Before John Belushi, before Bill Murray or Chevy Chase or Dan Aykroyd—before any of them, there was Gilda.
Gilda Radner was the first performer Lorne Michaels hired for the cast of Saturday Night Live when it launched, in 1975. She was, at the time, one of the stars of The National Lampoon Radio Hour, the only woman in a cast of men destined to be famous. “I knew that she could do almost anything, and that she was enormously likeable,” Michaels once said of the decision. “So I started with her.

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Donald Trump and Elon Musk continued their efforts to slash and overhaul the federal government this week.

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Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl that escaped from the Central Park Zoo in 2023, is still with us (even though he’s dead).
He spent about a year roaming New York City—hunting in the park, hooting from fire escapes—and in that time, he became a celebrity. Then he flew into a building while disoriented by rat poison and pigeon herpes. It has been a year since Flaco’s untimely death, and now the New York Historical is hosting an exhibition memorializing his life.

Just a few years ago, then-Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio said that if Donald Trump were reelected, he would advise the president to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state” and “replace them with our people.

A criminal case is not a chit. It’s not something you trade in exchange for political favors.
Perhaps the always-transactional President Donald Trump does not understand the importance of keeping the Department of Justice independent from partisan politics. But Attorney General Pam Bondi and Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove should.

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Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency appear to have wide-reaching plans to remake the government with AI. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who is now the head of the Technology Transformation Services, a federal IT division, invoked an “AI-first strategy” at a recent staff meeting.

This may sound like a hopelessly naive thought about a superhero movie, but Captain America: Brave New World presented an exciting opportunity. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, now on its 35th entry, has probably been exhausted at this point, yet the latest installment’s advertising was intriguing. It promised a thinky thriller in which the new, Black Captain America butts heads with a growly, militaristic president (played by Harrison Ford).