Sebastian Stan is tired of Marvel movie backlash. The actor, who has played Bucky Barnes in the MCU since 2011’s “Captain America: The First Avenger,” once again lamented over Marvel being a punching bag in Hollywood, this time in an interview with GQ UK magazine. “I’ve never been part of a company that puts so […]
Jeremy Strong recently told the Los Angeles Times that “it’s absolutely valid” to criticize straight actors for playing gay characters, although he also strongly believes that it’s an actor’s job “to render something that is not necessarily your native habitat.” Strong stars as Donald Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn in “The Apprentice.” “Yes, it’s absolutely valid,” […]
HBO has released the trailer for Seth Meyers’ new comedy special “Dead Man Waking,” which premieres Oct. 26 on HBO and Max. According to an official logline, Meyers’ first HBO stand-up special sees him shift “focus to his personal life – from the chaos of raising three young kids, to navigating different communication styles in […]
Universal Pictures is turning the Sega video game “Shinobi” into a feature film. The studio has enlisted “Extraction” filmmaker Sam Hargrave and producer Marc Platt to adapt the hack-and-slash series for the big screen. Plot details haven’t been confirmed but “Shinobi” follows protagonist Joe Musashi as a modern-day ninja who confronts evil. It debuted in […]
The Santa Barbara International Film Festival has unveiled plans to open a new film center in Downtown Santa Barbara at the former location of the Fiesta Five theater. SBIFF expects the center to open Nov. 14. “This is one of the most important chapters in the history of SBIFF and just as we’re celebrating 40 […]
SPOILER ALERT: The following interview contains spoilers from “Valley of the Dolls,” Episode 7, Season 4 of “Only Murders in the Building,” now streaming on Hulu. A Suffolk County, Long Island safe house full of creepy dolls, past strife between a brother and sister and an epic living room fight? Those are only a few components […]
Jenna Fischer announced on Instagram that she was diagnosed with triple positive breast cancer last December and is now living cancer free after “completing surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.” “The Office” actor wrote that she was coming forward with her cancer journey as October is breast cancer awareness month. “Triple positive breast cancer is an aggressive […]
What comes after “After”? That’s what author Anna Todd has been thinking about a lot lately amid the 10th anniversary of the debut of her popular romance book series. When “After” launched on Oct. 21, 2014, Todd was a newcomer to the formal publishing industry and had gotten her start as a Wattpad writer, where […]
Walt Disney World and Universal Studios, two major theme parks in Orlando, are preparing to close as Florida braces for Hurricane Milton to hit as a major storm. Disney said it would shutter its theme parks and Disney Springs entertainment complex in phases beginning at 1 p.m. on Wednesday and will “likely” remain closed on […]
SPOILER ALERT: The following essay discusses key plot points of “Joker: Folie à Deux,” including the ending. It is intended to be read after (rather than instead of) seeing the film. I hated Todd Phillips’ original “Joker,” which made me feel like a crank when the hit anti(super)hero movie went on to earn the top […]
Nu-metal group Limp Bizkit has filed a lawsuit against its label Universal Music Group, alleging that the company deliberately withheld at least $200 million in unpaid royalties. The suit, filed today in Los Angeles’ Central District, claims that despite a growing resurgence in the band’s popularity, UMG has failed to pay them what they’re owed. […]
Many people may be surprised to learn the proper procedure for taking a blood pressure reading—because of how different it is from what happens during their doctor's appointments.
According to the American Heart Association and other medical experts, getting an accurate reading requires following a strict set of preparations: You must not eat, drink, exercise, or smoke within 30 minutes of a reading. You must have an empty bladder. You must sit straight up in a chair with back support. Your legs must be uncrossed and your feet must be flat on the ground. The arm to be measured must be rested on a flat surface so that it is at the same level as your heart, not lower, not higher. You must sit calmly, without talking for five minutes to relax before the reading. When it's time, an appropriately sized cuff should be wrapped around your bare upper arm, right above the elbow; it should never be wrapped over clothing. At least two readings should be taken, with the average recorded. Ideally, readings should be taken in both arms, with the highest readings recorded.
Deviations from this protocol have the potential to significantly alter your blood pressure reading—and your blood pressure category. For instance, putting the blood pressure cuff over clothing can raise your reading as much as 50 mm Hg. That's enough to make someone with early stage hypertension seem as if they're in a hypertensive crisis, at imminent risk of a stroke or heart attack. If you have to pee, the reading can be 15 mm Hg higher. Talking can raise it by 10 mm Hg.
