Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/ReutersHe coulda been somebody. He coulda been a contender.I once had high aspirations for Ron DeSantis. But those of us who were hoping he’d be an instrument to stop Donald Trump from winning a third Republican presidential nomination look to be out of luck, as the promise of DeSantis recedes with the summer of 2023.A recent CNN/University of New Hampshire poll, for example, shows DeSantis plummeting 13 points since their last survey in July, putting him at just 10 percent in the “first in the nation” primary.Read more at The Daily Beast.

ReutersIn a letter sent on Friday, Mayor Dan Gelber of Miami Beach laid into presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis, saying the governor’s advice to Florida residents under 65 to avoid the newly available COVID vaccine is “entirely based on the politics of the Republican primary and not on what’s best for [his] Florida constituents.”“I have seen politicians do many things I thought were expedient, political, or simply gutless,” Gelber wrote to DeSantis, “These days, people expect as much. But urging your residents not to avail themselves of the one thing that can protect them from severe illness and death in order to revive your struggling campaign, is all of those things and worse. It is simply craven.”On Sept. 13, DeSantis and Florida’s Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo told Floridians the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration were trying to use them “as guinea pigs” to test the new COVID vaccine that “has not been proven to be safe or effective.” Breaking with the advice of the White House and federal agencies, DeSantis advised residents of the state under the age of 65 to avoid getting the new shot.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Alex WongJustice Clarence Thomas once championed the Supreme Court line of precedent giving deference to federal agency expertise—the so-called “Chevron deference” doctrine—writing in 2005 that the Federal Telecommunications Commission was “in a far better position to address these questions than we are” in a case involving regulation of broadband internet service given that the “subject matter [that] is technical, complex, and dynamic.”Thomas’ decision in that case—one known as Brand X—was no outlier given that the Chevron case from which the precedent arose has been cited more than 15,000 times since being decided by the high court in 1984. But 15 years later, Thomas announced that his own decision in that case was wrong because it added to the “constitutional deficiencies of Chevron and exacerbates them.” Unusually, Thomas announced his change of heart in a dissent where he advocated that SCOTUS should have accepted a case for the purpose of overruling his own opinion.What changed?Read more at The Daily Beast.

Brendan McDermid/ReutersThe internet might have labeled Abigail Elphick “Victoria’s Secret Karen” in 2021, but according to a new report from The New York Times, the real story is more complicated than that label might indicate.Two years ago, Ijeoma Ukenta, who is Black, posted a video to her YouTube channel with the title “Karen Goes Crazy Part 1.” At the start of the video, Elphick, who is white, seems to be reaching for Ukenta’s phone as she films. She then sinks to the floor in tears, covering her face and denying Ukenta’s claims that she’d tried to hit her. Passersby in the store remain silent while Elphick begs, “Don’t record my mental breakdown—please, please, please.” The video has netted 2.6 million views on YouTube.Ukenta had been shopping at Victoria’s Secret when Elphick began standing too close, the Times reports; when Ukenta asked Elphick to stand six feet away, she reportedly complained to a cashier, at which point Ukenta began filming. Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Everett CollectionFrom a brash Clint Eastwood in the classic spaghetti Western For A Few Dollars More to a conscientious Robert De Niro in Midnight Run, pop culture depicts the bounty hunter as a kickass, gun-toting white man. Sometimes it’s portrayed by former convicts like reality TV’s Dog the Bounty Hunter and Giovanni Ribisi’s con man who invades a family in the bail bond business in the Amazon’s series Sneaky Pete. Nevertheless, it’s usually a white guy. How realistic is this picture? Let’s examine it with the help of a real bounty hunter.First, the job title. While “bounty hunter” is universally understood since the days of the Wild West, professionals dislike it. “We never use the term bounty hunter because it is not the legal name we can use in Ohio,” said Dana Acy, bail bonds agent and owner of an eponymous bail bonds agency in Cleveland.Acy prefers “fugitive recovery agent.” Alternative job titles include bail enforcement agent, fugitive apprehension agent, and bail enforcer, which is also the title of Bob Burton’s seminal book that the U.S. Department of Justice uses as a training manual.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Anna Moneymaker/GettyIn the ballroom of a Washington, D.C. hotel last Friday night, hundreds of people swayed and raised their hands to catchy contemporary Christian music.There’s nothing that our God can’t doThere’s not a mountain that He can’t move.