NetflixFew people embody the American Dream more than Arnold Schwarzenegger, who transformed his love of bodybuilding into a vehicle for athletic, cinematic, and political superstardom.It was a rise of meteoric proportions, albeit not without its scandals, and Arnold, director Lesley Chilcott’s three-part Netflix documentary (which will be released June 7) about the icon’s tremendous life story, does touch upon the major ones, including the 2003 accusations from multiple women about his sexual misconduct, with Schwarzenegger stating, “It doesn't really matter what time it is. If it's the Muscle Beach days, or 40 years ago, or today. This was wrong. It was bullshit. Forget all the excuses. This was wrong.”It's a blunt admission from one of Hollywood’s most recognizable and popular leading men, and it’s not the only time during Arnold (arriving on the heels of his underwhelming Netflix series, FUBAR) that Schwarzenegger cops to his failings—something he also does, notably, about the affair and out-of-wedlock child (fathered with family housekeeper Mildred Patricia Baena) that destroyed his 25-year marriage to Maria Shriver.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Michigan State PoliceA suspect accused of stealing a car and leading cops on a mile-long highway chase before slowly crashing into a guardrail didn’t have a license. Because he is 10 years old. Michigan State Police were alerted to the vehicle’s theft by OnStar and simultaneous calls of a child behind the wheel of a Buick Encore on I-75, according to the Detroit Free Press. “The trooper was behind the suspect for about a mile with lights and sirens activated while OnStar disabled the Buick, allowing for a safe stop,” police said. The child, who is now in juvenile detention, was not injured.Read more at The Daily Beast.

HBOThe Idol opens with a scene that feels ripped straight from the controversial production of The Idol itself. The intimacy coordinator on pop star Jocelyn’s (Lily-Rose Depp) album cover photo shoot is kicked off set for following the rules of her rider. We’re not even five minutes into the pilot, “Pop Tarts & Rat Tales,” before the show’s notoriously provocative creator, Sam Levinson, has turned the monitor meant to make sure that celebrities are safe and protected when asked to do nudity or perform sex scenes into the villain.“Give me that laugh again,” the photographer tells Jocelyn, who squeaks, sounding more like a sorority girl in that Bama Rush doc than a superstar. Then she’s told to give “innocence.” Then “pure sex.” Then “vulnerable.” A tear rolls down her cheek after she’s asked to be “emotional,” a shallow portrayal of Jocelyn’s precarious mental health state: Is she so good at acting that she can whip out a single teardrop on command? Or is she actually hurting? So deep.More on that later—because duh, it’s Euphoria mastermind Levinson who is behind this show, after all. But Jocelyn (who has the boring nickname “Joss,” which reminds me of Joss Whedon and the Voss product placement sprinkled throughout this episode) is too busy flashing the photographer to care about her emotions. She says she wants to show her full areola. The photographer obliges, but the intimacy coordinator says nudity to this extent is not in her original rider. (Various areas of her breasts and cleavage were agreed on, but no nipple area.) The fix, the coordinator says, would be simple: renegotiate, wait 48 hours, then shoot with full nip in the frame without any legal worry.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyThe owners of a Cessna passenger aircraft that sparked panic as it flew into restricted U.S. airspace over Washington, D.C. Sunday—before crashing into the Virginia wilderness—are big-time Republican donors and major boosters of the National Rifle Association, according to federal records and public statements.The aircraft, which authorities said was piloted by a person who lost consciousness, prompted an aerial chase with Pentagon jets, which caused a sonic boom heard across the D.C. area, officials said.According to federal aviation records, the plane was registered to Encore Motors of Melbourne, a Florida-based company owned by John and Barbara Rumpel, though neither were on board at the time of the crash.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/ReutersEven before Marjorie Taylor Greene was sworn into Congress, she was a darling of the far-right.A MAGA soldier from a deep-red district, Greene spent her first few years in office as a thorn in the side of House GOP leadership. Her attention-seeking, Biden-bashing, pro-Trump antics endeared her to the conservative base as much as they alienated her with GOP leaders. And she owned the persona unapologetically.But lately, a different Marjorie Taylor Greene has emerged—one who’s found favor with Speaker Kevin McCarthy and scorn from the conservative allies who once adored her. And according to a text message Greene sent to Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) on Friday, Greene may be even more done with certain MAGA influencers than they are with her.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyTOKYO, Japan—It was an open secret to people in the Japanese media for two decades. Japanese Pop Titan Johnny Kitagawa was sexually assaulting male performers—so called ‘idols’—under his talent agency, Johnny & Associates. Especially the trainees and the new talents—young boys not even in their teens.There’s no doubt that he was a legend in the music world. He has the Guinness World Record for the most No. 1 singles produced by an individual, 232, but the allegations against him were horrifying. John Hiromu Kitagawa (known affectionately in Japan as just “Johnny”) was reportedly abusing children as young as 11, often repeatedly, and for years. He reportedly used his position at the head of his company to intimidate, coerce, and force up to 100 boys to submit to acts ranging from massage to penetrative rape. He continued to do this until his death in 2019.When he died, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sent his condolences and obituaries in the Japanese media glossed over his history of sexually assaulting young boys even though some of the allegations had been made public and proven in court. The nation mourned.