became inadequate , and he was sixteen when he tried steroids for the first time . vivian had to be at the very tip-top of her class and have ample volunteer experience and keep up with extracurriculars and , and , and . . . lydia’s beauty was everything . if her siblings had to be perfect , she was required to look it . the caveat always remained , though , that lydia got off the hook a lot easier than the other two . vivian was the oldest , afterall . elijah the only boy .  

LOVE in the costello family wasn’t given . it was earned . . . you had to be flawless to deserve love .

CHAPTER TWO : WALLS

VIVIAN NEARLY DIED TRYING TO FIT THAT MOLD. perfect wasn’t easy , but it was attainable if she stretched herself thin . her parents’ love felt conditional , and there was a small , foreign voice in the back of her mind that was louder than ever : you never fit anyway . . . so you have to work twice as hard to be what they want you to be . you have to be worthy of it . so vivian learned to do it all . student council president . captain of the local swim team . member of the debate team . top of her class , valedictorian when she graduated . her parents wanted her to be a doctor or a lawyer . . . so she would be , nevermind her own love for music . in a perfect world , she thought she might join an orchestra . . . she’d get her degree in music theory and continue playing violin on the side . but this wasn’t a perfect world . the only perfection was found in her transcripts . . . a list of accomplishments that later got her a full ride through college . she’d study biology , pre - med . 

vivian swam competitively all the way through . . . kept her grades up . . . kept a job . . . and she was burning the candle at both ends , all for a silent look of pride that was never quite put into words . all to be worthy of love . every action was a way of saying ‘ look at me . the daughter you chose . it was not a mistake , choosing me . ’ 

she was perfect . 

on the surface . 

inside , a storm brewed . anxiety churned in her stomach like white noise on a television , and when she was seventeen , everything changed . she knew she shouldn't have been there in the first place , so late at night , surrounded by a crowd of kids she hardly saw around , but her neighbor had a way with words that made her believe she deserved to live a little . just as quick as she took in her first breath of air , the ripples of hope disappeared after a splash of water .

[tw anxiety, ideations ] vivian was never the same after sneaking out that night . for the days to come , she continued to think her heart was failing . . . that her lungs were collapsing under the weight of the fear . it felt like she might’ve been dying following official news of chris’s disappearance , the little stability she clung onto in the face of her parent's demands was shaken to its core . all her brain could truly think was : if it ends now , at least i’ll get some rest . [tw end]

it wasn’t her first brush with anxiety , but it was the worst it had ever been . the only problem was . . . the costellos didn’t believe in therapy . or mental health . or anything other than pulling yourself up by your bootstraps , sucking it up , and powering through . so in high school , she couldn’t get help to process the grief of losing her neighbor . . . and in college , she had to unlearn her parents’ ideology . if she didn’t , she might’ve truly ended up in a dire condition . . .

CHAPTER THREE : PAVEMENT

SHE NEVER STOPPED TRYING TO BE PERFECT but she did learn to slow down . . . even if her parents seemed to be displeased by it all . she used her mcat score for leverage : near perfect . a world of options sat at her fingertips , and deferring for a year wouldn’t make those opportunities go away . her mother thought a gap year would be lazy . her father thought she was taking the easy way out . but her siblings were supportive . . . vivian knew that if she didn’t try to find herself now , she’d be dragged under by the current of her family’s expectations , drowned by the memory of her mistakes . 

she soon left to california from oregon , where she would spend her gap year . she got a job , learned to drive , moved into an apartment all on her own . away from home , away from the reminders of where she went wrong . for the first time , she didn’t have to be anywhere , be anything , be anyone . . . and she found herself at a loss . reflecting on her own childhood , she couldn’t remember what she liked . what she liked to do . what music she was into . what her favorite food was . whether she preferred to watch movies or read books . whether she was actually a morning person or a night owl . truth be told , at twenty-three , she had no fucking clue who she was or what she wanted .

but that’s what your twenties are for , her brother told her . 

so she spent the year falling in love with herself . she began playing the violin again , and she was good at it . she found that she preferred quiet cafes to los angeles’ nightlife . . . and that she enjoyed a casual date every now and then . she was a reader , not a movie goer  . . . and while nighttime was exhilarating , there was nothing quite like the quiet of the world in the hour before the sun rose , the hour before the city came back to life , when the crickets were all you could really hear . 

but she was on a ticking clock . . . and when a year was up , she had no choice but to enroll in medical school . all of the work she’d put into herself began to fade away , but at least her mother called more often . at least her father was excited to talk about her day . at least they didn’t avoid talking about her at family functions . she got a taste of what it was to be loved again . to have someone that’s proud of you . . . and so she began to spread herself thin . 

now that she’s finished her last year of med school , she isn’t sure she loves it the way she’s supposed to . . . the candle is burning at both ends . . . faster now than ever considering chris’s disappearance is thrusted back into the limelight of her focus .  she returns to oregon under the pretense of spending time with her family before starting her residency , but only she knows the truth . and only she knows whoever sent that message holds the key to her peace .