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/GettyAri Paez, 29, had been dating her boyfriend Jake* (not his real name) for about six months but had increasingly grown suspicious of his interactions with his ex-girlfriend.“I would see her name pop up on his phone quite often,” she says. “At first I was a little sketched out so I snooped on his phone but it all seemed very friendly, the messages weren’t really flirtatious, so I tried to be the cool girl and be like ‘some people are friends with their ex’ it doesn’t mean anything.”But the uneasy feeling in her stomach that something was awry only continued to grow when Jake and his ex would go on trips together.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Apple+This week:Nicole Beharie Is the Performer of the WeekI wouldn’t call the way The Morning Show tackles anything “nuanced.” The Apple TV+ show tends to rile up its impressive cast—Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Julianna Margulies, Jon Hamm, Greta Lee, Billy Crudup, and Karen Pittman—and has them charge at various ripped-from-headlines issues like a prestige television running of the bulls.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Handout/GettyUganda’s Murchison Falls National Park is home to much dangerous wildlife. The rivers teem with crocodiles and tusked hippos. Lions and leopards stalk the night. There are elephants that can crush anything in their path and massive cape buffalos with razor-sharp horns more than three feet across.When 21-year-old Dutch medical student Sophia Koetsier disappeared here under mysterious circumstances in the autumn of 2015, authorities tried to blame it on an animal attack, according to Dutch media reports.Eight years later, however, a potential new lead has surfaced. And the new director of the Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID) in Uganda has reopened the investigation into Sophia’s mysterious disappearance. Instead of a croc or a big cat, it now appears that Sophia may have fallen prey to the most dangerous species of all: man.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Erin O'Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty ImagesIn the last two months, I’ve read many stories celebrating the 50-year anniversary of Hip Hop. Stories of how teenagers who grew up in New York City harnessed nothing but their talent to create a cultural phenomenon that captivates the globe. Hip Hop’s cultural power is undeniable, but the story people don’t know is that the children who created this global juggernaut attended school in the shadow of the school reform movement that punished them for the very creativity they expressed in Hip Hop.Born in 1979, I am a card-carrying member of the Hip Hop generation. I started school when Hip Hop was making its way into the American mainstream. My big brother, 12 years my senior, introduced me to Hip Hop. Kurtis Blow, Salt-n-Pepa, Kool Moe Dee, and The Fat Boys blasted nonstop from his bedroom. I’d kneel by his door, hoping he would play my favorite songs more than once so I could memorize all the words. Hip Hop was all around me, influencing every part of my life. My clothes, hair, sneakers, walk, talk, and ideas about the world were being shaped by Hip Hop. It was my everything, and each kid that looked like me in my Black neighborhood in upstate New York spoke in the language of Hip Hop. At home, on our block, in our neighborhoods, we were in sync. But when we went to school, the heartbeat of Hip Hop that proudly blasted from every corner of our neighborhoods could not reach our schools or our teachers.We made beats and they told us to stop banging on the lunch tables. We were poets and writers, and they told us to stop rapping. We freed our minds and bodies through innovative movement, and they told us to stop popping and locking. We thought we were representing our pride and beauty through fashion, and they told us to turn our clothes inside out or leave school altogether.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/GettyI wasn’t even looking to work at the Center for Antiracist Research. I was a junior faculty member at Boston University with a modest public profile, so didn’t expect an invitation to the party. Dr. Ibram X. Kendi was an academic rockstar, after all.To my surprise, the Center reached out to interview me. When I got the job, I felt like Percy Jackson being summoned to Mount Olympus.Fast forward two years. I had left the Center, like so many others, and was recovering from the experience. Then I got word about the mass layoffs. All the old feelings came flooding back.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty/ReutersComedian Sam Jay opens her new HBO stand-up special, Salute Me Or Shoot Me, by admitting not only that she’s wearing Spanx, but because she doesn’t know how to pee in them, she’s standing before the audience now with a wet ass. Whether any of that is true or not is irrelevant, because she literally has made herself the butt of the joke.Hasan Minhaj, on the other hand, found himself clowned upon and debated this past week not because he acknowledged in a New Yorker profile that he had lied in his comedy specials, but because he lied for the wrong reasons.What’s the difference?Read more at The Daily Beast.

Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily BeastThe kit arrives in your mailbox in a cardboard box stamped with a modern, serif-font logo. It’s the kind of sleek, clean design so often associated with direct-to-consumer brands that fill your social media feeds with ads. A hip makeup line could easily be inside, or a set of razors with a cutesy name.Instead, you open the box and find a pair of gloves, a specimen collection jar, and an organic cotton tampon.NextGen Jane, a health tech startup founded in 2014, sends these kits to menstruators who volunteer to participate in one of the company’s clinical studies. Users wear the tampon for a specified amount of time before removing it and depositing it into the collection jar. Once the jar is sealed, a solution in the container activates to keep the sample’s DNA and RNA intact in ambient temperatures for up to two weeks. Users pack the jar in a supplied, self-addressed box, and drop it in the mail to be sent to NextGen Jane’s lab in Oakland, California for analysis.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty/ReutersI wasn’t sure a celebrity could have a worse week than Drew Barrymore did after three separate announcements—two of them, apologies—regarding the now-delayed return of her talk show during the WGA strike. Then walks in our Nepo Baby of The Week, Emma Roberts, who was called out for being transphobic and an overall mean girl by one of her former co-stars this week. This PR catastrophe occurred the same day as the premiere of her latest acting gig, which has also caught heat for strike-related reasons. Can these spoiled, Hollywood-bred girls do anything right?? (The answer is obviously no.)On Wednesday, television mogul Ryan Murphy unleashed his latest cursed project onto the world, American Horror Story: Delicate, in which Roberts plays an actress trying to conceive through IVF. Its arrival, however, has been anything but delicate. That’s not to mention that some of the next-morning reviews were pretty harsh.First, there’s the alleged scabbiness of it all, as Murphy and FX kept the show in production after the Writers Guild of America announced a walkout amid their ongoing fight for better wages and working conditions. (While the scripts that were shooting were apparently already completed, as several WGA members noted, writers are utilized throughout TV shoots, and therefore picketed outside the studio. ) It’s safe to say that no one was really checking for Roberts in this regard, as her billionaire co-star, Kim Kardashian, was catching most of the heat on social media. Yet the former Nickelodeon star managed to find herself in the center of even a more explosive controversy after Pose actress Angelica Ross aired out some of her experiences on Murphy’s sets.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via GettyAfter nearly a year of anticipation, the most shocking thing about the federal indictment of Sen. Robert Menendez that dropped Friday is how clumsy it makes the senator and his co-conspirators look.According to the indictment, the Democrat, his wife, and their alleged accomplices left fingerprints—literal, digital, and figurative—all over the purported plot to take bribes in exchange for local, national, and international favors. So far, Menendez and two of the other defendants have denied wrongdoing.None have yet disputed U.S. Attorney Damian Williams’ evidence. And that evidence, if accurate, would appear to indicate that not only is Menendez a crook, but an incredibly bad one.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty/ReutersAs he helped propel the government towards a shutdown, far-right Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles took a moment to announce urgent legislation to counter what he views as a threat to the American way of life.“Biden’s war on everyday appliances is not over,” Ogles tweeted amidst a national crisis on Thursday. “Now, he’s having his bureaucrats come after your water heater.”While responsible members of Congress were worried about the immediate impact a shutdown would have on everything from child care to cancer research, Ogles was concerned about a federal energy conservation measure for new water heaters that would not take effect until five years after final approval.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Reuters / U.S. Army The Biden administration is nearing a decision to send long-range munitions to Ukraine known as Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) that could give Ukraine an edge in the fight against Russia’s invasion, according to U.S. officials.President Joe Biden has told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Washington will be sending a small number of long-range missiles to Ukraine, NBC News reported Friday. Senior national security officials have also been discussing whether to send the ATACMS missiles armed with cluster bomblets instead of a single warhead in recent days, according to The Washington Post.ATACMS, which can fire about 190 miles, could provide Ukraine the firepower it needs to reach important logistics, stockpiles, command and control centers, and other Russian targets far inside Russian territory. Read more at The Daily Beast.

Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesHouse Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) isn’t finished caving to the far-right in his conference, even as they continue to sabotage his attempts at passing party-line spending bills ahead of an imminent government shutdown.The latest instance came on Friday—just eight days out from a shutdown—when McCarthy bowed to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) demand to remove $300 million in aid for Ukraine from a Pentagon spending bill. The bill was voted down by Greene and other hardliners twice this week, despite usually being one of the easiest government funding measures to pass, and one McCarthy hoped would chart a way forward for passing a wider resolution to divert a shutdown. The concession underscored the lengths McCarthy has been forced to go in order to appease hardline conservatives who, because of the razor-thin margins in the House, effectively have a gun to the speaker’s head allowing them to get whatever they want at the expense of effective governing.Read more at The Daily Beast.

REUTERS/Aude GuerrucciLongtime TV host and reality personality Sharon Osbourne is known for being outspoken, but this week, the wife of rock star Ozzy Osbourne peeled back yet another layer of vulnerability on the Piers Morgan show when she revealed a dramatic 30-pound weight loss, which she says is due to taking injections of Ozempic. Many suddenly-skinnier celebrities have aroused suspicion that they’re on the drug, which is intended to be prescribed to diabetics but which has had a huge surge in popularity due to its weight loss capabilities, but Osbourne is one of the few who’s copped to taking it. Other celebrities who’ve spoken out about taking Ozempic include Tracy Morgan and Amy Schumer—along with Chelsea Handler who claimed to have taken it accidentally. Read more at The Daily Beast.

Parisa Taghizadeh/Searchlight PicturesWriter-director Andrew Haigh has made a name for himself in the realm of sad, gay cinema. The director’s 2011 breakout hit, Weekend, became a lightning rod for some members of the queer community, with discussion of the film being a go-to icebreaker on first dates—well, at least for me. Weekend, for all of its fans, was a film that never connected with me, no matter how hard I tried. Bringing it up on dates was an effective litmus test for whether or not I might click with someone as a prospective partner. But it speaks to Haigh’s talent as a filmmaker that, although his most beloved feature could never pierce the veil for me, I’ve greatly enjoyed his other work, particularly 2015’s stunning 45 Years.In the case of Haigh’s latest project, the sublimely emotional All of Us Strangers—which screened Thursday at the New York Film Festival—things are very different. Here, Haigh takes the queer experience and makes it universal; the specificity of gay trauma is merely a catalyst for Haigh’s characters to embark on a journey through their best and worst selves. It’s at those extremes that Haigh crafts his most accessible film yet, a tender treatise on the undying power of love and what happens when we ignore its force.All of Us Strangers is loosely based on Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers, yet has Haigh’s signature touches all over it. I don’t just mean the hot guys, but I am also directly referring to the hot guys. The film stars Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal as Adam and Harry, two neighbors in a recently completed London high-rise who find themselves repeatedly bumping into one another, if only because there aren’t yet many other tenants to crowd the place. One night, Adam opens his door to find a drunken Harry standing in the hallway, asking if Adam would like to have a drink… or whatever else a drink may lead to. Though intrigued, Adam turns him down in favor of burying himself in his work: a screenplay set in 1987, about his parents who died in a car crash when he was just 12 years old.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Scouted/The Daily Beast/Plufl.Scouted selects products independently. If you purchase something from our posts, we may earn a small commission.I have five dogs (and four cats), which means I own a lot of pet beds in varying sizes. Like most pet owners, I love to snuggle, nap, and even sleep with my fur children, which has resulted in some pretty comical photos of me trying to contort my lanky 5’8 frame into one of their pet-sized beds to lay beside them. Naturally, I was instantly intrigued when TikTok served me a video featuring Plufl, the original human dog bed. This oversized fuzzy napping bed looks exactly like a premium dog or cat bed—only larger—68 inches long and 33 inches wide, to be exact. Unlike your standard cat or dog bed, however, the Plufl really is designed for human use, which means its base is made from mattress grade and orthopedic memory foam (hence the $400 price tag), so you feel like you’re sleeping in a mini version of your real bed—not your pet’s. This also means you can actually plop down on it without breaking your back when you hit the ground... it’s that padded. Read more at The Daily Beast.