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Reuters/Jason ReedA Cessna aircraft with an unresponsive pilot prompted an aerial chase with Pentagon jets Sunday when it crossed into protected U.S. airspace over Washington, D.C.—causing a sonic boom heard across the Washington D.C. area, officials said.In a statement, the Federal Aviation Authority told The Daily Beast the aircraft, a Cessna Citation, took off from Elizabethton Municipal Airport in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and was bound for Long Island MacArthur Airport in New York. The plane concerned authorities when it flew over restricted D.C. airspace. Pentagon F-16s scrambled and went supersonic to catch up with the runaway plane. According to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD): “The civilian aircraft was intercepted at approximately 3:20 p.m.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/APThe First Lady of Florida showed up on the campaign trail in Iowa this weekend wearing a ghastly black leather jacket—American flag on front, an alligator and the silhouette of her state on the back, with the sneering words, “Where Woke Goes to Die”—that brought to mind nothing so much as the racks of a Red State big-bin store where it would be retailing for $24.99.To be fair, Casey DeSantis wore the bomber to a charity biker rally and I’m sure the campaign intended it to be a viral moment, like Melania Trump’s infamous “I Really Don’t Care” coat that the former First Lady donned to check out the border crisis.The message on Melania’s coat, like the one-time model herself, was sphinxlike. Was it a sign to the outside that Melania dreamed of escaping her boorish husband, the stuff of a thousand Resistance Twitter fever memes? Was it the physical manifestation of the Trumps’ casual cruelty? After all, Melania was flying down to where the administration locked up little kids in cages and tore them from the arms of their desperate parents. Did it mean nothing at all, like her spox insisted—maybe like Melania herself, a cipher whose eyes seem to betray an inner emptiness, like the infinite refraction of mirrored light off of all those gold-plated Trump Tower bathroom fixtures?Read more at The Daily Beast.

ABC NewsRepublican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy thinks “major concessions” need to be made to Russia in order to end the war in Ukraine—a war, he believes, doesn’t affect U.S. interests.Speaking with ABC News anchor (and foreign policy expert) Martha Raddatz, Ramaswamy maintained his view that the war should not be a U.S. foreign policy priority. Instead, it should focus on diminishing the alliance between China and Russia.“I think the job of the U.S. president is to look after American interests. And what I think the number one threat to the U.S. military right now, our top military threat, is the Sino-Russian alliance,” he told Raddatz. “I think that by fighting further in Russia, by further arming Ukraine, we are driving Russia into China’s hands, and that Sino-Russian alliance is the top threat we face.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Mario Anzuoni/ReutersTyler James Williams took to Instagram early Sunday to dispel any rumors of his sexuality, instead urging his followers to deconstruct stereotypes forced onto both straight and gay people on representation.“Usually I wouldn’t address stuff like this but I feel like it as a conversation is bigger than me,” he wrote in a Notes-app message posted to his Instagram story. “I’m not gay; but I think the culture of trying to ‘find’ some kind of hidden trait or behavior that a closeted person ‘let slip’ is very dangerous.”Williams wrote that the culture of trying to force someone into coming out “contributes directly to the anxiety a lot of queer and queer questioning people feel when they fear living in their truth.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

One will often not tout their pending criminal investigations on their resumes or, perhaps, even their dating profile. For one House Republican, that fact could make Donald Trump even more credible.Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) appeared on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, where he was asked what he made of the ethical qualms Trump faced. Buck said last month that Trump faced “some ethical challenges” heading into the 2024 election, and Buck had said he would meet multiple 2024 candidates before he endorsed one. “Would Republicans be better off with a candidate who is not facing multiple criminal investigations?” host Dana Bash asked.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Fox NewsThe quest to make the earth a better and more habitual place isn’t just a political fight. For one Fox News host, it’s also sacrilegious.The hosts of Fox & Friends Sunday were discussing Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s pledge to be guided by faith if he wins in 2024, noting how religion is often referenced more by Republicans than Democrats. Co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy took that a step further, saying liberals only see Earth as the endgame while conservatives look beyond.“For them, where we live right now, this place, Earth is it,” she said. “So everything’s on the line here for them. They think, as you said, they can perfect this Earth. Those of us who have faith don’t believe that, and we believe how we act here determines where we go after. And so we got to behave.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

William B. Plowman/NBC via GettyChuck Todd is leaving Meet The Press, NBC announced on Sunday.Todd confirmed his exit from the program on his show Sunday. In a memo to staff Sunday morning, NBC News President of Editorial Rebecca Blumenstein and NBC News Senior Vice President of Politics Carrie Budoff Brown told staff that Kristen Welker will take the helm in September.This is a developing story.Read more at The Daily Beast.