We may not have to wait as long as we thought for the next test flight of SpaceX's Starship rocket.
The world's most powerful launcher could fly again as soon as Sunday, SpaceX says, assuming the Federal Aviation Administration grants approval. The last public statement released from the FAA suggested the agency didn't expect to determine whether to approve a commercial launch license for SpaceX's next Starship test flight before late November.
There's some optimism at SpaceX that the FAA might issue a launch license much sooner, perhaps in time for Starship to fly this weekend. The launch window Sunday opens at 7 am CDT (8 am EDT; 12:00 UTC), about a half-hour before sunrise at SpaceX's Starbase launch site in South Texas.
On a recent Sunday, a couple hundred politically engaged Floridians are sipping sparkling water and nibbling on Biscoff-crusted cheesecake bites at a posh golf club located along the state’s southeast coast. Not Mar-a-Lago. This event is 27 miles away, at the similarly lavish Boca Grove Golf and Tennis Club ($200,000 initiation fee, $45,000 annual dues).
At this point, Hurricane Milton has not formed. Hurricane Helene is still four days from making landfall, and Florida Democratic chair Nikki Fried and Democratic Senate nominee Debbie Mucarsel-Powell are making the case to the Brooks Brothers–loving crowd that more auspicious winds—political ones—are sweeping the state.
Fried invites the large room of club members and guests to envision their living rooms as election results start to trickle in on November 5: “We’re all watching MSNBC, and we’ve got Steve Kornacki on the board…He stops for a second. He puts his finger to his ear and he says, ‘I have a prediction,’” Fried intones in the style of a yoga instructor setting the mood for Savasana. In her fantasy, Kornacki forecasts Florida going blue, “deliver[ing] the presidency to Kamala Harris.”
“I don’t think it’s a secret anymore,” says Mucarsel-Powell, who represented the Miami area in Congress between 2019 and 2021. “Florida is in play.”
Not long ago, these predictions would have been laughable. In the Spring, Donald Trump was polling ahead of then-opponent President Joe Biden by 11 points in the Sunshine State. Republican incumbent Sen. Rick Scott’s advantage over his Democratic challenger was also near the double digits. With GOP supermajorities in both state legislative chambers, and the state led by an autocrat-curious governor known for shipping migrants to Martha’s Vineyard and requiring public schools to teach that slaves benefited from their servitude, Florida seemed about as red as the sunburn that some tourists (but not me!) get on their first day there.
Up until late Summer, Democrats seemed to think Florida was a lost cause. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) had only invested about $1.2 million in the state party; that’s well under the average price of a single-family home in the Coral Gables region, not the cost of procuring a massive political triumph. But Florida has gotten more interesting lately. Last month, three polls showed Mucarsel-Powell within a single percentile of Scott. A few large surveys also showed Harris within the margin of error for Florida’s 30 electoral votes. After Harris became the presumptive nominee in July, more than 45,000 Floridians signed up to volunteer their efforts toward electing Democratic candidates like Harris and Mucarsel-Powell.
“The surge was like Helene,” Hillsborough County Democratic Party chair Ione Townsend says of the numbers. “Fast and huge.”
At least part of the momentum is thanks to two April decisions made by the conservative state Supreme Court. First, the conservative judges ruled that a six-week abortion ban could take effect in May, putting the consequences of the Trump-induced overturning of Roe v. Wade in plain sight. Second, Floridians would get to weigh in on a ballot measure to enshrine abortion rights into their state constitution in November, motivating infrequent voters to participate in the election. Biden’s July withdrawal from the presidential race and endorsement of Vice President Harris to succeed him was another tree-shaking upheaval that boosted Democratic momentum nationwide.
