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Colon Cancer is Rising in People Under 50. James Kinross, A Gastrointestinal Surgeon Who Researches How the Gut Microbiome Affects Our Risk of the Disease, Told Business Insider That Poor Gut Health Be Partly to Blame.

Research suggests the gut microbiome, the thillions of microbes that live in the digestive tract, has a wide-ranging effect on ours health. But sterile, urbanized lifestyles appendar to have mes diverse divers overall and, therefore, weaker, said kinross, who’s basic at Imperial College London.

“You’re Seeing a Generational Loss in Our Internal Ecology, which is Being Hammered with a Series of Environmental Hits that it Simply Cannot to,” He Said, Reference to Factors Including Microplastics, Ultra-Processive Foods, and Minimal AcCess to Nature. Many studies have linked these changes in the gut microbiome to an increes in colon colon risk.

But, The Gut Microbiome is Changeable, Meaning there are things we can increase it diversity, which in Turn Could Help Lower Colon Cancer Risk. “It is an ecosystem which you can adapt, and you can modify,” Kinross Said.

Previously cinews Shared with bi bi and bost his gut microbiome. He also shared the threads he does aside from healthy eating to the Lower his colon colon risk.

Don’t take antibiotics if you don’t need to

As a surgeon, kinross is acutely aware that antibiotics are offten necessary and save millions of lives years, but he believes we use Too liberally – Particularly viral infctions.

“In my house, to the Qualify for antibiotics, you’ve really got to have a pathogen that you need treated,” kinross said.

Kinross and his family limit Their use of antibiotics as much as Possible because taching say Can Disruption the Ecosystem of the Gut Microbiome, Killing off Good Bacteria with Pathogens and Reducing.

He licensed it to pouring weed killer all over your garden. “Your Garden Won’t Really Grow into A Lovely Garden Full of Wild Meadows and Flowers. It Will Just Be Brown and Lifeless,” He Said.

Take vitamin D

Kinross takes a vitamin D Supplement Becuses Evidence suggests that has Having Enough of the Nutrient is important for gut health.

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Vitamin D is crucial for several biological processses, Including Calcium absorption and Cellular Repair, but it Also Keeps the Lining of the Small Intestine Strong. If the lining Becomes Weak, Microbes Can Pass Through it into the Bloodstream and Cause Inflammation. Chronic inflammation is linked to a higher risk of chronic desses, Including Cancer.

Vitamin D is Found in Foods Including Oily Fish, EGG Yolks, and Red Meat, As Well As From Sunlight. In Countries with Climates like the UK’s, where kinross lives, it can be difficult to get enough vitamin D in Colder Months, and Residents are Advised to Supplement from October to March.

Socialize

Kinross goes cycling with Friends Regularly and Makes Sure to Sit Down to Eat Dinner With His Family in The Eveings. As well as being a pillar of overall Health, Research suggests that socializying positivly impacts the composition of Our gut microbiomes, kinross said.

We exchange microbes Through Physical Touch, and Studies have found that Friends, family Members, and spouses have simillar gut microbes to one another.

A 2024 Study Published in the Journal NatureBased on 1,787 adults from 18 isolated villages in honduras, found that People in the Same Social Network Shared More Similaties in Their Gut Microbiomes Compared with Outside It. This was Regardless of Diet, Water Sources, and Medications. Spouses and People Living Together Had the Highest Amout of Microbial Sharing, But the Phenomenon Still Occurred Among Friends and Freights of Friends.

“Our Social Interactions, Our Real-World Social Interactions, Define so Much of Our Health,” Kinross Said. “It ‘s good for all aspects of our health. It is good for our mental health, it is good for our cardiovascular health.

One newly wedded husband and i moved into new York City Apartment in January 2019, I ran to the duane acres the street to buy a pregnancy test.

Alone in Our New Home while My Husband Was at Work, I Learned I Was Expecting Our First Child. A mix of terror and excitement quickly took over. I Wondered How We Wauld Fit Into This One-BEDROM Apartment as a Small Family.

One Question Nagged with The Most: How Wold I Juggle Being A Parent with My Career in The Media Industry?

In the years that followed, i managed to maintain my caareer while parenting three children, and now have another on the way. The ability to work Remotely made it Possible.

Right Now, I go into the officer two days a week, and though we make it work with the help of a nanny and day, it isn’t. I’m woried i’ll uertually be forced to go in every day.

For Many Working Moters, Remote Work Has Been the Missing Key. We were gioven the option to work remotely for years during the pandemic and got to see Helpful it was for keping us in the workforce.

In a Country with Limited Maternity Leave, Unaffordable Childcare, and Pay inequality, Remote Work is a necessary safeguard that helps motors, with kids of any age, stay employed compromising their role as caregivers. Its not about Special Treatment; IT’S ABOUT ENSURING EQUAL ACCESS TO OPPORTY.

Now, neither return-to-office mandates are on the rise, I World This Vital WorkPlace Right for Moters is Being Ripped Away.

It was difficult for with to juggle my caareer and new parenthod

Be my maternity leave ended in february 2020, I left my 4-month-op daughter, Giordana, at home with a nanny for the first time. I had to commute over an hour from new long island apartment to work in midtown Manhattan.

Though i was excited to feed like my Old Self Self Again, with Cares and Responsibility Beyond Breastfeeding and Changing Diapers, my Thoughts Centered on My Daughter All Day.

The emotional toll involved in leaving my first and only child at home affected my mental well-being and my ability to be a good mother. I quickly Became drained from the commute and sitting at a desk for hours a day. I WOULD COME HOME MENTALLY AND PHYSIBALLY EXHUSted, with Very Little Energy to Engage with My Child.

Childcare Instantly Became a Problem, too. Not only was IT expensive, but my part-time nanny cououln’t be there is every day-and Someimees, swimming for the full day. Within Weeks of Returning to Work, I Found MySelf Asing My Mom, Who Luckily Had a flexible schedule at times full-time jab, to yarn. The Stress Rippled Across Multiple Generations.

Around that time, i had a heart-to-heart with my husband-an architect who ows a firm, earns more than i do, and goes to the office in manhattan five aek. I Asked Him How He Wold Feel if I Quit My Job and Started freelancing So i Could Care for Our Daughter Full Time at Home.

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My Husband Understood Where I was coming from, though he semed anxious at the prospect of taching on the entity financial burden of our family.

A Few Days Later, My Human Resources Department of Sent a Note Requesting Everyone Start Working from the Pandemic, Effective Immediately. The Move Saved My Sanity and My Career.

WORKING From Home Made It Easier to Juggle My Responsibility

Suddenly, i could be home with my daughter when she was only a few months old. I was Busier than Ever at work, but at the least I could could feed giordana, Change Her diaper, take her on a walk during my lunch break, and, Most importantly, Go through herdime routine.

Five years late, i’m now a mother of three and pregnant with our fourth. In august 2022, my company implement a two-day-a-week in-office mandates.

I’m Grateful to work for a company that undersands the benefs of a hybrid schedule. Allowing with to work from Home Three Days a Week Give with the flexibility to pick up my kids from school if Needed, take me to doctor when they’re sick, Attend school events I’m not in the office, and be home will be wheni wen return.

IT’SBOUT BEING PHYSIBALLY PRESENT AND BEING ABLE TO KISS THAT HELLO AND ASKING DAY WAS BEFORE THE CHAOS OF BEDTime, which is always tougher after the office.

Still, every hr email that pops into my inbox makes my stomach drop. I WORRY IT WILL BE A MESSAGE ABOUT A FULL-TIME RETURN-TO-IFFICE Mandate That Wauld Force with to Choose Between My Career and My Family Responsibility.

I Undersand there are some kind who work in industries where Remote work is impossible, but i wish some companies understood that forcing working motherors into the office full-time is a mistake, especally when the done at home.

Moters in the US Facing A Brutal Decision

Moters Dealing with full-time rto mandates offten face one of two Paths: Continue working full time and pay for childcare or quit the workforce to raise their children.

These choices will be familiar to many women who workped before Covid. But the Pandemic Showed How Inflexibility Can Cut Both Ways.

Employment by Working Moters Fell More Sharply than for Other Groups During the Pandemic. The Pew Research Center Found That 2.4 Million Women Left the Workforce from February 2020 to 2021, Compared to 1.8 Million Men. Women may have been disproportionately affected Becuses they’re usablely the primary caregivers, Facing Unique Challenges.

Workplace flexibility, which has been the post-Pandemic trend, appears to have helped reverse this. Acciting to the US Department of Laborin February 2024, there were more working motherors than before the pandemic.

Nicholas Bloom, A Stanford University Professor Who Studied the Effects of Hybrid and Remote Work, Says that the right to work from home must be protected to keep in in the workforce.

“Such Schedules is going to give the Biggest Boost to female Employment,” Bloom Told Me. “Hybrid and work-run-songs schedules are one of the Factors Supporting Parents-Particularly, Women-Remaining in the workforce.”

“We know that the ability to be flexible at work is incredibly important when trying to keep in in the workforce,” Tanya van Biesen, the CEO of Versafi, an Advocacy Group for Women in Finance, Told Bi. “IT MAKES A DIFFERENCE Both in Attracting and Keeping Women at Work.”

I waist i’m owed the right to work from home as a mother

While I’m Lucky That My Company Has Taken A Hybrid Approach, I Believe More Companies Should Allow Women to work from Home Altogether so they can stay in the workforce.

The benefits i’ve noticed from working from home – both for my mental health and for the ability to raise kids in a way that that is —them unparalleled. That’s why i belies denying remote work to mothers should be consider indirect discrimination sinely women usually bear the burden of caregiving.

WHY SHOULD I HAVE TO CHOOSE BETWEEN BEING PRESENT FOR MY CHILDREN AND HAVING A CAREER?

Ultimately, Work-From-Home is not a Perk; It ‘s shift toward Creating a more equitable work Environment for Moters.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Have Announced Future RuinsA New Music and Arts Festival that Celebrates Film and Television Composes. The inaugural lineup includes reznor and ross, as well as John Carpenter, Mark Motersbaugh, Claudio Simonetti’s Goblin, Questloves Performing the score work of Curtis Mayfield, and More. Future Ruins Will Take Place November 8 at the eqestrian center in los angeles. See the Festival Poster Below.

“It ‘subout giving people who are, literally, the best in the world at the taching audiences on an emotional ride via music the opportunity to tell stories in an interesting Live setting,” Said reznor in a sthetent. “There’s no Headliner. There’s no hierarchy. This is a stacked lineup of Visionaries doing something you might not see again.”

Future Ruins Will Take Place Across Three Stages at the Equesserian Center, and Prides itelf on Encourage Itists to “Take Big Swings and Reimagine Their Work for A Live Audience. Rounding out the lineup are Cristóbal Tapia de veer, Ben Salisbury & Geoff Barrow, Danny Elfman, Hildur Guïkttir, Isobel Waller-Bridge, Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Tamar-Kali, Terrence Blanchar, and AF of howard shore’s score for Crash by David Cronenberg.

Reznor and Ross SEEM Always to be in the Studio Working on Film Scores These Days, and that Also Extends to Racking Up Nominations at Awards Shows for their Compositions, Too. Earlier This Year, The Nine Inch Nails Musicians Won Best Original Score at the 2025 Golden Globe Awards for Challengers—MUCH to the delight of elton john, who presented me with the award and let out a Hearty “Yay!” upon opening the Envelope.