REUTERS/Toby Melville/File PhotoPrince Harry has his day in courtThis coming week, Prince Harry is due to become the first senior member of the royal family to give evidence, and be cross-examined, in open court since the then-Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) gave evidence in a trial about an alleged incident of card-cheating by an acquaintance in the 1890s.Harry will be expecting a very different experience in court to his dissolute ancestor, whose evidence was hardly challenged, as he alleges that Mirror Group Newspapers, publishers of British tabloids, the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror, and the People, used illegal methods to publish a string of stories about him.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/TikTokZaid Khan has spent most of his life on the internet, and though he considers himself optimistic by nature, doom-scrolling through news stories and being bombarded with fatalistic content online can make that natural positivity difficult to maintain. “I think that’s just a very easy rabbit hole to fall down when you’re using the internet—feeling like ‘Oh my god, everything sucks, we’re all doomed,’” Khan, 25, said.But towards the end of 2022, he noticed a new trend emerge on TikTok, often accompanied by hashtags like #hopecore and #antinihilism, that offered a different perspective, promoting a kind of radical optimism.The trend takes on many forms: a series of inspiring sports clips or video game scenes spliced together; a slide show of quotes, tweets or web comics; or front-facing camera videos expressing some hopeful idea. Like the corecore trend before it, the format uses images or videos to evoke an emotional reaction in the viewer, ranging from the profound to the sentimental.Read more at The Daily Beast.

The Washington Post via GettyWith the new anti-transgender bathroom bill signed by Governor Ron DeSantis, parents of transgender high schoolers and college-age kids in Florida have been hit hard and now face excruciating and potentially costly choices.If they send their transgender child to an in-state university, that student, over the age of 18, could face the possibility of arrest every time they use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender.Republican politicians don’t seem to have taken the time to get to know these families. When they talk about trans issues, they never talk about real families with real children. They don’t truly acknowledge that transgender people exist. Instead, they seem to think that they are protecting women from full-grown men wearing dresses trying to get into women’s bathrooms, and that this is happening at such an alarming rate, we suddenly need laws against it.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/ReutersFor the first time in my life, I was canceled during a corporate keynote speech for talking about right-wing cancel culture.Earlier in the week, a tech company’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) team invited me to address their employees to celebrate Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, which ended in May. I lasted all of five and a half minutes before the Zoom meeting abruptly ended without a warning or any follow-up messages, texts, or calls from company personnel. I assumed it was a technical glitch. I spent 15 minutes trying to log back on but to no avail. After an hour and two emails, a member from the DEI committee finally replied and told me they ended the Zoom due to “internal issues.” That was the first and last communication I received. They initially didn’t even inform their employees, several of whom messaged me on Twitter over the next two days asking if I was censored for my comments.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty/ReutersWhen President Donald Trump pardoned Steve Bannon in the closing hours of his presidency, it seemed like the right-wing media personality—and once chief strategist for Trump—had successfully evaded any repercussions for his involvement in a scheme that sent some of his partners to prison.Double jeopardy laws, of course, prevent someone from being prosecuted twice for the same crime.But there’s a curious reason why Bannon can’t raise the double jeopardy defense before his upcoming state court trial and make the case disappear: New Yorkers saw this coming.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/FacebookAn environmental compliance specialist pining for a hiking buddy she met on Match.com allegedly tried to have his new wife snuffed out by a hitman she attempted to hire online.“I hope you fall off a cliff and die,” Melody Sasser blurted out when retired Department of Energy emergency manager and Air Force vet David Wallace told her last fall that he was engaged to another woman.Sasser, 47, allegedly stalked Wallace’s wife using a fitness app, sending updates on her precise location, along with the dates and times of her movements, to a bogus murder-for-hire service she found on the dark web.