In the last couple of weeks, Mucarsel-Powell has also seen an unwitting assist from three-term incumbent Sen. Jon Tester, whose slippage in the polls against a rich Republican challenger in Montana has the party petrified. Democrats were counting on Tester to keep control of the upper chamber; now they need alternatives. Texas and Florida are the only two states where Democrats stand a chance of unseating incumbent GOP senators, according to ratings by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. Scott has begun taking note: On Thursday, NBC News reported Scott was planning a $10 million advertisement buy in Florida’s metropolitan areas. That’s roughly as much as Mucarsel-Powell spent on her whole campaign through the end of July, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, now the Democratic nominee for US Senate in Florida, speaks at a Biden-Harris 2024 campaign press conference in Miami, Florida, on November 7, 2023.Marco Bello/AFP/Getty
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is lending a hand. The group announced in late September a “multi-million dollar investment in television advertising” focused on Texas and Florida. The DSCC is still trying to boost Tester, too. It stated a couple weeks earlier that it was spending $25 million on direct voter contact programs across 10 states, including Montana, Texas, and Florida. The DSCC did not specify exactly how much money it was allotting to each state.
Additionally, the independent reproductive rights campaign “Yes on 4” is spending millions on canvassing and advertising to turn out voters in support of reproductive rights, a cause Democratic candidates and most of their supporters emphatically endorse. But it’s a bit of an awkward dance: Florida’s new abortion restrictions have inspired a broad range of voters, including Republicans and independents. Leaders of the ballot measure want to engage them too, and therefore are trying to keep Democratic candidates at an arm’s length from their own organizing. But Democratic candidates, roused by the ballot measure’s widespread support, long to capitalize on the popular effort. The Harris campaign notes that the uptick in new volunteers in Florida predominantly consists of women, for example.
“You can’t go and want to support Amendment Four and still vote for these Republicans who took away this right, and would continue to take away this right,” argued Fried on a recent press call.
Democratic candidates in Florida tend to bring up reproductive rights within a few minutes of speaking to crowds. But you won’t see Floridians Protecting Freedom, the umbrella coalition working to pass the abortion ballot measure, brag about any ideological overlap with Democrats.
That’s out of necessity. Amending Florida’s constitution requires a 60 percent voter threshold. While several conservative-majority states—Ohio, Kentucky, and Kansas—have voted to protect abortion access in recent election cycles, none have achieved that high of a percentage. (Kansas was closest, at 59 percent). There are 1 million more registered Republicans in Florida than there are Democrats, and non-affiliated voters make up a quarter of the pie, too. It would be mathematically impossible for three-fifths of voters to support Issue 4 through registered Democratic voters alone.
Florida has routinely passed ballot measures, including on controversial topics, with bipartisan support: In 2018, Floridians far exceeded the 60 percent threshold on a ballot measure to restore voting rights to felons, and in 2020, the state narrowly passed an initiative gradually increasing the minimum wage to $15. That’s what Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition executive director Anna Hochkammer is trying to replicate.
Fortunately for her strategy, and much to Mucarsel-Powell’s dismay, “Florida has a history of passing what could be considered progressive policy referenda,” Hochkammer says, “while simultaneously electing very conservative people at the top of the ticket.”
Like Hochkammer, Mucarsel-Powell is also vying for the support of independents and Republicans. “There’s a huge group of independent voters in our state that will determine this election,” she tells me in Boca. “When they hear about me and what I want to do for the state, they come to me pretty quickly.”
Republicans have concerns about the border, for example. So does she.
“We have these communist dictatorships. They’re narco regimes. There’s a criminal organized crime network. This is true. It sounds like I’m talking about a movie, but it’s not. It’s real, and it’s happening with Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Ecuador,” she says.
It’s personal for her. She migrated from Ecuador with her mom and three older sisters when she was 14. She still has family there. Her dad, who stayed behind, was killed by gun violence when she was 24. “If you’re a mom and you’re trying to escape violence and murder in your country, you’re going to do everything you can to bring your children to this country for safety,” she says. “I mean, it’s one of the reasons why my mom brought us here.”
If Republicans really wanted to solve the “crisis at the border”—her choice of words—Mucarsel-Powell argues they would have gone through with the Senate bipartisan border control funding bill steered by Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.). Instead, after Trump said that only a “Radical Left Democrat” would vote for it, Republicans pulled their support in February. (If it passed, it would have been the largest and most aggressive border bill in decades).
“It’s very dangerous to allow the trafficking of drugs into the country. You had an opportunity to do something about it, and you refused to for your own gain,” she says, referring to Republicans.
Her upbringing in Ecuador also influences her perspective on reproductive rights—a major focus of her Barbie-pink branded campaign. Had she never left, she imagines she would have “probably married a little too young” and “maybe had more kids than I have now.”
She compares what is happening in her state to the high rates of sexual violence, bodily harm, and maternal mortality that occur in Latin America. “That’s the reality that we’re now facing in Florida,” she says. (Ironically, some countries in Latin America are expanding reproductive rights as US states reduce access.)