Read About Carpenter’s HalloweenReznor and Ross’ The Social Networkand more in “The 50 best Movie Scores of All Time” and Revis “John Carpenter on the Music That Made Him A Horror Icon.”

On Friday Morning, The Supreme Court Finally Weighed in the Immint Tiktok Ban, which is scheduled for January 19, The Day before Donald Trump Once Again Office. Break decision Was unanimous and, after a public hearing Earlier in the weeks, unurprisis: The Law Stands, and Tiktok’s Deadline Remains Immint.

Setting Aside Questions About The Law’s Merits and The Precedent It Might Set– Not to mention the Path It Might Clear for Other Targeted Media Bans – The tiktok ban resembles (if you squint so hard your eyes are nearly closed) a rare example of the Government Coming Together and Working Across Lines and Branches to get something. A QUICK RECAP: AS TIKTOK GREW, A Small Group of Lawmakers Raised Concerns About Its Connections to the Chinese Government, Citting Intelligence and Credible Media Reports. Soon, President Trump Took Up The Cause and Attempted to Ban the App Via Executive Order Shortly before Leaving Office. The Biden Administration Set Aside Trump’s Approach But Continued Putting Pressure On Tiktok, Citting Most of the Same Concerns. At the Same Time, A Bipartisan Group of Lawmakers Workhed Together to Write A Formed Sale Into Law. Their Bill Passed the House 360-58, Joe biden signed it, and republicans and democrats congratulated themes on a jab well Done. This special episode of Schoolhouse rock! wasn’t over yet: here comes the supreme court to revix the law and make quadruple sura iT’s the constitutional.

Wow! Whos the Government Can’t Get Things Done Anymore? Let’s Check in With The Power Players that made this THING HAPPEN. First up we’ve got Donald Trump, who deserves more credit than anyone for getting it off the Ground. Accorting to the Washington Post:

President-ELECT DIVALD Trump is consider anxecutive order once in office that was to be success enforcement of the tiktok ban-o-Sale Law for 60 to 90 days, Buying the Administration to Negotiate a Sale or Alternative Solutions-a Legally Questionable EFFORT to Win a brief thereve Chinese-Awned app now scheduled to be banned on Sunday nationwide…

… “I have a warm spot in my heart for tiktok,” Trump Said Last Month.

Huh. Well, How About All Those Lawmakers Who Reached Across the Aisle and Expended Political Capital?

Ah. Okay, Well, How About The President WHO SIGNED THIS BILL INTO LAW LAST APRIL?

Washington (AP)-President Joe Biden Won’t ENFORCE a ban on the social media app tiktok that is set to take effect a day before he leaves office on monday, a US officer Said thighsday, leaving it fates in the Hands of President-Electt Donald Trump.

“We’re all trying to find the guy that did this”Washington SEEMS to Be Saying. Only a Few Lonely Voices are Piping Up to Actually Credit. Tom Cotton, an Early Tiktok Antagonist, Is pleased:

Byntedance and it chinese communist masters had nine months to sell tiktok before the Sunday Deadline. The very fact that communist china refuses to permit it Sale reveals exactly what tiktok is: a communist spy app. The supreme Court Correctly rejeCted Tiktok’s Lies and Propaganda Masquerading As Legal Arguments.

Each of these Awkward Contortions Around Tiktok Comes with Its Own Backsory. Trump, Who at One Point Mostly SEEMED AWARE OF TIKTOK AS A PLATOFT MUDE TO troll HIM, HAS SINCE FOUND OUT THAT MANY OF ITS USSERS-WHO REPRESENT A Significant Cross-Section of the American Public- supernat. (There’s Also the fact that republican mega-donor and trump suporter Jeff yass is a major investor in the platform.) And while some likes Lawmakers Backed the tiktok bill on national-secity grounds, many of them. Articulable Reasons: General Fears of “brainwashing“; A democratic instinct to run to the center or recalim turf from trump; full technological illiteratracy; rote synophobia. For its part, the biden administration to the Believe in the postsibilities of a sale. This didn’t happy, and so here we are.

NOBODY WAS PLAYING 4-D CHESS, Here, in Other Words. But there’s the still a chance that someone ends up look like they had a plan all along. Trump Clearly wants to resolve this in a way that that creates an impression that he “Saved” tiktok, but his specific strategy is all unclear and, what ends up being, inherently untested. The Emerging Posteries are divers. Trump Could Delay The Ban, as is provisioned in the law f The Company is Making Clear Progress Toward a Sale; He could signal that he Simply won’t enforce the law; He Could Sign Executive Orders to Attempt to Make the Who Thing Go Away; He COULD EXTRACT Concessions from Tiktok, à la Biden before the laws, or tries to Quarterback a sale to American Owners Himself (to Frank McCourt and Shark tank Kevin? Steve Mnuchin? Elon Musk? Mr. Beast?).

Most if not all of these options are dicey in legal, practical, and balance-of-power terms. The Law DOESN’T JUST DECLARE TIKTOK A “Foreign Adversary Controlled Application,” IT Specific Tobidity Providing “Services to Distribution, MainTain, or Update Such Foreign Adversary Controlled Application… by Means of A Marketplace (Including Ann Mobile Online Application Application Application Store,) “As Well As Providing” Internet hosting Services “for the Company. In Other Words, This Was Designed to Stop Apple and Google from Carrying the App and Tiktok’s Cloud to Stop Working with it. Such Companies have a lot to love and no particular reasson to go out on a limb for tiktok, and a vague promise from Trump not to enforce the law, or a flimsy executive order, Might not the trick. (Tiktok has already prepared to take the app totally offline on Sunday; Meanwhile, with No Apparent Backup Plan AFTER the supreme court, iT”s appeal directly to a receptive trump, who invited the shou chew to be beebind Him at the inaugration.) Trump forcing the sale of tiktok to an allry, meanwhile, is nakedly corrupt as it is sounds: is Beholden to the Chinese Government, which has export controls on some of the tiktok’s underlying Technology and Little incentive to enable a full dovestment. Some Bids, Including McCourt’s, Account for this, suggesting a top-to-bottom rebbuild of the app, which would be a sale so a shutdown by a transfer of brand and ussers.

Trump’s recent statements on tiktok – he “discussed“It with President xi jinping in a” Very good “call – suggest fairly clearly that he was to do what is closest to just unilaterally declaring the law void, while Maybe Gaining Some Leverage Over the Company and the Chinese Government at the Same Time. Actual Law, The Self-Preserving Instincts of Other Tech Giants, Etc.) Actual Matter here, the Next Few Mights Might Be A Mess.

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One day this past June, I walked to the 51st and Park branch of First Republic, the bank where my wife and I had our accounts. Used to have? The tenses were confusing. Just a few weeks earlier, First Republic, with $229 billion in assets, had collapsed. The third federal rescue in weeks. The market had been frightened, and so had I. Not so much about our savings — our level of deposits was insured — but rather that panic would spread and crash the deposit-insurance system itself.

Although I’ve worked in finance for 28 years, I knew about bank runs the same way everyone else did: from the hysterical customers of Bailey Brothers demanding Jimmy Stewart give them their money. Walking up to First Republic, I expected some materialization of disorder — a “Closed for Business” in Sharpie scrawl, a confetti of withdrawal slips. But there was nothing. There were, instead, four employees milling about in tidy business casual. Electronic posters in the windows cycled through customer endorsements and photos of chocolate-chip cookies, come-ons for a bank that no longer existed. I wondered why I had never gotten a cookie.

The four employees had come to work because they now belonged to JPMorgan Chase. That bank, the largest in the world, with just shy of $4 trillion in assets, had become even larger when it bought First Republic and, just like that, snuffed out the panic. Those four employees used to have 7,000 co-workers. Now they had 294,000 of them — more than all the women in Wyoming. JPMorgan’s immensity invites such golly-gee statistics. The $51 billion in profit that the bank generated over the last year is bigger than the gross domestic product of Jordan. Its credit cards, loans, and checking and savings accounts are in nearly half of American households. It has branches in all of the Lower 48 states and an ATM in Hawaii. The company has no physical presence only in Alaska. Its mutual funds still own Alaskan bonds.

JPMorgan is spending $3 billion to build a new global headquarters, and from 51st and Park I walked three blocks south to see the construction site. The skyscraper already has ego, full of implicit rebukes to other banking towers. It is rising in the heart of Manhattan, not on the wallflower edge of the island (like Goldman Sachs). JPMorgan will not tenant-occupy its new building (like Bank of America) but own it in full. The avenue-deep structure will be ascendant, narrowing over five levels to 1,388 feet, looking down on the Empire State Building — a Matterhorn, the Morganhorn, with a summit fit for a mountaineer’s flag. One wonders if Jamie Dimon, the bank’s CEO for 17 years, will place his office at the peak.

Gawping skyward, however, only tells part of the JPMorgan story. Before I wrote this — an attempt to explain what, exactly, Jamie Dimon has built — I had a lot of half-formed ideas: that JPMorgan is the circuit board of American capitalism; that JPMorgan is so dominant that the U.S. government must regularly rely on it; that JPMorgan is the Amazon of finance, an octopus monopolist with tentacles choking off every competitor; that JPMorgan, eater of small banks for breakfast, has been in this position without interruption from the time old Walrus-Mustache Bulb-Nose was knocking together trusts.

None of these things, I found out, is true.

The correct view of the new JPMorgan tower is both vertical and perpendicular. From that vantage, you see the bank as both the king of the island and a citizen of the avenue, constrained by the grid. JPMorgan emerged from its mishmash origins to become the market leader with more outer restraints and inner caution than people assume. Nothing was predestined or even likely.

Can you trust me on that? That is, can I write objectively about this bank? Let us count the ways I can’t: JPMorgan is the lead lender to a division of the private-equity firm where I work. JPMorgan manages an emerging-markets bond fund I’ve invested in for 12 years without success. I have pitched JPMorgan Asset Management without success. I have pitched JPMorgan Private Bank without success. Recently, I was pitched by JPMorgan Private Bank, success TBD. I am acquainted with people who work there. My boss told me that if there is a 0.01 percent chance of offending JPMorgan with this essay, don’t write it.

But that is sort of the point. The bank is so ubiquitous that to ask a finance writer not to write about it is like asking a politics writer not to write about the government because she has a passport.

To understand how the bank makes money, you should know that few employees of JPMorgan Chase say that they work for “JPMorgan Chase.” They think of their employer as either “Chase” — conventional banking, offering checking and savings accounts and credit cards to people and small businesses — or “JPMorgan.” The latter group, JPMorgan, is divided into investment-banking and commercial-lending divisions that make money from loans, fees, payment services, and trading; there’s also an asset- and wealth-management division offering, among other things, mutual funds broadly and money management for the rich. In recent years, Chase has generated about 40 to 45 percent of the bank’s revenue, JPMorgan investment and commercial banking slightly more, and JPMorgan asset and wealth management the final 10 to 15 percent.