CHAPTER FOUR : DOORS

GROWING UP , SHE WAS CURIOUS. she asked questions with wide eyes and listened to answers attentively , committing them to memory . vivian always had a gentle way about her . not necessarily delicate , not necessarily nurturing . . . but gentle , like the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings or the warmth of a light summer breeze rustling tree leaves . gentle . 

she has a way with people , something about that gentleness and curiosity that makes you feel comfortable opening up . she’d ask you a dozen questions about yourself and change the subject when you asked about her . it was always easy to be around her , but it was just as difficult to know her . she wasn’t as boisterous as her sister or as charming as her brother , but when she did speak , it was clever or kind or insightful . she could make you laugh , and the melodic sound of her own laugh in harmony with yours would leave a flush on anyone’s cheeks . 

she’s always been nonstop . busy busy busy . she didn’t make time for herself . . . or for anyone else , for that matter . that was another reason why it was hard to know vivian costello , it seemed she never stopped moving . the only time she ever truly stood still was when hurt shot through her body , skittering down her spine and rendering her immobile . dark brown eyes would widen , and despite the small smile that would press at her lips , you could always see it in her gaze . it was easy to hurt her feelings ; she’d always been the most sensitive of the costello kids . it was a double edged sword : she knew how to interact with other peoples’ emotions , but she didn’t dare confront her own . 

she is loyal to her people , sometimes to a fault . and sometimes to her own detriment . even in heartache , she would remain loyal to people she loves . or loved , once . 

there’s a tranquility about her , not necessarily one that she feels in herself , but one you can find from being around her . there’s something about the quiet that calms the storm inside . . . and she’s always been a great person to be quiet with . comfortable silence is something she knows all too well , and she doesn’t mind it . 

she isn’t quick to anger , but when she does get angry , it’s dark and stormy . it’s silent anger , and it’s static . it might last a day or it might last a month . the quietness makes it unpredictable , and though there are times she has wanted to lash out . . . she’s only done so a handful of times . usually , she swallows the thunder and lets it run its course in the center of her chest . she handles it on her own . 

she isn’t selfless , per say , but she does have a gentle way of loving . to be loved by vivian is to know softness and kindness . it’s being wrapped in a warm blanket when you fall asleep on the couch or waking up to your favorite mug already filled with coffee . she might not always say as much , but she knows how to show her love . 

. · * vivian , above all else , is still trying to figure herself out .

CHAPTER FIVE : HOME

i will not be adding wanted connections because i don't want to make this any longer than it already is ( i.e, i'm lying , i don't have any connections written yet ) . but , i'd be happy to brainstorm together , fill in your wanted connections , or just simply go off of chemistry ! i also added a wanted plots section in vivian's pinterest board !

[typingtess]

Tiptoeing through the possible “Sleeping Dogs” guest cast

Christopher Gorham as Alex Kilbride. Gorham played Harrison John in Popular, Trevor O'Donnell in Felicity, Neil Taggart in Odyssey 5, Jake Foley in Jake 2.0, Miles McCabe in Medical Investigation, Benjamin Barnes in Out of Practice, Henry Dunn in Harper's Island, Henry Grubstick in Ugly Betty, Auggie Anderson in Covert Affairs, Walsh/The Wizard of Oz in Once Upon a Time, Bobby in 2 Broke Girls, Ric D'Andres in Full Circle, Bob Barnard in Insatiable and Trevor Elliott in Lincoln Lawyer.

Gorham's guest roles include Spy Game, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Vengeance Unlimited, Party of Five, Saved by the Bell: The New Class, Boomtown, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2003), Without a Trace, Love Bites, Hot in Cleveland, Heartbeat, Major Crimes, The Magicians, Modern Family and Leverage: Redemption.

Voiced characters in a number of animated series including playing Barry Allen/The Flash in a number of animated Justice League/DC Comics series.

Gorham provide a backstage tour of where NCIS: Los Angeles filmed being near a set where he worked in the past.

Ashley Sharpe Chestnut as FBI Special Agent Summer Morehurst Returns from "Let it Burn" in late November.

Kavi Ramachandran Ladnier as Agent Shyla Dahr Duncan Campbell as Agent Castor Both return from "Shame".

Possible guest stars:  Both actors here are credited in both this episode and episode 19.

Milissa Sears as Leah Novak Returns from season 13's "Genesis" episode

David DeSantos as Anthony Beltran DeSantos played Agent Dennis Livengood in Animal Kingdom, Eduardo in Roswell, New Mexico and Sergeant Rodrigo Sanchez in SWAT.