Timothy A. Clark/AFP/GettyFor one week each year, as world leaders gather in New York for the United Nations General Assembly meetings, the biggest stories in international affairs all seem to be laid out, side-by-side for Americans to view up close. This year, the spectacle and related developments here in the United States had to leave most rational observers more shaken than stirred.On Wednesday, speaking at a climate conference, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said environmental challenges facing the planet had “opened up the gates of hell.”The unsettling week also saw congressional Republicans move to cut future funding to help stop Russian aggression in Ukraine, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman crowing on U.S. television about his $2 billion investment in Jared Kushner and his embrace of the benefits of “sportswashing,” Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu cozying up to one of the world’s leading enablers of anti-Semites, Elon Musk, and China finishing up the week by announcing a “strategic partnership” with Syrian butcher Bashar al Assad.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Kenny Shaw/CMUUse your hands for a moment. Grab that bottle on your desk and unscrew the cap. Or get a pencil or pen and write your name. You might already be using your hand to read this story on your phone—that works too. As you do, notice each movement that your hands and fingers make, and the tiny changes in pressure you apply as you go through the motions.Pay close enough attention and you’ll see that your hands are doing a lot more than you realized. But it’s something that you tend not to think about. After all, you’ve probably made these motions countless times in your life.However, Kenny Shaw thinks about these motions a lot. As a robotics engineer at Carnegie Mellon University, he’s devoted his research to figuring out how hands work—and how to replicate them in machines.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Adrian Edwards/GettyIn his announcement on Thursday that he was stepping down as chairman of News Corp and Fox Corp. and handing the reigns to Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch assured staff that his eldest son was “absolutely committed to the cause.”According to Fox News’ far-right media rivals, that apparent cause is wokeness.In the wake of the 92-year-old media mogul’s decision to fade into the background, mainstream and liberal media have contemplated just how much the younger Murdoch will continue his father’s legacy of peddling outrage porn, grievance, and deception for profit. “I fear Fox will only be worse under son Lachlan & that this is a means to solidify his power before Dad’s death,” journalism professor Jeff Jarvis noted.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Kevin MazurA man named John Hetherington finally got to see Beyoncé perform live last night after an airline failed to accommodate his wheelchair last week, forcing him to miss the singer’s concert in Seattle.On Friday, Hetherington, who has cerebral palsy, expressed his gratitude to Beyoncé and her online fanbase, known as the BeyHive, for getting him to her Renaissance World Tour show in Arlington, Texas.“We partied, we sang, we danced… HARD,” he wrote in a caption. “BeyHive, you made this happen. You pushed and tagged like the internet has never seen. Tonight for the first time ever, I had a seat on the floor of a concert.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Justin Sullivan/GettyEach day, you leave digital traces of what you did, where you went, who you communicated with, what you bought, what you’re thinking of buying, and much more. This mass of data serves as a library of clues for personalized ads, which are sent to you by a sophisticated network—an automated marketplace of advertisers, publishers and ad brokers that operates at lightning speed.The ad networks are designed to shield your identity, but companies and governments are able to combine that information with other data, particularly phone location, to identify you and track your movements and online activity. More invasive yet is spyware—malicious software that a government agent, private investigator or criminal installs on someone’s phone or computer without their knowledge or consent. Spyware lets the user see the contents of the target’s device, including calls, texts, email and voicemail. Some forms of spyware can take control of a phone, including turning on its microphone and camera.Now, according to an investigative report by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, an Israeli technology company called Insanet has developed the means of delivering spyware via online ad networks, turning some targeted ads into Trojan horses. According to the report, there’s no defense against the spyware, and the Israeli government has given Insanet approval to sell the technology.Read more at The Daily Beast.