The combined business, which most outsiders refer to as simply JPMorgan (and so I will, too), makes money in three ways. Just under half of its revenue comes from what people have been doing since before Hammurabi regulated interest rates in Babylon: paying depositors less to use “their” money than charging lenders to borrow “yours.” In aggregate, as of September 30, JPMorgan had $2.4 trillion in deposits for which it paid depositors on average over the prior quarter 2.5 percent interest. Overall, it loaned out that money at a 2.7 percent higher “net yield.”

About a third of revenue last year was “non-interest revenue.” This is a waterfront of moneymaking: an overdraft fee for someone bouncing a check; an annual fee for someone jonesing for a metal credit card; investment-banking fees for advising on a merger. The final 22 percent is “markets” revenue, from trading everything: stocks, bonds, swaps, futures about the price of cocoa, crude, carbon emissions, coming defaults, the already defaulted, in rupee, riyal, and Romanian leu.

The bank’s total revenue, $154 billion over the last year, is so large it creates its own gravity, sometimes difficult to escape from. Market leaders are prone to complacency. One former executive told me the bank isn’t good at innovation. Another wondered why anyone would think a bank this big could be good at innovation.

And yet JPMorgan has still separated from its rivals by using scale in classic economic ways. In 2022, the company took some of its profit and spent $14 billion on improving its own technology; only a dozen or so banks in the U.S. have more than $14 billion in revenue. The bank invests to grow by singles and walks. At some point before 2017, someone there wondered, “Why don’t we have branches in Boston?” The bank built 42 in six years and got $2 billion in deposits. Scale means JPMorgan can try things — to me, pretty random things like buying luxury travel agencies and foodie websites — and if they prove to be mistakes, it can easily absorb them. Scale means the bank can even absorb mistakes that would have been fatal for others, like the $6 billion lost by a trader known as the London Whale in 2012.

Maybe the biggest benefit of scale is aura. A large commercial customer of the bank told me it “gave” its banking and hedging business to JPMorgan because it believed that the bank’s imprimatur would give the borrower credibility in the market. When the company issued bonds, JPMorgan’s investment-banking division took a piece of the underwriting revenue because it would look creepy if the lender wasn’t part of the deal.

This aura defies contemporary logic. Rich customers of private banks are usually snobs. That’s kinda the whole point of being rich: Loro Piana over Target. Yet somehow JPMorgan has found a way to convince the Loro Piana customer of its essential Loro Piana-ness even as it runs Target. This is the same for commercial customers, as JPMorgan is no longer considered a notch below the prestige of Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs.

Our rich history spans over 200 years,” the company’s website boasts, and so it’s tempting to start the tale in 1817, when Joseph Morgan bought the Exchange Coffee House, a Hartford establishment that — very hip — sold coffee and booze and — not so hip — became a location for and a participant in incipient American finance. But the bank’s adolescence through Joseph, his son Junius, and his grandson John Pierpont was determined by the opposite forces that forged today’s JPMorgan.

Joseph-begat-Junius-begat-Pierpont is the story of American finance back when it was startlingly personal. The Morgans sorted out bare-knucklers and bounders and the occasional honest entrepreneur. They underwrote the industrialization of America and served as ballast in a bust-prone and almost wholly unregulated system.

The company that Dimon now leads arose from a totally opposite context: a mature, competitive, bureaucratic industry with commoditized services and heavy regulation that confined the possibilities of the sector to an extraordinary degree.

So let’s start there. In the 1990s, as the industry was being partially deregulated from that cramped state, banking headlines were about mergers: mergers for scale (the way to increase profits in any low-margin industry) and for strategy (to put together things you once couldn’t put together). Chase then wasn’t really Chase but one of the acquisitions of Chemical Bank, which had already bought two other large lenders and took the name Chase Manhattan because “Chemical Bank” sounded like a place to store your benzene. In 2000, Chase bought J.P. Morgan & Co., which had been shrinking in importance in the nearly eight decades since Pierpont died. The merger was not well received by bankers at J.P. Morgan, the smaller but more glamorous institution. According to Last Man Standing, a 2009 book about Dimon that is still remarkably relevant, 80 of the top 100 people left soon after the deal. I was at Goldman Sachs then, and to us junior analysts in our three-button suits, the combined and rebranded JPMorgan Chase — with its aspirations to become a force in trading and investment banking — was embarrassing, a suburban dad voguing at a wedding.

The bank to envy at that time was Citigroup, assembled by Sandy Weill. Starting with a downscale credit business in Baltimore (car loans to convicts et al.), Weill gobbled up name-brand financial-services companies (Smith Barney, Travelers, Salomon Brothers) until finally swallowing Citibank, the biggest bank of all. Next to Weill through the meal was Dimon, whose parents knew Weill, who interned for Weill in college, who joined Weill out of Harvard Business School, and who became president of the Weill machine at 35.

One of the strangest things about Dimon’s career is that the man who now leads the world’s largest bank has never really worked for a bank. He helped Weill buy and transform financial-services companies. And then he ran banks. During his years with Weill, there was a clear division of labor: Weill was chutzpah and vision, Dimon was operations and numbers. He would obsess over downside, integration, and costs, cutting newspaper subscriptions and country-club memberships and jobs. Everyone noticed how good he was, and by 1998, Weill, a complicatedly insecure egotist, could no longer tolerate it. He fired his professional son. Dimon considered CEO jobs at Home Depot and elsewhere and then shocked everyone by agreeing in 2000 to run a hodgepodge of poorly integrated midwestern banks, which overcompensated by calling itself Bank One. In four years in Chicago, Dimon relentlessly fixed the institution.

That talent was what Bill Harrison, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, decided was missing in his larger bank. In 2004, Harrison bought Bank One in a merger with some business logic — and to get Jamie Dimon. He agreed to make Dimon CEO in two years. While Citigroup is remembered today as a cautionary tale (with a stock down nearly 90 percent since its peak), Dimon brought to his new job three parts of Weill’s vision. First, to be an acquirer in the future, be a low-cost competitor with a great balance sheet today. Second, done right, you can create value by putting disparate financial services together in one bank. Third, don’t be a snob. As Last Man Standing says about Dimon, “A business doesn’t have to be sexy to get him excited; it just needs to be reliable, profitable, and growing.”

And so Pierpont Morgan to today’s JPMorgan is your immigrant great-great-grandfather who left you your last name: symbolically important but only 6.25 percent of your DNA. JPMorgan, at the moment that Dimon inherited it, had multiple ancestors, cultures, systems, businesses, personalities — and thus no personality. He ended up giving it his own.

Jamie Dimon has an ego. His intelligence isn’t a bluff. He gets to the essential point quickly. He’s not afraid to have smart, talented people work for him. He’s not afraid of firing people working for him. He talks constantly about doing the “right thing.” He has a temper. He doesn’t suffer the unprepared. He demands written reports 48 hours ahead of time. He absorbs more from those reports than his executives think possible. He’s impatient. He likes — exalts in — single-sheet to-do lists.

Three of his grandparents immigrated from Greece. He grew up in Manhattan and Queens. His voice holds onto Manhattan and Queens. He didn’t get into his first choice of college. He got rejected from 14 of the 15 jobs he applied to after college. He can be funny even if his humor can come in repeated bits. His writing voice is blunt, loose, commanding. It does not feature what his speaking voice was long known for: a whirlwind of fucks. He’s a Democrat. He is patriotic and curious about policy. He doesn’t like black-tie affairs or golf. He has no conspicuous hobbies. He enjoys traveling for his job and a country place in Bedford. Otherwise, in the same penthouse on 93rd and Park that he bought when he moved back from Chicago, he is a homebody, preferring the company of his wife and their three grown daughters. He cares about the bank. He is interested in the bank — its position, its markets, its loans, its risks, its risks again, the point of view of people on the front lines and three rungs below him.

Dimon has changed a bit, people tell me. He is 67. He had throat cancer in 2014 and a ripped aorta in 2020. He’s less of a hothead. He has cooled it on the fucks, although he can still summon the old fastball. He may no longer be reading the last line of the last page of every report. But he’s still remarkably the person he was when he joined JPMorgan.

Dimon had been CEO for only two years at the start of 2008, the year of the global financial crisis. What everyone now remembers is that JPMorgan did less poorly than its rivals. Squawkers argue that his executives, distracted by the work of coordinating teams from legacy banks, were simply late to the subprime hysteria. And it’s true that they made some bad loans, particularly in credit cards and private-equity buyouts. But JPMorgan sold the most rickety parts of its housing-credit portfolio early and never participated in a big way in the mortgage-securitization mania that killed banks, hurt homeowners, and knocked the economy on its back. From whatever combination of prudence and luck, JPMorgan had spilled its third glass of wine on the carpet. Other banks had driven drunk into a school bus.

The reward for being relatively healthy was two acquisitions: Bear Stearns (taken on reluctantly, urged on by the government, a money-loser) and Washington Mutual (more classic Weill-Dimon, enabling expansion into Florida and California). Yet not imploding does not equal doing well. As a retired senior executive at the bank told me, even after the worst of the crisis, life was a grind from government consent decrees, bad loans to work through, a weak economy, businesses to be rebuilt from scratch. JPMorgan didn’t even come out of this period in the pole position. In April 2010, it was, by market capitalization, only the third largest of the big four commercial banks: bigger than Citigroup but smaller than Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

Some nights, as he surveyed the challenges to expanding his bank, Dimon must have wondered if he should have taken that job at Home Depot. In 2012, he admitted that there was “no road map” for how to grow and run big companies. The paths he was famous for were closed. Cost-cutting by enthusiastic strategy had been replaced by cost-cutting by financial necessity. Acquisitions were out because of government approvals that would never come and the rule that no bank could hold more than 10 percent of the nation’s deposits.

The path that remained was, perhaps, the one Dimon always wanted to take while living in Sandy Weill’s always-be-closing world: straightforwardly, cautiously running a bank. (Isaiah Berlin, quoting C.I. Lewis: “There is no a priori reason for supposing that the truth, when it is discovered, will necessarily prove interesting.”) The ethos Dimon brought seems less of the financial world than of other big companies: Sam Walton’s Wal-Mart, combine a broad offering with a preoccupation on costs; Jack Welch’s GE, focus on market position and employee upgrades; Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger’s Berkshire Hathaway, be patient and simple.

This is still how JPMorgan battles the constraints of being heavily regulated, heavily commoditized, and heavily competed against. Victory is always on the margin. JPMorgan has been good at building what Dimon calls “franchise value” — the ability to build a brand that sells products (and maintains an aura) rather than just offers the lowest price. Half of Chase’s customers use more than one of its products. The bank takes pains to not seem too red state or blue state, targeting $2.5 trillion to “advancing a sustainable and inclusive economy” and rebuffing calls to stop banking the oil and gas industry. JPMorgan lives by a Dimonism: “First and foremost, banks must satisfy all of their regulators.” It settles disputes with the government quickly, even if it has cause to fight.

JPMorgan’s rivals, attempting to step up growth and catch up to the leader, have blundered. Goldman Sachs tried to build a Main Street savings, lending, and credit card division too fast, at a cost of billions. For 15 years, Wells Fargo pressured employees to cross-sell financial products. But instead of creating franchise value it damaged its franchise (and paid a record fine) when it became clear that the employees had opened millions of customer accounts fraudulently. To repair things, Wells hired a new CEO: Charlie Scharf, who for 25 years had been a lieutenant to Jamie Dimon.

