Four or five days ago I listened to a NY Times Opinion Podcast titled “The Rich Don’t Play By The Rules, So Why Should I?” It was basically a measure of how much hostility toward corporations is simmering out there.

Hosted by NYT Opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman, the guests were New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino (i.e., the bearded dude) and political commentator Hasan Piker.

Go to 3:24 for the Whole Foods portion of the discussion — “Would you steal from Whole Foods?“)

I, HE personified, have never stolen a single item from a Whole Foods store. Nor from Wilton’s Village Market or a Stop & Shop or any similar-sized corporate store. Or from a library or a gas station convenience store. I’m not a thief.

An attorney friend tapped out this would-be Onion article this morning:

“President Trump has peremptorily pardoned accused would be ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Cole Tomas Allen of all charges,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced today.

“The president felt it was the right thing to do,” Secretary Leavitt revealed, reminding everyone how the President had pardoned some 1500 January 6th rioters. “Many of them probably would have characterized themselves as assassins if given the opportunity,” the President noted, adding that “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

Trump really feels he had no choice, Secretary Leavitt explained. “Mr. Allen believed he was being a good patriot, and that’s good enough for me,” the President told Leavitt.

“This is further evidence why President Trump is the greatest President in all of history…past, present and future,” gushed Secretary Of War Pete Hegseth. “He’s not afraid to do the right thing, also known as the Christian thing.” FBI Director Kash Patel said he agreed “one thousand percent…justice without mercy is tyranny. As we’ve seen time and again, this President doesn’t hold a grudge.”

The President consulted with former Vice President Mike Pence, who wholeheartedly agreed, said Secretary Leavitt.

The Onion has reached out to Vice President Pence for comment and received this response, through a spokesperson: “The President is batshit crazy, always has been. I don’t think Allen should be pardoned, but perhaps a Nobel Peace Prize nomination is in order.”

I was wondering when the N.Y. Times would finally run an article about the gulf between film critics’ damnation of Michael, partly if not largely for ignoring the pedophilia angle in Michael Jackson‘s life, and the general indifference to the various child molestation charges that Joe and Jane Popcorn seem to be embracing or are at least okay with.

The paper of record finally ran that piece today (4.27.26), and boy, is it soft! Total cottonball.

Reported by Derrick Bryson Taylor, it’s called “Michael Fans Danced in the Aisles, Critics Be Damned“. It boils down to Taylor quoting two or three naysayers (including MJ’s daughter Paris), but mostly quoting some oblivious Michael patrons at a Union Square-area theatre where the film was playing last weekend.

There’s a spot-on quote that recently ran in The Hollywood Reporter, spoken by Finding Neverland director Dan Reed, basically stating that typical moviegoers simply don’t care about how many kids MJ hay have diddled. Taylor doesn’t mention this observation.

The forehead-smacker arrives when Taylor quotes youngish Michael fan Necia Blanc, who says that movies are for entertainment, and that only documentaries should deal with child molestation.

This is an obvious opportunity for Taylor to (a) remind Blanc that Reed’s Finding Neverland, which premiered on HBO in 2019, had explored the MJ allegations via the testimony of two fully grown male victims, and (b) ask Blanc if she’d seen this doc or at least heard of it. He doesn’t mention Reed’s film and Blanc never says squat about it. Nobody does, in fact.

If a joke lands, it lands. If it doesn’t land, that’s showbiz. If it offends DJT and Melania, off with the joke-teller’s head!

Jimmy Kimmel was alluding to Trump’s advanced age and the possibility of Melania enjoying good sex again, but sometimes the best jokes are the cruelest. Cole Allen, the would-be assassin, had nothing to do with it.

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THR‘s Abid Rahman is reporting that several social media psychotics from China, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong are hugely pissed about a recently posted Devil Wears Prade 2 clip that they regard as racially offensive. It’s a brief scene between Anne Hathaway‘s “Andy” and Helen J. Shen‘s “Jin Chao”, Andy’s new assistant.

The insecure Jin, fearful that Andy won’t like her, hurriedly recites her qualifications at a machine-gun pace: “I did go to Yale, 3.86 GPA…lead soprano of the [Yale singing group] Whiffenpoofs, and my ACT score was 36 on the very first time.”

One Japanese ayehole called the footage “blatant anti-Asian racism.” Another hair-trigger offense-taker tweeted “we are in 2026… what made them think we’ll find this kind of racism funny?”. A hyperbolic Korean tweeted “all the East Asians are fucking pissed off, and the fact that a few quotes from those living in the West are turning it into ‘overly sensitive snowflakes’ is the perfect finishing touch.”

The former assistant’s new assistant.

Watch a new clip from The Devil Wears Prada 2 and experience the film only in theaters May 1. Get tickets now: https://t.co/BJd5wLTnLS pic.twitter.com/f2w0NWr8q5

— 20th Century Studios (@20thcentury) April 16, 2026

HE to Asian twitter hysterics: “You guys think Shen’s dialogue is offensive? You need some 1962 Angela Lanbury Manchurian Candidate dialogue to toughen you up:

In the matter of last names ending with an “s”, a possessive apostrophe followed by a second “s” looks visually, fundamentally wrong. Submental even. I don’t care what the grammar rulebook says.

An all-but-forgotten Lenny Bruce skit. Recorded in ’58 or ’59. The interviewer (I think) is Ray Goulding, of Bob and Ray fame. Bruce authentically voices the sullen, soft-spoken musician, but doesn’t sound like himself at all. This is a truly hilarious bit if you listen to it ripped.

Oil-on-canvas portrait of Herman Eldridge Wells (1797-1871), painted by famed portraitist Thomas Sully sometime around 1835.

This is actually an AI creation by Surrealium…if I want to pay for a version that doesn’t have “surrealium” stamps across it, I can do that.

This was created within two minutes. If some rando software program had done this for free ten or even five years ago, it would have been a moderately big deal. Now it’s almost a ho-hummer. Surrealium is a legit Millenial operation out of Stockholm.

A week into the filming of The White Lotus‘s season #4, creator-director-writer Mike White decided that Helena Bonham Carter‘s character was “not aligning,” whatever the hell that means.

Deadline‘s Nellie Andreeva: “As production started and Carter shot her first scenes, White, who writes and directs each episode, felt that her character as originally conceived was not what it should be, sources said. With the role believed to be central to the Season 4 story, a decision was made to rework it and recast it.”

If I was a major producer or showrunner on this show…if I had asked why HBC has suddenly left the shoot and was told that her character was “not aligning”, I would say “okay, yeah, sure…but what actually happened, without the bullshit?”

White went to the trouble of landing Helena Bonham Carter for a central role in the latest series and then, after a week of shooting, went “uh-oh…not working”? Either White didn’t write HBC’s character as fully or exactingly as he should have, or HBC couldn’t get a handle on the character, or it was a combination of the two.

Boiled down, either White screwed things up or Carter couldn’t bring whatever he was looking for.

Please tell me of any theatrical film or major limited series that cut loose a major actor because things weren’t “aligning” or blah-dee-blah. I’m not saying this hasn’t happened before — I just can’t think of any particular instances.

If Lena Dunham rebooted Girls in 2026 pic.twitter.com/qqEKZLmHR2

— Charles Curran (@charliebcurran) April 24, 2026