Arts & Culture

“You know what freedom is? No fear,” says Benicio Del Toro’s Sensei Sergio in One Battle After Another, inspiring Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson to face an authoritarian manhunt right on his family’s tail. While both Bob and Sergio are, in certain senses, doomsday preppers, they react quite differently to an impending threat. And how we react when we feel under threat makes a big difference, both to our own wellbeing and to the movements we care about.

In the film, Bob is an in-hiding former member of the far-left revolutionary group called the French 75. For the last 16 years, while raising his daughter Willa in the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross, he’s lived with an intense paranoia about her safety and the potential of his old life coming back to haunt them both. 

Oscar season hasn’t even started, and 2025 is already shaping up to be a strong year at the movies. We’ve seen small-budget standouts, from the thought-provoking body horror of Together to the empathetic dramedy of Sorry, Baby. Even the superhero blockbusters—Superman, Fantastic Four—had more to say about justice and community than I’ve come to expect from spandex cinema. And then there was Sinners, which was perfect.

“I keep hoping that gets easier,” one character in The Long Walk says, shortly after witnessing the gruesome execution of a companion. Still visibly shaken, Cooper Hoffman’s character Ray Garraty replies: “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

A 2025 film adapted from the 1979 novel by Stephen King, The Long Walk depicts a dystopian near future where young boys from all over the United States voluntarily compete in a contest to walk at 3 mph continuously across hundreds of miles—with those who repeatedly fall below the pace being shot dead until there is one winner of glory and riches.

Why is it that, in our current era, the most emotionally resonant art often lurks behind the silliest premise? It has become something of a running joke in the rapidly emerging KPop Demon Hunters fan community that the movie, on the basis of the title alone, is incredibly difficult to recommend to people without being laughed off. KPop Demon Hunters may have a campy hook, but it explores ideas that cut to the heart of human experience.

KPop Demon Hunters is about Huntr/x, a trio of Korean singers whose pop star status conceals their true role as mystical demon hunters tasked with creating a supernatural barrier called the Honmoon. Through the power of music, this Honmoon keeps soul-consuming demons at bay from the world. When the evil demon king Gwi-Ma sends a demon boy band called the Saja Boys to fight fire with fire (or pop song with pop song,) our heroes’ defense against the demon army begins to break. And the darkest secret? Rumi, the group’s lead singer and the film’s protagonist, is actually part-demon herself.

 “At their best, my videos are life-changing,” CJ The X tells me, with a laugh that acknowledges the immensity of the claim. From the mouths of many other internet creators, this statement might sound ludicrous—but the comments on CJ’s channel will reveal that they are not exaggerating.  

“Every CJ The X video gives me about 5 metaphysical panic attacks before giving me some sort of closure,” one commenter remarked.  

Hearing about the news of James Dobson’s death reminded me of a conversation I recently had with my sister while we were making our way to an Ethel Cain concert.

We were conversing as we hurried to the car, excited to profess our love to Willoughby Tucker, and I told my sister she was the only reason I knew about Ethel Cain—whose real name is Hayden Anhedönia. We then indulged in some cynical jokes about the “woke” impulse to cancel Anhedönia because of old social media posts, which she has since apologized for and described as “deeply shameful and embarrassing.”

I didn’t expect church to be the place where I learned 803Fresh’s “Boots on the Ground,” the latest line dance taking the nation by storm. The song, which currently has more than 14 million views on YouTube and is known for the refrain, “Where them fans at,” has been danced to by folks like Shaquille O'Neal, Ciara, Kamala Harris, Tina Knowles, and Michelle Obama. And it’s been performed everywhere, from trail rides to graduations, news broadcasts to talk shows. But when people started performing the line dance in church, not everyone was pleased.

“Some of these so call [sic] churches is night 🌙 clubs,” wrote one Facebook user in response to a viral video of a “Boots on the Ground” line dance performance at a small church. “Put them boots on the PASTOR and scoot him out of the church,” another wrote.

IT’S BEEN ALMOST a hundred years since God created The Three Stooges, who taught us the first rule of humor: If you can’t make people laugh with a joke, then hit each other over the head with a mallet. According to their cinematic archive, no job was too challenging to fail at spectacularly, including plumber, painter, carpenter, chef, and even surgeon. They could not succeed in these endeavors because they were utterly unqualified, a can’t-do attitude that fits right in with today’s Trump administration. But the good news is, any moment now we should start laughing.

In fact, had Moe, Curly, and Larry lived into their second century, they might have been chosen as members of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, ACIP for short. Since so many of RFK Jr.’s new hires have been sorely mistaken as respected experts in the field of immunology, why not The Three Stooges, whose disqualifying ineptitude could stand shoulder to shoulder with their own.

The original members of ACIP were summarily dismissed for — as far as we can tell — a strong commitment to scientific inquiry and making fact-based decisions. Also, their surprising aversion to prescribing Vitamin A as a wonder cure. (RFK Jr. is a huge vitamin A fan. He can’t get enough of it. Nor, apparently, can he get enough time in tanning beds despite the proven risk of melanoma. To his credit, RFK Jr. will put up looking tanned and fit against a cancer risk any day.)

Once, a woman told me the closest thing she had to a religion was speculative fiction. Just as spiritual practices do for many believers, reading Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler helped her face the haunting edge of humanity’s knowledge, those parts of being alive that refuse explanation.

It’s this confrontation with mystery that Megan Giddings places at the center of her captivating novel Meet Me at the Crossroads. Seven doors appear around the world, each opening to a beautifully warped alternative dimension. Those who walk through these doors see meadows peppered with gold stones and orange deserts under purple skies — but they don’t always come back. Once people realize that the doors are “uncontrollable, unkillable and unknowable,” most ignore them or call them a hoax, aside from a few fringe religious groups. Woven with plenty of heart, this story is not so much about the nature of the unknown as the complicated ways people cope with it.

In Michigan, twins Ayanna and Olivia grow up near one of the doors, developing contrasting ideas of its meaning. Ayanna lives with their father, who raises her in a marginalized faith community that reveres the door as a divine invitation to embrace mystery. Olivia lives with their mother, a Catholic who rejects her ex-husband’s religion as heretical. Amid the tense family dynamics, the sisters remain close until, upon entering the door as teenagers, Olivia disappears.