People on Wall Street love — truly, love — talking trash about their competitors, but when I researched this article, I found surprising respect for JPMorgan. A board member of a rival bank marveled at how the bank’s employees all seem “to row in the same direction.” One hedge-fund manager told me that JPMorgan’s research and trade execution is generally the best of the banks he deals with — as are the ethics of JPMorgan employees, who lack the “spiciness” of other bankers. (And this guy once sued JPMorgan over the terms of a credit-default swap!) Another customer told me that JPMorgan’s commercial banker had an intellectual depth and command of the details above other bankers and a long-term relationship focus that eschewed many of the ticky-tacky fees banks annoy their customers with. JPMorgan has achieved this through a GE-style focus on culling underperformers and an ability — thanks to its profitability — to retain long-tenured employees. It never hurts on Wall Street when you can pay people more.

Perhaps the core of JPMorgan’s differentiation is risk management. This starts with a “fortress balance sheet,” a phrase inherited from Dimon’s Citigroup days. At its most basic, the fortress is built with a decision to hold more capital in reserve than even the regulations require and to use clear-eyed accounting to not disguise hidden liabilities. But risk management goes deeper. As the retired executive explained to me, rigorous risk assessment at the bank came before growth, because in banking you can always grow in ways you shouldn’t by loaning more to people unlikely to pay you back.

The retired executive told me that JPMorgan meetings could be “90 percent negative,” focused on what could go wrong, even regarding businesses where nothing was going wrong. He was not nostalgic for Sunday nights reading 60 pages of numbers. (“Not just reports,” he clarified. “Sixty pages of just numbers.”) He still admires the company and its approach: “Banking is a vanilla business. People who make it more vanilla do better.”

How much better? Even five years ago, the idea of the big-four U.S. banks made sense in a Beatles sort of way. There was JPMorgan and Bank of America, the other giant across investment banking, consumer banking, commercial banking, and wealth management, then Wells Fargo (with little international footprint) and Citigroup (global but with fewer U.S. branches). John and Paul, George and Ringo.

We have moved from the Fab Four to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: JPMorgan’s $3.4 trillion in what the Federal Reserve calls “consolidated  assets” is almost $1 trillion more than Bank of America, twice the size of Citi and Wells, and equal to the combined total of the next seven banks after that.

The common conception of Jamie Dimon is that he’s a guy who likes to brag about the colossus he has constructed. And he does, a bit. In his annual “Dear Fellow Shareholder” letters, Dimon includes a Le banque, c’est moi table comparing a generic investment in the financial sector with an investment in him, going back to what he started at Bank One. The most recent installment showed him winning by 872 percentage points.

There’s a lesser-known Dimon pose that, I think, is more revealing. In that same 2022 shareholder letter, Dimon sums up JPMorgan this way: “Despite our best efforts, the walls that protect this company are not particularly high — and we face extraordinary competition … We recognize our strengths and vulnerabilities, and we play our hand as best as we can.” I’ve read this world-weary passage a dozen times with admiration. It captures what every banker knows in her heart: While JPMorgan does some things better than its competitors, while men and women graduate from Yale to assemble PowerPoint decks elucidating what JPMorgan does better than its competitors, a rich family with a wealth adviser or a middle-class family with a checking account or a CEO looking to take a company public almost always has plenty of other good options. In some transactions, JPMorgan is just a model-dictated interest rate on a car dealer or mortgage broker’s screen. The customer usually goes for the lowest price.

And it’s not just banks posting interest rates to screens. This is another theme of Dimon’s recent letters. Once upon a time, banks’ biggest competitors to storing money, loaning money, and moving money was money — stuffed under a mattress and pulled out to buy a cow. The decentralization of loaning money is old news: People have been issuing bonds for centuries, securitizing loans for decades, and increasingly borrowing from big asset-management firms like Apollo barreling into “private credit,” the hottest segment of finance today. The moving of money is now being disrupted by Apple Pay, Venmo, and others coming for the fees formerly captured by Chase credit cards. And the guiding spirit of blockchain-based decentralized finance is to liberate the storing of money from the duopoly of mattresses and banks.

JPMorgan is also, for the most part, an agent in finance. Its investment bankers provide advice. Its private bankers pitch wealth preservation (and tax “management”), not beating the market. Even its asset-management business is known for more cautious strategies, partly because of regulation and partly because of corporate personality. Thus the challenge: No one is born an investment banker versus a hedge-fund manager. And while much higher risk, private-equity and hedge funds are where billionaires are made. To many professionals on Wall Street, that’s all that matters.

Finally, whereas Dimon’s career began in a deregulatory moment, JPMorgan’s business now is more boxed in than ever by congressional grilling, public attention, and at least ten separate overseers in the U.S. alone. Dimon usually takes an I’m-not-complaining-but-I’m-kind-of-complaining attitude to this all. (Well, sometimes he’s complaining. To an audience of bank nerds, on the subject of the “global systemically important banks”: “We always said that the G-SIB calculation is nonsensical as it is not risk-based at all. It drives absurd behavior …”)

The U.S. regulatory system has effectively two tiers. To help small banks compete with big ones, regulations on them are lighter by cost and by the cash they must hold onto in case things go wrong. Instead, they can use that cash to make money. The eight U.S. G-SIBs — the big four plus Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of New York, and State Street — have significantly more oversight and much higher cash-reserve mandates. (Because if they fail, it’ll be very bad.) But the field is leveled again because these banks have economies of scale and other sources of revenue. JPMorgan made $51 billion over the past year despite having a balance sheet that would allow it to lose, in theory, $496 billion without needing to raise more equity capital.

And then there is how the Federal Reserve, outside its regulatory powers, determines the price of much of what JPMorgan “sells” by setting baseline interest rates. The Fed also competes against it by offering bonds with yields better than available in a Chase account. It’s as if the U.S. Postal Service started selling cold brew next to every coffee shop in America.

Those are just the external threats to JPMorgan. Internally, an all-the-women-of-Wyoming population will always be hard to manage. Former employees complain to me of dealing with “armies of lawyers and compliance guys” and joke that the company’s stock ticker, JPM, stands for Just People Meeting. The bank is not a von Trapp family of cheerful innocents singing arm-in-arm under their stern but charming father. Its employees are subject to the human condition. They have rivals. Good corporate politicians sometimes rise faster than more capable employees. People grumble about their pay. Investment bankers and traders have to grumble about their compensation — just look at the Jordan of profits even after everyone gets paid — as a sign of character.

And people do stupid things. In recent years, the bank has suffered from embarrassing, expensive hits from boomer gullibility (as a fanboy to Adam Neuman) and incomprehensible moral blindness (as the banker to Jeffrey Epstein). Last year, JPMorgan paid a $200 million fine because employees were doing business over WhatsApp, where lawyers and regulators couldn’t keep an eye on things.

And yet there is some tautology to the fines and failures: They haven’t mattered because they haven’t mattered. They haven’t mattered in a general way: Banks were the villains of the economy 15 years ago, but now it’s tech companies. This is not just luck in short-attention-span America. It’s also boredom of the correct kind. Banks are less villainous — not because bankers suddenly got character but because of regulations and market pressure to be more cautious and efficient.

The fines and failures also haven’t mattered in a specific way. Richard Ramsden, the bank analyst at Goldman Sachs, says, “What JPMorgan Chase has managed to do, which has really surprised people, is finding ways of growing as the largest bank in the world. The view for a while was that the banking industry is not really a growth industry. The only way to grow was by acquiring other entities or taking on excessive risk. But JPMorgan Chase can grow in all of their businesses, predominantly organically.”

Maybe because we’re living in a coronation year, between Charles III and Taylor Swift, a lot of people have been proclaiming Jamie Dimon the king of Wall Street — especially after the bank run JPMorgan ended in May. Dimon did act a little Pierpontish. Before First Republic failed, JPMorgan deposited $5 billion in the bank in an attempt to shore it up, and Dimon reportedly led the effort to get ten other banks to deposit another $25 billion. When that didn’t work, six weeks later, JPMorgan bought First Republic outright.

The popular narrative of the deal contains a few elements that aren’t really true. First, that JPMorgan was the government’s only option. Not so; there were four bidders. Second, that JPMorgan backstops a panic regularly. I’d argue that 1895, 1907, 2008, and 2023 are closer to Chicago Cubs banner years than a habit. And third, that JPMorgan got some sort of special deal. On this last point, the FDIC did agree to some notable terms; it loaned the bank $50 billion of the $61 billion in cash needed for the purchase, and it pledged to absorb 80 percent of any losses on First Republic loans. Yet, as clarified by Bloomberg’s Matt Levine, our poet-philosopher of finance, these features are less things JPMorgan needed — First Republic loans aren’t especially risky, and JPMorgan has plenty of money on hand — than what JPMorgan wanted to protect its capital-reserve ratios. In the end, the bank paid what Levine called a “pretty high bid.”

There was a defensive and offensive strategy for that bid. The defense-oriented reason, as explained to me by Ramsden, “is that JPMorgan was going to pay anyway and might as well get something out of it.” The FDIC insures bank deposits, but it’s not an insurance company. It’s a regulatory body that collects money from banks. After Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failed early in 2023, the FDIC issued a special assessment of $16.3 billion. (It’s like if your neighbor burned down her house and, the next month, the fire department sent everyone else on the block a special bill.) In our two-tier regulatory system, the smallest 4,000 or so banks will pay nothing of this assessment. The largest 114 banks will pay it all. Per Ramsden, JPMorgan is usually responsible for about 15 percent of these assessments. The market expected a failure of First Republic to lead to another one for $25 billion to $30 billion. Had JPMorgan not bought First Republic, it would have had to pay 15 percent of that, and 15 percent of every assessment following, domino failure by domino failure. That’s reason enough for JPMorgan to end a bank panic.

In the public business case for the acquisition, Dimon said that the deal “modestly benefits our company overall.” This was not the immodest deflection of a fat cat, feathers fluttering out of his mouth after a feast, but rather an accurate statement. Most of the onetime paper gains are offset by restructuring costs. The $500 million in projected additional net income is 1.4 percent more than the bank earned in 2022. The deal grew JPMorgan’s assets by only 7 percent.

JPMorgan’s ability to acquire First Republic without breaking a sweat comes from its risk management and scale. The bank assigned 800 people to analyze the deal. Within two months, its capital-reserve ratio returned to exactly where it had been, and it’s even higher than that now at a healthy 14.3 percent. JPMorgan’s scale allowed it to solve the problems that got First Republic into trouble. The first problem was economic: First Republic didn’t use commonly available, if expensive, strategies to hedge rising interests. JPMorgan is a master of managing interest-rate risk, a core specialty of a bank making nearly $30 billion per year in trading revenue.

The second problem was sociological: First Republic wooed rich customers with cheap loans, good customer service, and apparently cookies. (Except for me: I was wooed by ATM-fee rebates and a nice umbrella.) The bank presumed that if (a) you give someone a multimillion-dollar interest-only loan for his Sagaponack house and (b) do a lot of other must-be-nice-to-be-rich stuff like couriering thick envelopes of cash to that house so that he can pay the help, then (c) that customer will be with you for life. (The envelope thing, by the way, is true.) It’s a sensible theory. But First Republic customers were financially literate, gossipy, multi-accounted, and ultimately unsentimental. Many joined together in the bank run, goading each other into yanking almost $102 billion in deposits in the first quarter of the year. They didn’t even need to send the help to wait in line for their money. They just used their phones.