Mucarsel-Powell pins the blame on her opponent, reminding voters that Scott said he would have signed the six-week abortion ban into law if he was still governor; that Scott once co-sponsored a national abortion ban that would have imprisoned clinicians who provide abortion care; and that Scott has twice, including last month, voted against a Senate bill to protect IVF access.
After my Sunday with the underdog Senate candidate in South Florida, I head north, planning to interview leaders from Floridians Protecting Freedom and shadow volunteers canvassing for abortion rights on Wednesday. Hurricane Helene, nearing the state’s Gulf Coast, had different plans. So I instead interview the campaign’s director, Lauren Brenzel, from a rented Kia Forte in the parking lot of a combination casino-rest-stop off of 1-75.
Brenzel doesn’t want to talk about Democratic races: “It’s just not related to us. None of the federal solutions for abortion access have immediately impacted Florida, so we just aren’t involved in candidate races, because the solution for Florida’s abortion ban is based on constitutional protections for abortion which are only available through direct democracy.”
I try again, asking about the possibility that a GOP-controlled Congress or Trump-controlled White House tries to enact national restrictions, or use the Comstock Act to ban mailing medications used for abortions and miscarriage management. Those things would impact Floridians even if their ballot measure was successful. “We just aren’t focused on the national landscape at all for this,” she says, matter-of-factly.
She is instead laser-focused on Florida’s peninsular shape. During our interview, Brenzel kindly but vigorously suggests I get out of Florida as fast as I can to avoid getting caught up in the catastrophic flooding and flight stoppages that would result from Helene, which made landfall as a Category 4 storm in late September and has so far claimed more than 225 lives. “Abby, I’m warning you. Go now,” she says. “The geography of our state is so unfriendly.”
Surrounded by water on three of four sides, it can be time-intensive and expensive to get to other states from Florida. That is true for escaping both hurricanes and strict abortion bans, Brenzel points out. “You can’t go east, south or west,” she said. “You’re surrounded by ban states.” The closest alternatives, where abortion is legal beyond six weeks, are seeing greater patient volume than clinics can accommodate. Often, Floridians in need of care end up flying to Washington, DC, or New York, “because they can’t get appointments in North Carolina or Virginia.”
Reproductive rights activists participate in the “Rally for Our Freedom” to protect abortion rights for Floridians, in Orlando, on April 13, 2024. Chandan Khanna—AFP via Getty Images
For those who want or need abortions in a clinic, traveling is often the only option. Gestational ages are not based on the actual date of conception but from the first day of a patient’s last menstrual cycle. By the time someone misses their period, they have two weeks to discover their pregnancy, get into a clinic to confirm it, and then schedule an abortion before the six-week window closes. Doctors attest these restrictions are not just logistically and financially challenging; for some patients, they prevent lifesaving medical care. While the six-week ban allows clinicians to end pregnancies if their patient faces a “serious” risk of substantial, irreversible injury or impairment, the law is hazy on what constitutes “serious.”
A September report from the national nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights shared a recent, real-life example of the uncertainties caused by this law from a Florida OB-GYN whose patient previously suffered a spontaneous coronary artery dissection after her last pregnancy. This woman was pregnant again and her medical team believed she had about a 10 percent chance of experiencing another spontaneous dissection, which would almost certainly kill her the second time around.
“I had to sit before five or six or seven hospital administrators and make an argument for this woman,” the OB-GYN told researchers. “I had to hear these people say, ‘Well, is 10 percent a lot? Is that enough?’” Hospital administrators ultimately agreed the patient’s risk was serious, but it took two-plus weeks to get approval to end her life-threatening pregnancy.
After a long drive through the everglades Tuesday, I stop by the Harris-Walz field office in Tampa. There were some other abortion ballot measure events I considered attending in Orlando and Jacksonville, but those would have involved hundreds more miles of driving.
This isn’t merely my personal gripe. It’s also a challenge for Mucarsel-Powell and Harris. Florida has several major metropolitan areas spread throughout the state. They aren’t just far apart, making campaign stops difficult. They are also exorbitantly expensive places to buy advertisements.