Guest roles include Seven Days, Spyder Games, American Family, Crossing Jordan, CSI: Miami, House, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Ugly Betty, Numb3rs, Torchwood, Pretty Little Liars, This is Why I'm Single, Switched at Birth, Ray Donovan, Days of Our Lives, General Hospital, Castle, The Red Road, Famous In Love, SEAL Team, The Rookie and played Holden Gaines in the "Judgement Call" season six premiere of NCIS: New Orleans.

Written by:  Andrew Bartels wrote or co-wrote "Allegiance", "Zero Days", "The Grey Man", "Humbug", "Fighting Shadows", "Driving Miss Diaz", "Angels & Daemons", "Where There’s Smoke…", "Glasnost", "Old Tricks" "Battle Scars", "Fool Me Twice", "Warrior of Peace", "Reentry", "The Prince", "Smokescreen", "The One That Got Away"/"No More Secrets" two-parter, "Yellow Jacket", "Missing Time", "If the Fates Allow", "Red Rover, Red Rover", "Divided We Fall", "Genesis" and "Survival of the Fittest".

Directed by:  Gonzalo Amat is directing his first NCIS: Los Angeles episode.  He has directed episodes of SEAL Team, FBI, SWAT, Outer Banks and Fire Country.

[piratefalls]

TAG SOMEONE YOU WANT TO KNOW AND/OR SOME OF YOUR BESTIES

Tagged by @wellhalesbells because she always tags me in the fun stuff.

Last song: "Jaded" by Miley Cyrus. It's ridiculously good. Otherwise it's been a lot of Taylor Swift. I fell down the rabbit hole.

Last movie: Meg 2: The Trench. (Girl, we share a fandom again, I'm obsessed with it and them and their family and all their bad, sometimes himbo level decisions.)

Currently watching: Most recently a rewatch of Designated Survivor (I forgot how intense the first season is);

Other stuff I watched this year: As I already mentioned, Meg 2 (agree that it's a cinematic masterpiece). Other movies include Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (truly awful, and less tongue-in-cheek than I expected, still mad that it violated the #1 rule of horror movies); Red White & Royal Blue; Cocaine Bear (also agree on it being a cinematic masterpiece); the first two Lord of the Rings movies (I had not previously seen them because they're not my thing, but my friends insisted); Clue (because I'm always watching it); Bros (which would have been great except Billy Eichner's character annoyed the shit out of me); I also went on a Labor Day Queer Movie Marathon that included Love, Simon, Geography Club, The Thing About Harry, and Fire Island; and all the Mystery 101 Hallmark movies. As for tv shows, Leverage (OG & Redemption); Will Trent; Air Disasters; The Lincoln Lawyer; 9-1-1 (OG); Big Sky; Rizzoli & Isles; iZombie; Fringe; Grimm; The Good Wife; The Boys.

Shows I dropped/didn’t finish: I need to finish Deadloch. Otherwise I don't think I've intentionally dropped something this year?

Currently reading: "Husband Material" by Alexis Hall. I loved "Boyfriend Material" so I'm hoping this is just as good. I only read one thing at a time because I can't keep shit straight in my head.

Currently listening to: 1989 (TV) has been on repeat.

Currently working on: well it certainly isn't fic. learning how to sleep more than 4 hours a night.

No pressure tagging @ereborne @newyearknwwme and anyone else who wants to do it!

[mesillusionssousecstasy]

The Lincoln’s lawyer Season 2 - Part. 1

This first part of season two was really good.

I’m pretty sure that Lisa is not clean. There is really something about her. 

Is it me or Lorna deserves someone better?

[lizzy384]

Just started season two of the Lincoln Lawyer. I’m curious as to what he actually does, but to me there is an easy way around the new client who tricked him so he would have to drop his innocent client because of conflict. Simply go before the judge and say you recuse yourself without prejudice because you have just been made aware that you are, as of now in conflict and can no longer defend your first client. If I were a judge, I’d damn well want to know why he dropped a client mid-case. Might be a tricky slope, but technically you haven’t said anything. But a smart detective might just look at who your recent clients were.

[cynifer]

I think The Lincoln Lawyer got a new director this season because the camera angles and shots are different. I really like them.

I had to look it up because I noticed some differences too!

They have most of the same directors but brought in 3 new ones for this season...including two more women (they're actually great with women and minority representation on the cast AND crew of the show!).