To be clear, the rich, when not spooked, are not bad customers. It’s terribly embarrassing to have one’s Hamptons house foreclosed upon, so they pay back their loans. They’re not too focused on interest levels in checking accounts. They have money to invest. This was attractive to JPMorgan, which has a Jack Welch–ian strategy to be a market leader in every business line. It has that status in investment banking, credit cards, and consumer banking. It does not have that status in high-net-worth money management, a very fragmented, lusted over, and (yet somehow still) highly profitable business. The First Republic acquisition brought in 200 wealth-management advisers, managing $200 billion. On the margin, it helps. And so, in part, JPMorgan bought a bank brought down by catering to rich people because it caters to rich people.

It could do so because, as the bank for everyone everywhere, it’s not overly reliant on them. First Republic, SVB, and Signature were banks with novel tilts: banks for coastal rich people, for the tech industry, for New York real estate and crypto. Lavender honey, salted caramel, cereal milk.

Vanilla won.

Of course, not everyone was thrilled. On May 18, Senator Elizabeth Warren grilled the acting head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for approving the First Republic deal. There were pop quizzes on how much bigger JPMorgan was than PNC and Citizens, who also bid. (Eight times and 14 times bigger.) “You are the one person,” Warren concluded, “who was supposed to use judgment on the question of: As between multiple sales, which one was the right one to go with and which one presented more risk to the banking system? According to your own metric, you chose the one that gives us more concentration in the system. I am very troubled by that decision.”

Warren’s disquiet originates partly from a technical thesis: that if big banks fail, they will cause systemic problems because they are bigger and woven into more parts of the economy. In other words, one day, JPMorgan or another big bank could suffer a megarun or lose tens of billions owing to the Calf of the London Whale. Chaos ensues.

This could happen. But the U.S. doesn’t have a particularly concentrated banking system. It is the sixth-least–concentrated banking system in the world, behind Vietnam, Iraq, Taiwan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. The U.S. has half of its bank assets in its five largest banks. Canada has 85 percent. Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden have over 90 percent. Anyway, are large banks more likely to fail than small banks? In 2023 the answer was neither. Mid-size banks with strong lending discipline but too-interesting business models collapsed.

A second objection to bank concentration is that large banks have unfair competitive advantages, ironically for the opposite reason of the first objection: People perceive big banks as safer because of greater regulation and diverse depositors and loan books. Bank runs tend to focus the mind on such facts. Today, even solvent regional banks are doing things they really shouldn’t have to, like scheduling meetings with major customers to detail why they are solvent.

There is a sense that JPMorgan must be hoovering up customers because of its reputation as the biggest and safest bank. I’m sure this is true in some cases, but it’s hard to measure. JPMorgan’s average deposits are down one percent over the past year. Whatever billions of deposits were acquired with First Republic and flowed in from new customers worried about further contagion were offset by other depositors leaving for institutions offering higher interest rates or withdrawing money to pay down loans.

One critique of bank concentration weaves the two objections together, claiming the only way to level the playing field is to insure all deposits at all banks. Otherwise, a search for safety will cause a cascade of deposits into a few banks, which will one day run into trouble themselves, requiring nationalization. This is gloomy and improbable. Our banking system is still regulated to encourage size diversity. Dimon lists the ways that JPMorgan itself supports that fragmentation, providing services to smaller banks such as payment processing, hedging, trading, loans, capital raises, and more. And small banks’ greatest protection? Apathy and inertia, maybe the secret to healthy banks (and easy living). There’s an old truism in the industry: Customers are more likely to get divorced than change their bank.

And yet, outside the practical arguments, discomfort remains. A “hipster antitrust” regulatory movement has arisen to check the power of giant companies. Even as its specific actions lose in court, its motivating mood captures something. We live in an age of benevolent despots: companies that shame us with their market power but entice us with what they sell. I cringe at the incessant appetite of Amazon and Microsoft. My family mocks me for my ardor for Whole Foods and Excel.

Our dread of benevolent despots is inextricable from other complaints about how we live now. Why do the Yankees have four times the payroll of the Orioles? Why do all the big movies involve superheroes? Why does a state legislator rage about national policies instead of potholes? Everyone is nostalgic, in some aspect of life, for a country less nationalized and winner-take-all.

JPMorgan is an easy target for our mood. It’s the biggest bank, so it gets the most attention. Bank of America is probably grateful for the shade. JPMorgan is heavily regulated, so public officials can call it to task. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t ask Bob Iger to defend Deadpool 3.

But we can’t deny the history, or facts. JPMorgan is not a benevolent despot. No bank is. JPMorgan could fade to nothing, and other banks would fill the void. Other banks want to fill the void. JPMorgan was also not on a road to becoming the far-largest, most-respected bank 20 years ago. It achieved that position by being well run and gaining customers in the marketplace. It did so by being cautious and taking on less risk. The industry would be quite different today — quite possibly worse — had Jamie Dimon built something different by taking the job selling nails.

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The 2025 Met Gala Red Carpet is underway, and it look like we have a contender for best dressed – and best hat – of the one and only diana ross. IT’S been 22 years SINCE ROSS LAST GRACED THE EVENT WITH HER PRESENCE, AND SEME TO STEP OUT FOR THIS YEAR’S GALA CELEBRATING BLACK DANDYISM.

Ross Wore a Showstopping Beaded White Gown With A Matching Fluffy Hat and an 18-Foot Train that tok a Horde to Hoist up the steps. She revealed that the train had the names of her five children (Rhonda, Tracee, Chudney, Ross, and Evan) and Her Eight Grandchildren (Raif, Callaway, Everlee, Leif, Indigo, Bronx, Ziggy) embroidered Inside. Acciting to VogueThe look was a collaboration between her, her son Evan Ross, and Nigerian Designer Ugo Mozie.

“It was not a plan,” She Told Vogue of her attendance, adding that “Everything was really, Really Last-Moment.” Well, it sura doesn’t look like it. Ross Said Her Son, Evan, Who Appeared on the Carpet With Her, Persuaded Her to Attend Tonight. (Her Daughter, Tracee Ellis Ross, Arrived late in an equally Compelling Pink Ensemble.) “She is the Met Ball.” Hard aggree.

When i Read the comments on my recap of the season premiere of Poker faceI was surpassed to see that some viewers found the cynthia erivo-as-quintulets installment to be “too.” This is a show that that obviously exists in a heigened reality. You have to suspend disbelief, for example, that Charlie Cale stables onto a wall of solving in every episodes – and that the murselves are intricately full in a way that that is almost in real liff but that thats makes for good television. For my part, i’ve had no problem embarrassment the occisional wackiness and credulity-straining thanks to the top-tier wring, directing, and performances. “The Taste of Human Blood,” Howver, Has Pushed with Past My Breaking Point. For the first time, Poker face Has Crossed the Line Into “Too Goofy” territory.

I say this while notting that amver going to full reject any episode of television starring iconic ’90s child Star Gaby Hoffmann. She plays fran lamont, a Florida cop who’s “one of the good Ones,” as evidences by the fact that she is attempted burglar go Because “I don’t think a good life should be ruined for one stupid mistake.” (This Show’s Relationship with Law Enforcement Remains Muddled, Though i Appreciate this Particular Perspective.) SINCE 2019, fran haen nominated for the year’s at the Florida Panhandle Cop Awards (aka the flopacopas), and every year gator ” (Kumail Nanjiani), whose nickname references to the baby gator he rescueed from dealer Named Stanky James. On his popular tiktok channel, joe busts tweakers with daisy, the Now-Garti, as his sikick. And while Fran Didn’t Care About the Award to Begin With, She’s Become Dangerously Obsessed AFTER BEING REPEATEDY BASED BY AN INPET, FAME-HUNGRY FRRAUD WITH CRINGE-WORTH Catchphrases: “Gator Done”

The comedy here is broad, but it is also a deliberate invocation of the “Florida Man” Meme that Fran’s Boss, Chief Pendleton (John Sayles), Rails Against. And there are Certainly Laughs to be Had before the Things Go Completely off the rails. At the 2025 Flopacopas, Fran is Feeling Confident, and Not JUST BECUSE SE SENT EDIBLE Arrangements to All the Judges. But when she sneaks backstage to look at the trophies, she’s horrified to discover that gator joe has won again. Well work, he bumps ino her while she’s in the midst of a Tearful Breakdown, calling her a crybaby before declaring, “I’m the michael jordan of the being a cop in florida … Panhandle.” Obiviously fran neds her revenge – and credit to director Lucky mckee for the very forgetful moment IT LOOKS LIKE SHE’S TO MURDER HIM IN COLD BLOOD. She holds off, though, instead opting to embarrass him by spiking his energy shot with laxative reptile.

While i’m not above scatological humor, francios plan and subsequent actions when it goes awry where this episode loises me. First, she consults with rusty from animal control, played by please don’t destroy’s ben marshall, who explains that cisaprid is safe for humans as you don’t exceed a Certain dosage, which he helplly fallites on a napkin. Fran does try to give jey just the right amout; ITH’S ONLY AFTER VI DROPS DEAD IN THE BATHROM MID-DEFECATION THAT SHE WAS LOOKING AT THE NAPKIN UPSIDE DOWN. An unintentional Murder is Still Murder, and Fran Knows Toxicology Testing Plus Her Convo With Rusty Wouuld Implicate Her. Thinking Quickly, She Frees Daisy, lures her down the dall and into the bathroom with oreos, and then to get her eat gator joe. Daisy is Too Docile for that, so fran does the only thing she can: She steals a bag of the meth from the confiscated drugs and weapons Photo-Table (Sure), and dumps a healthy amout into daisy’s nostrils. It’s a fairly obvious nod to Cocaine bearA Movie Most of US Wold Rather Forget, but it does the trick. Soon, Joe’s Partily Eateen Corpse has Been Discovered, and Daisy is the Only Suspect. (The fact that the cops catch her in the act doesn’t exactly help her case.)

Thankfully, daisy has the Kind of Ally We All Dream of in Charlie, whose post -beatrix hasp wandering has brought her to a gator Sanctant by a group of outlaw Activists who secretly animals in distress. Their “White Whale” is daisy, who gator joe haen pumping full of drugs. She’s Kind of the “Judy Garland of Alligators,” Charlie Observes. Leader of the Group Hutch (Shiloh Fernandez) Says a Lot of Woo-Woo SHIT ABOUT LOOKING INTO ANIMAL’S EYES TO OPEN OPENDITION, But he’s so dreamy that Charlie just kind of goes with it-Including one tasked with the Daisy from the Flopacopas. Hutch Tells Charlie That Daisy Has a Gentle Soul. SO gentle, in fact, that charlie should be able to open the cage, put a leash on her, and lure her out of the Building. Charlie isn’t convinced unil she stars into daisy’s eyes and does indeed have a cosmic vision, that catapults this episode storm into the land of absurdity. But after snagging someone oreos from the supplying closet – and bumping into gator joe in serial of a bathroom – she returns backstage to find Daisy Missing from Her Cage. Not even Charlie Soon Learns, the alligator she’s ben tasked with saving is in the process of devouring joe.