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Wikimedia Commons/MaxA funny, introspective and altogether charming show driven by the inventive and confessional artistry of its creator, John Lurie, Painting with John is a balm for the soul. The celebrated leader of the Lounge Lizards jazz ensemble, the star of Jim Jarmusch’s seminal ’80s indies Stranger than Paradise and Down by Law, and the host of the cult small-screen hit Fishing with John, the 70-year-old Lurie is a raconteur with few equals.The multi-hyphenate once again provides a unique peek into his world—and his idiosyncratic paintings—with his acclaimed HBO series, whose perfect Rotten Tomatoes score (a point of pride to Lurie, who even mentions it in a new episode) is unlikely to waver following the June 2 debut of its masterful third season.Recounting anecdotes and musing on absurdities in to-the-camera interviews as he puts paint and brush to canvas, Lurie is a born storyteller, and the tales that make up Painting with John’s third go-round are some of his finest, including a second-episode yarn about a childhood summer-camp odyssey that’s brilliantly animated by Lurie himself. That Lurie knows how to build to a sly punchline or moving denouement is by now well established.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyThe Starck Club’s creators had set out to make the best club in the world, and for the five years the venue was open, it just might have been. Grace Jones and Stevie Nicks performed on opening night, immediately turning the club into a destination for people flying in from out of state or even out of country. Tom Cruise, Owen Wilson, Timothy Leary, Jack Nicholson, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, and Jean-Michel Basquiat—not to mention George W. Bush—all partied there, along with some thousand to fifteen hundred people every Friday and Saturday night.The lack of inhibitions wasn’t the only notable feature of the Starck crowd. There was also a level of diversity seen nowhere else in the Bible Belt.The social lubricant that fueled this radical temple of acceptance was not alcohol or cocaine but Ecstasy—lots and lots of Ecstasy. “You have to remember, it was legal at the time,” Monica said. “You could go to your favorite bartender and order a beer and an Ecstasy.” She estimates that on any given night, 70 to 90 percent of Starck patrons were rolling, the colloquial term for Ecstasy’s blissed-out high. “The kaleidoscope of emotions that brought on was incredible,” Monica said. “It elevated people mentally, they were always happy. And the dancing was never ending.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Sony Pictures AnimationA helpful reminder for Spider-Man fans flocking to see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: Just remember, this one’s only the first of two “parts.” As Polygon notes, the film’s working title was Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse—Part 1. If you want to know how the story really ends, you’ll have to wait until next spring.Did we not get enough of this stretched-out nonsense from Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Twilight, It, and, most recently, Dune? Is anyone really still yearning for one story stretched out over two shaky movies? As I type this, I’m struggling to imagine the kind of person who re-watches The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 by itself, on purpose. (And that title? An ungodly mouthful!)Thankfully, Across the Spider-Verse delivers enough meat to satisfy hungry Spider-Fans—even if it does end on a frustrating cliffhanger.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Bravo/GettyOn Friday, supermodel, author, and host of Top Chef and Taste the Nation Padma Lakshmi revealed on Instagram that she has “made the difficult decision” to leave Bravo’s award-winning cooking competition series, after 19 seasons. “I am extremely proud to have been part of building such a successful show and of the impact it has had on the worlds of television and food,” the statement read, in part.Presiding over the show turned Lakshmi into a household name, and she has since become a New York Times bestselling author and prominent activist. The second season of Taste the Nation, her food-centric road trip show on Hulu, also premiered in early May. As she travels across America to visit immigrant communities and taste their food, Lakshmi has unearthed harrowing, but often empowering, tales of survival, not to mention mouth-watering culinary traditions. Season 2 features, among others, the Afghan refugee community in D.C., a melting pot of cultures in Appalachia, Cambodians in New England, Greeks in Florida, Nigerians in Houston, and Filipinos in San Francisco.Weeks ahead of announcing that she was leaving Top Chef, Lakshmi and I spoke about this pivotal moment in her career. Our wide-ranging conversation included discussions of her personal loss that informed this season of Taste the Nation, experience with adversity while working on the Bravo hit, and evolving relationship with beauty. (Through a representative, Lakshmi offered no further comment on her Top Chef departure.)Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/ReutersFor years, Rep. Lauren Boebert’s mother has maintained that a retired professional wrestler named Stan Lane, whom she had a fling with in the 1980s, was the congresswoman’s biological father.A court-ordered paternity test completed decades ago showed that, in fact, Lane was not the dad. But some doubts on the Boebert side of things persisted because the lab worker who took Lane’s blood sample was later convicted of taking a bribe to switch vials in another case.Because of those questions, last month, the Colorado Republican and Lane agreed to take another round of tests and put the matter to rest once and for all.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Dave Kaup/ReutersRepublican presidential hopeful Tim Scott is gearing up for an appearance on “The View” next week, promising to settle the week-long feud between himself and the daytime TV staple.Scott’s feud with the show began shortly after he announced his campaign, when host Joy Behar claimed Scott, the most high-profile Black Republican seeking the party’s nomination, doesn’t understand racism. Now, the South Carolina senator will have the chance to push back on that argument in person during his scheduled appearance on Monday, June 5.The only problem: Behar won’t be there. She gets Mondays off.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyThe New York Post has exposed a raft of emails between a pair of powerhouse attorneys who led an exodus from Los Angeles-based mega-firm Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith last month, in which the pair referred to women as “cunts,” Black people as “savages,” a colleague as a “f*g”—and even a judge as “sugar tits.”Neither John Barber nor Jeff Ranen, the former Lewis Brisbois partners, immediately responded to phone calls from The Daily Beast.The messages the Post published include numerous other slurs, ranging from “fudgepacker” to the n-word, and included numerous crude jabs at fellow employees of their old firm.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Google MapsAvery Arden, who is transgender, was not going to return to their childhood church in Ohio just to hold their tongue as the pastor preached that the Catholic church was “under attack” in reference to a pro-LGBTQ+ nonprofit.“Look at the Los Angeles Dodgers. Look what’s happening. Defaming the name of Jesus Christ. Defaming the name of every Christian here on Earth,” Rev. Timothy Gareau of St. Raphael professed in a sermon last week. “It just burns a hole in my heart, angers me and embitters me. And it should you.”While the priest said he didn’t “want to give these people a name,” Arden knew he was referring to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and in an interview with Cleveland, said dodging the group’s name “felt like a dog whistle.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

JPMORGAN/DIMON/REUTERS/Lucas JacksonWhen JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon was questioned under oath last week over the bank’s lengthy relationship with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, he was asked whether he had received letters from any survivors of Epstein’s abuse.A transcript of Dimon’s deposition—taken as part of two lawsuits accusing JPMorgan of facilitating Epstein’s sex ring—reveals the executive testified that he didn’t recall getting one particular victim’s mail but that he had “enormous sympathy” for her.That victim, The Daily Beast has learned, was Haley Robson, who was a Florida high-schooler in 2004 when Epstein exploited her and made her one of his recruiters.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Charles Platiau/ReutersLast month, a referee halted a Brazilian jiu-jitsu competition after he decided one of the opponents—Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—had gone unconscious.Now Zuckerberg, his coach, and his nearly $700 billion company are stepping in to dispute that referee’s call.The episode, which took place last month during a match in California, appears in a recent New York Times article examining Zuckerberg’s intense new workout regimen and his foray into martial arts. The referee who officiated the match said he intervened after Zuckerberg started to snore, a sign that he was out cold.Read more at The Daily Beast.

EDDIE KEOGHAn Idaho school district has postponed its graduation ceremony indefinitely over what it says are fears of “outside groups and agitators”—days after the school penalized a senior for denying the existence of non-binary people during a recent assembly.The Spokesman-Review reported that local law enforcement had received word that potentially dangerous demonstrators were en route from outside the Kellogg school district to support the student, whom the school barred from walking on graduation day following his remarks. The authorities also reported the school had received menacing phone calls warning of upcoming attacks.“We did receive word that a large number of protesters were coming from out of county to organize with our local cause; however, the group is known for violence during protests which is concerning,” Shoshone County Sheriff Holly Lindsey wrote on Facebook. “In the last few days, KHS also received several phone calls threatening violence. Due to the threat of violence, the Kellogg School District made the decision to cancel tomorrow’s graduation.”Read more at The Daily Beast.