[heavenboy09]

Happy Birthday 🎂 🥳 🎉 🎈 🎁 🎊 To You

The Most Iconic Charming & Smooth Talking Natural Born Blonde 👱‍♂️ Haired Texan Actor In Hollywood, That All The Ladies Know😍 & Drool for 🤤

Born On November 4th, 1969 In Uvalde, Texas

He is an American actor. He achieved his breakthrough with a supporting performance in the coming-of-age comedy Dazed and Confused (1993). After a number of supporting roles, his first success as a leading man came in the legal drama A Time to Kill (1996). His career progressed with lead roles in the science fiction film Contact (1997), the historical drama Amistad (1997), and the war film U-571 (2000).

In the 2000s, McConaughey became known for starring in romantic comedies, including The Wedding Planner (2001), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003), Failure to Launch (2006), Fool's Gold (2008), and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009), establishing him as a sex symbol. In 2011, after a two-year hiatus from film acting, McConaughey began to appear in more dramatic roles, beginning with the legal drama The Lincoln Lawyer. In 2012, he gained wider praise for his roles as a stripper in Magic Mike and a fugitive in Mud.

McConaughey's portrayal of Ron Woodroof, a cowboy diagnosed with AIDS, in the biopic Dallas Buyers Club (2013) earned him widespread critical acclaim and numerous accolades, including the Academy Award for Best Actor. He followed it with a supporting role in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and a starring role as Rust Cohle in the first season of HBO's crime anthology series True Detective (2014), for which he was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. His subsequent film roles include starring in Interstellar (2014) and The Gentlemen (2019), as well as voice work in Kubo and the Two Strings (2016), Sing (2016), Sing 2 (2021), and Deadpool & Wolverine (2024).

Please Wish This Iconic Legendary Charming & Smooth Talking Natural Born Blonde 👱‍♂️ Haired Texan Actor In Hollywood

A Very Happy Birthday 🎂 🥳 🎉 🎈 🎁 🎊

YOU KNOW HIM

THE LADIES KNOW HIM & CANT HELP BUT DROOL OVER HIM 🤤

YOU SEE HIS MOVIES 🎥

& YOU CANT HELP BUT LOVE HIS CHARISMA 😉

THE 1 & ONLY

MR. MATTHEW DAVID MCCONAUGHEY 👱‍♂️

HAPPY 55TH BIRTHDAY 🎂 🥳 🎉 🎈 🎁 🎊 TO YOU MR . MCCONAUGHEY👱‍♂️ & HERE'S TO MANY MORE YEARS TO COME

#MatthewMcconaughey

[spaciousreasoning]

Bad Checks

Daylight savings time ended today, but it was the first time in ages that we had to deal with it. Instead of ignoring it, which is what Arizona has done for a long time. Thankfully, our phones and computers took care of the change by themselves. We had to manually change five clocks in the house, and that did not get taken care of until later in the day.

It was a surprise when my blood sugar registered at 109 this morning. That’s a low figure, especially considering the large amount of potato chips we snacked on during the football game yesterday, plus the pasta for dinner and the sugar in the dessert after. It might be time to revert to the lower dose of metformin.

We rushed through coffee and all but two brain games so we could take off for church on time. We shared a banana while we played.

Then we went to church for All Saints Sunday. There was a baptism and I did the streaming thing once again. We were invited for dinner at Joe and Anne’s place this Wednesday. Plus I was informed that the checks I ordered had the incorrect routing number, which was entirely my fault. It’s less than $20 down the drain, plus what it takes to refund the church the bank fine. For now I’ll just stick with the old checks and write in my new address. It’s not like we actually write a lot of checks these days.

After church we stopped for lunch at Johnny Ocean’s Grille again. Nancy got a hamburger and fries, and I had the pad Thai. Then went to PetSmart for more kitty litter of the clumping corn cob variety.

When we got home I did an online meeting with Shaun about Tucson’s NA website and the meeting list and how to manage the WordPress installation.

The rain appeared to be gone away for the rest of the day, so Nancy and I went out walking and managed to get in 2.18 miles in just over 50 minutes, a good pace for the two of us together.

Thanks to the return to “normal” time, it was already pitch black when I took off for the Sunday evening recovery meeting shortly after 5 p.m. The reading said, in part, “Recovery, and life itself, contain equal parts of pain and joy. It is important to share both so the newcomer can know that we stay clean no matter what.”

My dinner consisted of cheese and crackers and a couple of handfuls of potato chips, and the we streamed the second episode of “Somebody, Somewhere,” another episode of “The Lincoln Lawyer” and an episode of “Tracker” from the first season.

[recentlyheardcom]

'The Lincoln Lawyer' Season 3 Finale: Showrunners on Courtroom Drama

SPOILER ALERT: This interview incorporates spoilers from Season 3 of “The Lincoln Lawyer,” now streaming on Netflix. “The Lincoln Lawyer” amps up the motion for the third season of the favored Netflix present, culminating in two dramatic episodes that may depart viewers in shock. Protection lawyer Mickey Haller, performed by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, additionally finds time to dabble in romance along…