To the surprise of no one, all the cops at the flopacopas are eager to put daisy down. The theory is that once an animal experiences the Taste of Human Blood, They’ll Want More. (This sounded fake to me, but it is apparently a thing. I’m Still Team Gator on this, though.) Charlie is demanding “Gator Due Process,” but shockingly, Florida Law enforcement is unmoved. IT’S up to charlie to start investigating, at which point she realizes the twist tie she put on daisy’s cage was removed – and it could have ben by gatar joe, Because he told her (honestly!) That he urgently had to shit. She Also Notes the Trail of Oreos Leading from Daisy’s Holding Area to the Bathroom, a sign that someone brought the gator there for a reason. I realize that Charlie’s investigations are offen quite convenient, but this one is especally tough to swallow, with her perfectly timed-kidnapping of daisy giving her shat of the clues she needs. To her credit, she does discover that a bag of the methane has ben stolen, notting that it would have been hard for daisy to walk away with it herself. Someone must have snagged the drugs to feed them to daisy with the Express purposes of Making Her Aggressive. When Charlie Asks Rusty if he’s Ever Heard of a “Meth Gator,” he tells her, “Like, Every Week, Yeah. This is Florida.” Fair Enough!

At first, fran is eager to kill daisy and put this whole acidental MURDER THING TO BED. But a call from a concertned chief pensmine HER off to the fact that gator joe posted a tiktok of fran Crying that he recorded with his hidden camera glasses. And while daisy has eateen that bit of evidence, if she’s killed, the glasses will be removed from her stomach, along with some very incroting footage of Fran. For reasons of pure self-protation, she joins forces with charlie, who has located a post-meal daisy in the suply closet. The two hide the guest a rolling buffet table, and get her into the back of franci’s cruiser. Again, have to wonder what the commenter who calmed the premiere “Farcical” thinks About This Turn of Events. When the pair make it to the swamppland where’re going to release daisy, Charlie finally clocks that part partner in crime is not on the level. Realizing that fran has no intention of letting the gator go, charlie intercepts her right as she’s poised to shoot daisy. “I THOUGHT YOU WERE ONE OF THE Good Ones,” she teles the cop. This episode doesn’t go full acab, but it does poke some choles in the “One of the Good Ones” Belief System.

Charlie is able to unravel the Truth of What Happened to Gator Joe Remarkably Quickly. In a moment of necessary self-awareness, she notes how Truly bizarre the thing is: “i’m saying that in a rational tone of voice, but it is empirically insane.” Wen Reach This Installment’s Silliest Turn As Fran Looks Into Daisy’s Eyes, Has Her Own Cosmic Connection, and Decides to Confess Everynding. It may be a commentary on the way cops protest their that chief pendleton refuses to let fran COMAN and resign, after all she tells the whole story, which is “The Most Florida Man Shit Time.” He wans to keep doing the law enforcement, Because she’s – you guess – “One of the good Ones.” Thankfully, Fran has Had Enough and Decides to make amends by serving her community in another way: Working at the Gator Sanctanty. As for Charlie, She’s Ready for Her Next Adventure. “I’m Fine Out How to Finally Start Enjoying this Journey,” she tells her cb radio friend good buddy. THEN SHE AVOIDS A RUN IN WITH A FAST-APPROaching Daisy, Who Has, As Promised, Developed a Taste for Human Blood. IT’S A FITTING END TO AN EPISODE THAT REALLY HAVE REINED IT IN.

• Good Buddy is played by steve buscemi, WHOM WE ONLY HEAR, SIMilar to How Rhea Perlman’s Distinctive Voice was all we go of the Beatrix hasp unyl she showed up in the fly. I like the idea of ​​charlie Having a distant confidante, and hope good buddy sticks ARUND.

• I was hard on this episode, but there are a lot of the funils, the participle at the flopacopas. As one of the Few Remaining People Who Remembers A & E’s The GladesI love Matt Passmore Cameoing As Himself.

• Other Great Flopacopas Jokes: The Cop Groupies that Chief Pendleton Calls “Pig Porkers,” and the Hors d’Auvres served with the Question, “Can I Your Miranda Bites?”

• nod nod to copy refusing to the Hold Each Other Accountable, The Announcing of the Award for Best Internal Affairs Investigation Gets Boos. There is a Sharpness under the surface here that more interesting to say the Florida Man Shenanigans.

• We never really get to see charlie in a romantic context, so i was delight by her attempted flirtation with hutch. “We’ll be in your ear the which time,” he tells her. “Oh, Well, Be Careful, It ‘A Little Waxy in There,” She Says, Sticking Her Tongue Out. She is really bad at this!

• Shoutout to director Lucky McKee, who does what he found, but who has haad material to work with last season and helmed “Time of the Monkey.” If you haven’t seen the 2002 cult horror movie Maywhich mckee wrote and direct, get on that.

The Show Must Go On, Event without Electricity. On Saturday Morning, Cannes and the Region Surrounding It Experienced A High Power Outage on the Final Day of the Cannes Film Festival, AFTER POWER LINES WERE sawed off in the Alpes-Maritime. Police Suspect Foul Play, But Power was eventually restored at the festival, which has an independent POWER Supply Ready to go.

Leading Up to Saturday Night’s Closing Ceremony, All Eyes Were on Neon As the Film Production Company has previously won the five palme d’or at cannes. And sura Enough, Jafar Panahi’s It was just an ACCIDENT Won this year’s top prize – neon just scored north american rights for the film a few days ago.

Elsewhere, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value Won the Grand Prize, Cannes Breakout Nadia Melitti Won Best Actress for Role in The Little Sister, and Wagner Moura Won Best Actor for The Secret Agent. Nor for already presented outlets, Robert de Niro and Denzel Washington bot Won Honorary Palme d’Ors for their Lifetime Achievements in Cinema History. Another Guy was presented with an award in cannes at a different event, but let’s not get into that now.

Below Are All the Winners Announched During the 2025 Cannes Closg Ceremony.

Palme d’Or
It was just an ACCIDENT

Grand Plug
Sentimental Value

Jury Prize (Tie)
Sirât
Sound of Falling

Best actor
Wagner Moura for The Secret Agent

Best Actress
Nadia melitti for The Little Sister

Best Director
Kleber Mendonça Filho for The Secret Agent

Special Award (Prix Spécial)
Resurrection

Best Screenplay
LUC Dardenne and Jean-Pierre Dardenne for The Young Mother’s Home

Un Certain Regard Winner
The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo

Jury plug
Do poet

Best Director Prize
Tarzan and Arab Nasser for Once uppon a time in Gaza

Performance Awards
Cléo diarhe for I Only Rest in the Storm
Frank dillane for Urchin

Best Screenplay
Harry Lightton for PILLIOT

Specialtime
Norah

Short Film Palme d’Or
I’m glad you’re dead Now

Short Film Special Mention
Ali

Camera d’Or
The President’s Cake

Camera d’O Special Mention
My Father’s Shadow

Immersive Competition
From Dust

Critics’ Week
Do Ghost useful

Golden Eye Documentary Prize
Imago

Golden Eye Special Jury Prize
The Six Billion Dollar Man

Queer Palm
Little Sister

Dog
The love that Remains

Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award
The President’s Cake

Honorary Palme d’Or
Robert de Niro
Denzel Washington

Cinéfondation
First Prize: First summer
Second Prize: 12 moments before the flag-raising ceremony
Third Prize (Tie): Ginger boy (separated) and Winter in March

Thanks to more platforms paying for stand-up than ever, technological advancements that make production significantly cheaper, and social platforms that make promotion easier, we’re in the middle of a stand-up-special gold rush. Depending on how you stream, you’re likely to encounter a hastily assembled 20-minute “special” next to the masterpieces of the best comedians working. With hundreds of specials being algorithmically recommended at the same time, it’s hard to make sense of the glut. That’s what this column is for. Every month, we’ll suggest anywhere from three to five specials that are worth watching. While they might not all necessarily be the “best,” they’re worth your time for being funny, ambitious, moving, or bad in a way that must be reckoned with. There is gold in them hills, and this column will share only the most choice nuggets.

Brett Goldstein’s situation is unique. He performed stand-up for over a decade in England — in the British style of working toward an hourlong, narrative Edinburgh show every year — to little fanfare. But then, thanks to Ted Lasso, he found himself performing in the U.S. to large theater audiences who didn’t know what to expect from his act. Seventeen years into stand-up, The Second Best Night of Your Life is Goldstein’s first special, and it feels like the manifestation of reconciling all of this history. It’s structured like a classic American stand-up special with some shorter getting-to-know-you jokes at the top (which, for Goldstein, cover his newfound fame and being British in America), then some longer stories and bits in the middle, and then ending on sex stuff.

Goldstein is the strongest in the middle, where he’s afforded more space to tell longer stories and have more flights of fancy that are more typical in British comedy. There is a great section about how he loves musicals but hates plays that includes a bit about seeing “Hamlet or Macbeth, couldn’t tell you which” (a phrase he repeats over and over because “they’re both gibberish”) and experiencing the audience actually laugh at a line in the play. And Goldstein gets furious! It’s a fun move that will tickle anyone turning in to get some of that Roy Kent magic. It’s in these moments that you feel the sum total of Goldstein’s experience — British stand-up, American stand-up, Ted Lasso, etc. — and the result is a voice that is uniquely his own.

After grinding it out in clubs for years, Jessica Kirson started gaining attention on social media two years ago for her crowdwork clips. Nothing against her crowdwork, but her true mastery is in the club-comedy art of layering punch lines and tagging jokes. It’s a skill she employs relentlessly: She squeezes and squeezes and squeezes until the premise, and the audience, is exhausted. While talking about her vibrator, for example, she says, “You know, a lot of women are like, (high pitched, nasal voice) ‘I bought a new vibrator. It’s purple. It’s amazing. I deserve it.’ My vibrator, it has pieces missing from it. I’m serious — they’re inside of me. I have more plastic inside of me than the Pacific Ocean. It’s that Magic Wand. Enormous. Like a jackhammer. It is so powerful. Did you know I dropped it the other day, and my neighbors got an earthquake warning? I also use it as an immersion blender. So it’s very helpful. I make split-pea soup with it. That’s my merch. Split-pea soup. I sell it after my shows.”

That’s like 15 to 20 laugh lines on the premise of having a powerful vibrator and, not for nothing, the joke keeps on going from there. She isn’t just getting the quick laugh of a surprise twist but building more and more laughing energy. To be in her audience, it feels like everyone is in a pot of water about to boil over. Obviously something is lost in the translation from live to filmed performance, but thankfully Kirson is a dynamic performer who slips into different voices, faces, and impressions that make it hard to look away.

Surprise Me is a very good name for a comedy special, especially one that combines stand-up and magic. The title is a nod to an early standout joke from the hour about how the Dunkin’ app features the option to choose “Surprise Me,” which is mostly used as a way for a store to get rid of stale doughnuts. The title also suggests being taken care of, and Zach Zimmerman’s material is written with care and clarity. There’s something charming about how happy Zimmerman is to share the many, many jokes he worked so hard on. Like this section on being tall: “It’s exhausting being this tall. Do you know how much energy it takes to animate this body? Truly, I do a sit-up, I’m like folding the Eiffel Tower in half. Like those little French bulldogs. Okay, hear me out: We’ve been bred to look like this, and it is hard for us to breathe. I’m chopping vegetables on regulation countertops like (wheezes heavily). I want you know, I want to use a downstairs bathroom and not get a concussion. That would be nice. I’d like to raise my hand and not tickle the feet of God. Could that be arranged? I want to talk to a short person and not turn into an umpire.”