REUTERS/Scott MorganFormer President Donald Trump’s lawyers and New York state investigators duked it out in court Friday morning, as both sides sought to score a decisive victory to avoid a trial that threatens to topple his real estate empire and drain his bank accounts.“There was rampant fraud in preparation of Trump’s personal financial statements,” said Andrew Amer, a lawyer at the New York Attorney General’s Office. “The defendants used those fraudulent statements repeatedly and persistently with banks and insurance companies in transactions seeking financial benefits.”Amer argued that Trump has “ultimate responsibility” over the way he faked personal financial statements to inflate the value of his properties to augment his net worth by $2.2 billion or more. The former president’s own records for the backbone of the $250 million lawsuit the AG’s office last year against Trump, his top lieutenants, and the heirs he appointed as Trump Organization executives.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Al Drago/ReutersSen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been charged with bribery in a federal indictment to be formally unsealed Friday at 11 a.m.The indictment, which has already been added to the federal docket and is available for public review, accuses Menendez—the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—with accepting “hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes in exchange for using Menendez’s influence as a Senator to seek to... benefit the Arab Republic of Egypt.”The alleged payoffs came from three New Jersey businessmen, and included cash, gold bars, payments toward a home mortgage, a no-show job, a Mercedes, and “other things of value,” according to the indictment.Read more at The Daily Beast.

REUTERS TVThe headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in the Crimean city of Sevastopol was in flames Friday after being hit by a Ukrainian missile. The latest Ukrainian success against Russian naval targets in the occupied peninsula was confirmed by the city's Russian-appointed governor, Mikhail Razvozhayev, who urged locals to avoid the city center in a post on the Telegram messaging app. Videos posted on social media showed the naval HQ in flames and reports suggested a large number of ambulances had been sent to the scene. Read more at The Daily Beast.

NetflixLove Is Blind has never felt more chaotic than it does in Season 5, which premiered its first four episodes Friday on Netflix. This season has everything: midseason break-ups, a confounding argument over make-up that’ll leave you scratching your head for days, and, as viewers who’ve seen the first four episodes already know, a shocking revelation that rocks multiple cast members to their core.So, why does this season also seem like the most orchestrated, highly “produced” entries yet? The answer might just lie in the twist itself. (For those who have not yet seen the first batch of episodes and want to remain unspoiled, this is your cue to stop reading!)For the uninitiated, Love Is Blind sends its cast members into individual “pods,” where they blind-date each other through a wall. After a couple weeks of narrowing down to one potential suitor, cast members must propose through a wall before meeting in person for the first time. Then, it’s time to move in together, meet the friends and family, and, ultimately, face one another at the altar in what often unfolds like a game of emotional “Chicken.”Read more at The Daily Beast.