Texas, where the race between incumbent Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and Democratic challenger Colin Allred was just updated by Cook Political Report from “likely” in Cruz’s favor to the more-competitive “leans” in his direction, presents similar geographical challenges. “Texas-sized” is a phrase for a reason, and the state also has high-priced media markets. A large, mid-September Morning Consult poll of nearly 3,000 likely voters showed Allred ahead of Cruz by one point, but a downside to Democrats making major national investments in Texas over Florida is that support for Harris is lower in Texas. Very few, if any analysts, are putting a question mark by Texas’ 40 Electoral College votes.
Florida Democrats would argue there are other signs Florida deserves more national attention. Harris’ husband and ultimate wife-guy, Doug Emhoff, made a campaign stop at the sprawling Villages retirement community in September, calling Harris a “badass” and warning how a second Trump presidency would imperil the state’s high population of seniors; Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison has made the trek south several times; and in a media call late last month, Fried announced the DNC was immediately infusing $400,000 into Florida in support of Democrats. “I think we have the enthusiasm that the Republicans don’t have,” says Townsend, the party chair from Hillsborough.
Case in point is Florida Democrats volunteer Susan Quinn. A now-retired sales representative and New Jersey native, Quinn says she “would have obviously voted for Joe Biden,” but wasn’t as excited for him. Now, Quinn is phone-banking for Harris and contributing cash down the Democratic ballot. “This is probably the most I’ve ever given financially to campaigns,” she tells me at the campaign outpost, “because I’m feeling there’s a chance to actually affect this.”
It would take a lot of Susans to flip Florida, including at the Senate level. The biggest barrier to that is still money. “We’re not a battleground state, so we’re not seeing the kind of infusion that the seven battleground states are,” Townsend laments.
Mucarsel-Powell is working on that. By the time I fly out of Florida on Tuesday night to dodge Helene, the candidate is in New York for a fundraiser. She has a lot of ground to make up: As of the last FEC filing period, Scott’s $20 million in spending across the campaign was double that of Mucarsel-Powell.
As the candidate puts it, electing Mucarsel-Powell wouldn’t just be one of the limited ways the party can protect their control of the US Senate—it could also protect Floridians’ control over their bodies. “It will mean nothing if they vote to pass this ballot amendment and enshrine in the state’s constitution a woman’s right to her reproductive health care,” she told me back in April, “if then they elect Rick Scott, send him back to the Senate, and then he pushes for a national abortion ban.”
It appears as though Mark Robinson is hellbent on his apparent refusal to take emergency action in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
Following the North Carolina lieutenant governor’srole as the sole lawmaker to skip a vote on North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper’s request to declare a state of emergency before Helene struck late last month, Robinson, also the Republican gubernatorial candidate, was onceagain the only official to fail to respond to Cooper’s executive order to increase relief efforts.
According to CBS17, each member ofNorth Carolina’s Council of State had 48 hours to respond to Cooper’s call for action on Saturday. But Robinson did not respond. Robinson’s newly hired chief of staff, Krishna Polite, told the news outlet on Tuesday that Robinson had supported the order, but it went awry because Roy’s formal request was sent to former staff members.
Robinson’s team did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.
Robinson’s campaign has been inundated with chaos in recent months, with half of his staff quitting following a CNN report connecting to him racist and sexually explicit remarks on a pornographic message board. That includedcomments declaringhimself a “black NAZI!” and referring to Mein Kampf as a “good read.” But Robinson has remained defiant, refusing to bow out of the race in the face of multiple controversies.
That defiance, or at least Robinson’s refusal to accept responsibility, appears to extend to his Helene response.After missingthe initial state of emergency vote, Robinson posted on X: “Democrats like Cooper, [North Carolina Attorney General] Josh Stein & Joe Biden want to hide behind bureaucratic resolutions that pass automatically—instead of getting out there and working to help people in dire need. I won’t stand for this.”
Though his recent controversies may have shocked people at the national level, Cooper, a Democrat, may not be so surprised. In July, the North Carolina governor explained at an event for land conservation that he dropped out of the running to be Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate because he was worried about the damage Robinson could do if he leftoffice. (North Carolina’s state constitution says, “During the absence of the Governor from the State…the Lieutenant Governor shall be Acting Governor.”)
“This was not the right time for our state or for me,” Cooper said at the time. “We had concerns that he would try to seize the limelight…and that would be a real distraction to the presidential campaign.”
Cooper’s latest executive order supports recovery from Hurricane Helene by increasing the number of professional health care workers and making emergency medications more readily available.
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