Thematically, the special’s title is central to the fundamental question Zimmerman attempts to answer in the hour: What is the meaning of love? In the triumphant closer, he tells the story of his failed attempt at becoming a Christian magician that builds around him performing a card trick, and in the (very, very) long delay before he reveals the volunteer’s card, he says, “Love means giving someone a chance to surprise you.” Surprise Me is a YouTube special, so it doesn’t have the big production budget of the streamers’ specials, but in its ambition, it is genuinely surprising.

At the start of Cameron Esposito’s fourth special, she regales the audience with stories of rescuing a dog and tearing her own butthole in her signature high-energy style. She’s as effortlessly charismatic as always, yet as the special goes on, it’s clear some things are different. She is sitting down, she has her notes onstage, she stumbles over a word or two, and her pace has slowed. Then, 37 minutes in, the edit glitches and cuts to Esposito in an identical position but now alone and in a white room. From that point forward, for Four Pills’s more somber last third, Esposito (who also directed the special) continually cuts back and forth between both sets as she tells the audience about the behaviors that led her to check into rehab and get diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She details how she’s grown since then, including the medication that fundamentally altered her performance style. Watching the end of the special, it becomes clear how ingeniously the entire thing is built. Esposito doesn’t just tell the audience how she’s changed since she started taking the titular four pills; she shows the audience, too. She delights them with the manic behavior that made her such an exciting onstage presence before conveying why it couldn’t last.

Esposito hasn’t released a special since 2018’s Rape Jokes, and in the seven years since, there have been a lot of specials that deconstruct the stand-up special and/or focus on mental health. But like Rape Jokes did with the topic of sexual assault and the language around abuse, Esposito approaches Four Pills with uncommon grace. She doesn’t bluntly call attention to what she’s doing differently or the bravery of revealing her issues. Instead, she invites the audience into her story and lets the hour’s brilliance slowly reveal itself.

After opening with a few minutes of thanking her gay fans, Chelsea Handler spends the vast majority of The Feeling focused on two stories. As the author of six autobiographical best sellers, Handler is adept at laying out stories with perspective and voice, even if she, too, often falls back on saying “Let’s go!” or “Let’s fucking go!” where a better punch line should be. The first story is an impressive depiction of her early life. Instead of following a single linear narrative, she jumps around to different moments between when she was born and her tween years. She masterfully balances the naïve perspective of her as a kid with her snarky, bawdy comedic voice. There’s a section, for example, about when she learned how to pleasure herself at a friend’s sleepover when she was 8, where all the girls were face-down in their sleeping bags similarly proto-masturbating. “I showed up at that sleepover at 7:30 and I didn’t get up from that position until 7:30 a.m., when Jodi’s mom tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Honey, we’re gonna need you to leave,’” Handler tells the crowd at the Wellmont Theater. “I left that sleepover, I had rug burns on my forehead. I was so thirsty and dehydrated from sweating so much into my pajamas. I was like, ‘Does anyone have a Capri-Sun, please?’”

The second story — about trying to have sex with Andrew Cuomo and trying not to have sex with Bill Cosby — is less inventive but undeniably juicy as hell. When they get famous, a lot of comedians dishonestly underplay the celebrities in their stories, acting like they are just a regular person talking about their regular friend and/or sexual partner. Handler always plays up the gabbiness in a way that respects her audience’s intelligence.

Forget “the best stand-up working right now” — Bill Burr is fighting to be in the conversation of greatest stand-ups of all-time. That demands artistic evolution and, in an autobiographical medium like stand-up, personal growth. (Not going to therapy is hack.) As such, Drop Dead Years feels like a major leap in both categories. The best example is a section about how Burr improved his relationship with his wife after attending a friend’s funeral and having the profound realization that his wife “agreed to spend her life with me, and I’m being this curmudgeonly asshole, and I’m kinda ruining, a little bit, the one life she has.” So Burr decides to try to be more agreeable, and what follows is a portrait of his relationship, with all its built-in assumptions and resentments, that results in some of the most intensely personal material featured in a special in years. Burr shares a few examples in which his wife asks him to do something, assuming he’d say no or complain as usual, but instead he just says yes. With each example, the tension builds: When is Bill going to snap like he always does? But the harsh right turn never arrives. Instead of the instant gratification of a man breaking down for our pleasure, Burr presents something genuinely surprising and touching.

This is not to say Burr has gone soft. Artistic evolution and personal growth are difficult when you’re a successful comedian and know there is a portion of the audience who wants you never to change. It’s easy to lose audience members by being too offensive; it’s much harder to risk losing them by being honest with who you are now as a person. Burr is not self-righteous or self-pitying, and with each new special, his audience gets to see a man at war — a man fighting to grow despite all the societal, cultural, financial, and familial forces working against him. And with each special, he keeps getting better.

Thanks to the recent boom in YouTube specials, the platform is awash with international comedians. As a result, every month a few shows that ran at Edinburgh Fringe Festival get uploaded, making it clear that a lot of these shows aren’t that good. That said, Crushing, which was nominated for the main prize at 2023’s Edinburgh, is good. While it might not be as narratively or conceptually ambitious as his fellow nominee Julia Masli’s much-publicized Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha or the eventual winner, Ahir Shah’s Ends, Smith’s hour of silly, exacerbated storytelling is worthy of its accolades.

Smith succeeds because he doesn’t worry about translating his Northern England cultural specifics to a potential international audience, as the specificity of background underlines the specificity of how his brain works. (“I come from a little town called Goole,” he tells the audience. “If you don’t know Goole, it’s just a stone’s throw from York, if you throw that stone onto a two-hour train.”) But more than that, Smith is fluent in the universal language of faux exasperation, which is on display in a story about a hotel manager downgrading his room because the man in the room before him shit in the bed and interacting with the hotel manager who told him this. (“I’m a new customer. I’m coming into your workplace for the first time. Don’t say ‘shit the bed!’”)

Some viewers might like the Edinburgh solo-show tick of stating outright what the show is “about” — in this case “stress” and the jokes you tell when not talking about the breakdown of your engagement — but personally, I find it unnecessary at best and, at worst, an oversimplification of what could be a multilayered, paradoxical work. It’s not a particularly distracting tick in Crushing but something that should be considered as more and more Edinburgh shows get turned into filmed pieces.

A minute into his Don’t Tell Comedy half-hour special, J.C. Currais tells the audience he used to be on a Disney Channel original series, and it makes perfect sense. It’s not that Currais has a juvenile sense of humor but that he is friendly and able to go big in a way that feels cartoonish yet organic. There’s a joke, for example, where he tells the audience it’s time to turn off no-contact delivery on the food apps. It’s an admittedly generic area to joke in, but for Currais, it sets up an act-out of him “right on the other side of the door, just standing there, looking through the peephole like a little food goblin.” He hunches, impishly bops around, and with a voice that will surely one day be cast as a troll in an animated movie, he says, “Yes, put it on the dirty ground. I’ll eat it from the dirty ground.”

While Currais too often finds himself in familiar comedic territory, the comedy instantly feels exciting and specific to him once he does a voice or physical movement. And with Cat Daddy just being a half-hour, the problems don’t deter from Currais’s good vibes and animated act-outs. Equal parts bighearted and lighthearted, the appeal of Currais’s low-stakes silliness is almost primal, whether you are 4 or 44.

In Andrew Schulz’s first proper Netflix stand-up special, he showcases some of his signature lazy, cynical joke writing. Whether it is a lack of focus or creativity, Schulz has some of the worst joke math in comedy; instead of writing interesting, surprising punch lines, he machine-gun blasts the audience with a random assortment of supposedly edgy buzzwords. Early in the special, when he learns his wife is going to have a C-section, he jokes, “I’m Googling on the low ‘dad C-section.’ It’s just tranny porn showing up on my phone.” With so many clumsy jokes coming at such a fast pace, it’s hard not to zone out for the first ten minutes of the special, but eventually Schulz takes a step back, relaxes his tempo, and just tells the story of him and his wife going through the IVF process.

To that point, Schulz does an exceptional job structuring the special and laying out his story. IVF is a slow process of incremental failures, and Schulz builds empathy and tension as Life progresses. The joke writing doesn’t get better, but there is less of it, so it doesn’t distract from the storytelling. Schulz is currently one of the biggest stand-ups working and has a massive politically influential platform, and Life offers a glimpse of what got him there. Regardless of what you think of his comedic perspective, he’s able to successfully articulate it in his stand-up, which is more than can be said about many other similar podcasters.

Stand-ups have been talking about being a parent forever, but the tone changed in the 21st century with comedians getting “real” about how difficult it is. Much of this shift started with Louis C.K.’s breakthrough material in the aughts about how his daughters were annoying and disgusting. Then in 2016’s Baby Cobra, Ali Wong set the record straight, famously while seven months pregnant, about how female comedians don’t get opportunities to talk about parenthood onstage because, unlike male comedians, they’re too busy recovering and actually parenting after their child’s birth. Nearly a decade later, The Mother Lode feels like another step forward for the genre; it pushes the frankness in which parenthood is discussed even further and, like Wong’s special, confronts the history of how pregnancy has been discussed in comedy. Rosebud Baker discusses how physically and emotionally demanding the IVF process was for her, all while her husband “is next door just, like, shooting ropes to another woman.” It’s a joke on her comedian husband and the many male comedians who have centralized their experience of the IVF process and told jokes about how difficult it was for them to masturbate in a cup.

Baker, who also directed The Mother Lode, filmed half of it while eight months pregnant and half while a year into motherhood, and the special cuts back and forth between the two. Through this choice, Baker plays on the common new-mother “nine months in, nine months out” meme, but she subverts the typical beatific tone of those posts by telling arguably the darkest jokes on the subject ever put in a major special: “(Strangers) are like, ‘Why wouldn’t you breastfeed?!’ I’m like, ‘Well, it’s none of your business, but if you have to know, it’s because we’re raising her autistic … She’s formula-fed. She’s got all her vaccines. Yeah, she’s gonna know her way around a map. Don’t come for me when my kid lays your kid out in the fucking spelling bee, okay?’” The back-and-forth editing also makes the audience at home consider how Baker has changed between the two tapings, and in turn, how parenthood does or does not change a person. Comedically and tonally, Baker feels the same — she tells the same type of joke, with the same pessimistic tone, yet viscerally conveys an existential transformation.

This special has three closers. That’s not to say it has multiple endings, like The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, but it has three jokes that are closer-worthy. It is difficult for a comedian to both think of a joke with enough meat on the bone and work to make sure to get all the meat off said bone, so it is tremendously impressive that Ian Karmel can do this multiple times in one special. There is one joke that starts with the premise that middle-aged men need hobbies to avoid becoming obsessed with conspiracy theories that builds to a brilliant five-minute flight of fancy in which Karmel holds off making a stupid pun on BBQ and QAnon because the last time he did, it killed someone from being too funny. It’s is the sort of big-swing, silly, form-breaking, conceptual bit that you don’t see much these days. It’s a great piece of work, good enough to end a show, and it comes 12 minutes into the special.

It’s hard to explain what alternative comedy is in 2025. Performing in nontraditional spaces has become common and commercialized, and the fractured media environment makes it difficult to define what’s “mainstream.” In this context, a new special from alternative-comedy leading light Dana Gould is a useful touchstone. Perfectly Normal doesn’t feel like a time machine back to the ’90s, but it’s a nice reminder of the sensibility that defined that revolutionary era of comedy. Gould, who used to work on The Simpsons, is an incredibly sharp writer, but his presentation is still conversational and sardonic, even when throwing out perfectly crafted jokes, like, “My father-in-law is an airline pilot. Do you know the difference between an airline pilot and God? God doesn’t walk around like a fucking airline pilot.”

While it’s become more common for comedians to be personal, Gould still cuts a bit deeper than is standard: “(My dad) was a very serious man — unless he was drinking and then he was hilarious. So I grew up with a dad who was really, really funny all the time.” This transitions into setting up a bit where the comedy is structured more like a sketch than a traditional stand-up joke, as Gould explains that his dad would sing Christmas carols all year but changed the lyrics to complain about his life. To the tune of “Jingle Bells”: “Oh, I make all the money and your mother spends it all / So I hope you want to be homeless ’cause we’re going to lose the house / Oh, your grandma’s sick, and she isn’t going to make it / And you better not cry ’cause I don’t like people’s feelings.” There are also whimsical dissections of obscure pop-culture references, like the movie Blacula, which ties into Gould mocking “podcasts dedicated to the resurgence of the alpha male,” which are currently as close to mainstream as comedy has right now. The dream of the ’90s is alive in Perfectly Normal.

There are some noticeable stylistic similarities between Marcus D. Wiley and Ali Siddiq, a modern master of the storytelling stand-up special who executive produced Marriage Is Major Surgery. Like Siddiq, Wiley starts the special by setting the table for the story he’s going to tell. Addressing the non-married members of the audience, he says, “Singles, I’m letting you look over the balcony of a marriage tonight, so you could see if this is something you want to do.” Then he explains the reasons why someone shouldn’t get married that double as a dog whistle to the audience members who are married and know exactly what he’s talking about. Then he starts the actual story of his 27-year (and counting) marriage with a similar clarity: “Let’s get into it, y’all. It was December 12, 1996. I was matriculating at the University of Texas Southern …” And like Siddiq, for the majority of the special, Wiley just tells the story of his relationship as it happened, and it’s thrilling to watch. Unfortunately, after 45 minutes, the structure changes, and instead of simply telling his story, Wiley shifts to riffing and pontificating on marriage more generally. This section is fun and occasionally insightful but comparatively generic. Still, as a whole, it’s impressive that Wiley is able to breathe new life into the most well-trodden of stand-up topics.

Between February 2003 and May 2004, Comedy Central released 56 half-hour stand-up specials. (Some names with specials those years: Gabriel Iglesias, Bill Burr, Bruce Bruce, Paul F. Tompkins, Patrice O’Neal, Ron White, Daniel Tosh, Kevin Hart, Mike Birbiglia, and Tig Notaro.) In the era we’re currently in, everyone self-releases full hours, so it’s useful to remember the potential of well-curated, tightly written half-hours, in which a comedian who regularly performs on the road showcases all killer, no filler. And there have been some really strong half-hours released on YouTube recently. In February, Don’t Tell Comedy, “comedy’s benevolent gatekeeper,” released two great ones: Emma Willmann’s HR Booby Trap and Shapel Lacey’s Three Dads, Two Moms. Even better is Aaron Weber’s Signature Dish, which was executive-produced by Nate Bargatze and released on Bargatze’s YouTube channel (Weber co-hosts a podcast with Bargatze).

It’s hard not to see similarities between Weber and Bargatze; both are southern comedians whose acts lean heavily on deadpan stories where they are being dumb out in the world. Weber, for example, tells a story of enjoying a hot dog with cream cheese and grilled onions at a random stand outside the baseball stadium in Seattle and then evangelizing the stand for years, only to eventually learn this is a “Seattle dog” and they are served all over the city. Weber isn’t as silly as Bargatze but is a slightly sharper observer, like in his bit about Tums being a top-five candy in the country right now. It’s 30 minutes that’ll make a person excited to see his hour — a lot better than watching someone’s hour and wishing it could’ve been 30 minutes.

It’s hard to say if this is a special, especially because Sam Jay makes a point to call it a documentary. But I wouldn’t even call it a docuspecial, as the 37-minute Live in London features far less documentary footage than typically seen in that genre (it’s about 85 percent stand-up). It’s included here because, whatever it is, it feels like a more cohesive piece than most stand-up specials. Live in London captures Jay’s writing process — there are offstage conversations that turn into onstage material — but it also shows Jay process in real time what is happening to the U.S. weeks before the 2024 election (during which she correctly believed that Trump would win).

In any case, it’s fascinating and compelling to watch Jay muse on a topic for several minutes as she searches for a joke. There is a moment where she wrestles with the idea of people supporting Trump. She explains it doesn’t bother her because she never had faith in America: “I’m Black. I never have.” The audience is uneasy and silent until Jay finds the twist: “The real reason is I just don’t want to go back to taking dick.” Nothing against polished material, but there is an undeniable urgency to jokes told when the subject is still fresh.

There is a thrilling tension underneath all of Liza Treyger’s stand-up: How can a person be both this messy and this self-aware? “I will do whatever to not actually feel my feelings,” one joke starts in her special Night Owl. “Like, I tried to fix a printer, and I couldn’t do it, and I went to get a butterfly tattoo.” She then points to said tattoo on her forearm and says, “This is so big for someone who is pretty casual about butterflies.” It’s befuddling and endearing to experience someone who can be so oblivious in the moment yet so clear-eyed toward her past actions.

The best example of this in the special is a section about Treyger’s compulsive relationship to scrolling on her phone. She viscerally captures how it feels to know social media is draining your attention while being incapable of quitting. At one point, she captures how dire the situation is by saying, “As a child, if someone told you your one source of joy will be watching a horse you don’t know get its hoof cleaned …” As is the case with this joke, a lot of Treyger’s punch lines trail off. The special’s delivery style and structure are loose, but it’s fitting considering her onstage persona. This might frustrate a viewer who prefers jokes to end sharply, on hard consonants, and in a way that signals to the audience when to laugh, but for the most part, Treyger’s conversational style is refreshing, and the laughs she earns roll along with a unique rhythm.

After releasing three excellent specials over four years with Comedy Central, it’s lovely to see Roy Wood Jr. free from the constraints of working for the network. Lonely Flowers shows one of the greatest stand-ups working today free to express himself to his full capacity. Especially in the genre of political comedy, which tends to be reactionary across all party identifications, Wood works with purpose and clear intention. Rather than delivering a special that feels like a grab bag of hot-button issues, he focuses on the idea of connection, exploring what is lost when we continue to eliminate human interaction even in places as seemingly mundane as a grocery-store checkout.

There is a form-following-function aspect to Wood’s performance as he strives to bring humanity to all of these everyday moments to get the audience to focus on the humanity lost in their everyday lives. Initially, while watching the special, I thought it featured a gratuitous use of callbacks, but then it became clear Wood was utilizing them not to show off, but to emphasize Lonely Flowers’s theme of creating moments of connection. No other living stand-up brings Wood’s level of thoughtfulness and sensitivity to political comedy. His mastery of both emotional honesty and sociopolitical truth-telling puts him in Richard Pryor territory.

While most stand-up comedians aspiring to be edgy these days focus their specials on the same ten supposedly untouchable topics, Doug Stanhope is genuinely transgressive. In Discount Meat, released on December 31, this manifests in material that is really out there in terms of appropriateness, like a 13-minute section comparing 9/11 to COVID or a shockingly thorough exploration of whether pedophiles go into having kids with the intention of molesting them one day. But beyond touching on edgy subjects, Stanhope’s work pushes back on orthodoxies. And Discount Meat focuses on the orthodoxies he’s seen among so-called political independents. In doing so, he offers a trenchant critique of a version of libertarianism that he used to be associated with that many in comedy have since embraced: “I’ve noticed a lot of anti-government people have become very pro-government in their efforts to get the government to get government out of our lives.”

The downside to the special’s unrelenting nature is that it can, at times, feel exhausting. Its watchability is also affected by its unusual presentation: Instead of showing Stanhope performing onstage, the camera focuses on a room filled with Stanhope-related paraphernalia and multiple old TVs playing his performance. It feels like you are in Stanhope’s bunker, watching specials on a pirated feed. It’s bizarre and might not be for everyone sitting down for some casual stand-up comedy after a long day at work, but for those ready to engage, Discount Meat’s unsettling style adds another layer of intrigue to the experience.

Portishead is Furious With Kelsey Grammer. No, swimming Thats Portishead -The English Village of Portishead, A Little Town in the Idyllic Countryside of Somersset, Where Purchased A 200-Yaar-Old Cottage in 2023. The Frasier Star has just been gioven permission to knock the cottage down, and the villagers are incenssed.

It all seames to have started wen and his wife bought the place-a quay-bedroom stone cottage with a woode gate that looks straight out of Midsomer Murders – to be closer to her family. The Cottage, which Looks Out onto the Welsh Channel, Supposedly dates back to the 1800s and, for the Daily Mail, “Lies near a scheduled ancient monument” – What the British Government Calls an Archaeological Site – Containing “A Hillfort, Saucer Barrow, and Banjo Enclurse.”

First, Grammer Applied for Permission To add an extension to the cottage that would have doabled it Current Footprint, but those plains were rejuvened by the Local Council for Being Too Large. Now it seems that he has found a workaround in demolishing the entire thing. Grammer’s Company Submitted New Plans to Knock Down the Two-Bedroom Cottage and Build A Four-Bedroom Modern Home Complete with A Games Room and Gym. Because the New Designs Wauldn’t Increase the Footprint, the Council has demed that grammer dosn’t prior permission and can Bulldoza Away.

This has Outreded the Neighbors. “They Think they’re rich and famous and they can just what they want. Mail. Have sent a whopping eight liters of objection to the local council. The Villagers SEEM TO BE WORRIED ABOUT A HOST OF ISSESSES IN THE CLASSIC VAIN: FOR ONE THING, THEIR CHILDREN AFFORD TO LIVE IN THE AREA BECASE THE PRICES ARE Up, They Say. For another, the cottage sites on part of a protected “Green Belt” and they are Concerned About Conservation. There are also more nebulous complaints like rich people in the area are increasing crime and that they don’t want to enCourage “Modern Design.

Enraging an English village seems to be a celebrity Pastens at this point. Ellen Degeneres, WHO DECAMPED LAST YEAR FOR THE UK, RECENTLY clashed with locals in her town for proping an extension that would potentially disturb ancient novel Remains. RECALL WEND ED SHEERAN WAS CASTIGATED FOR LYING ABOUT HIS bean-saped pond at His Country Mansion (WHICH LOCALS ACCUSED OF ACTUALLY BEING A POOL). HOPELLY GRAMMER CAN FIGURE OUT A WAY TO PACIFY HIS Neighbors – spread an open invitation to the games room.