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    Seth Meyers Is Amused by MAGA’s Epstein Infighting

    President Trump’s most conspiracy-minded supporters can’t believe he wants them to forget about the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.A MAGA MeltdownSome fans of President Trump have felt betrayed since he dismissed the conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein’s death in a lengthy social media post, basically telling them to move on.On Monday, Seth Meyers called the MAGA infighting “a monster of their own making.”“They made the Epstein conspiracy a center of their worldview, despite the fact that Trump and Epstein were photographed together, and partied together, and Trump called Epstein a terrific guy, and Epstein called Trump his closest friend of 10 years.” — SETH MEYERS“In a post over the weekend on Truth Social, President Trump told his supporters to ‘not waste time and energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.’ Yeah, nobody cares about him! The guy only had, like, one friend.” — SETH MEYERS, referring to Trump“How dare you fixate on a story from the past, something Donald Trump has never done? He’s focused on the issues of today, not the 2020 election, or the Russia investigation, or Hunter Biden’s laptop, or Hillary Clinton’s email server, Joe Biden’s autopen, or Rosie O’Donnell making fun of him, or his ratings for ‘The Apprentice,’ which ended in 2015, or deceased golfer Arnold Palmer’s unusually large penis, which, by the way, we have yet to see definitive proof of.” — SETH MEYERS“That’s right, President Trump reprimanded his supporters on Truth Social for focusing on the Epstein files — and maybe some other stuff. I only made it through Chapter 1.” — SETH MEYERS“This is the most Trump’s written since Hooters got on Yelp. Look, I don’t know if Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, but I’m sure, after this, some of Trump’s advisers did.” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Flat Earth Edition)“Oh, here’s a sentence I’ve never said: There’s some fun news involving Jeffrey Epstein.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Wait a second. If it was sitting on Pam Bondi’s desk in February and now it doesn’t exist, that can only mean one thing: Someone stole Pam Bondi’s desk.” — STEPHEN COLBERT, referring to Epstein’s supposed client list“Yeah, everyone from Trump supporters to Democrats are asking to see the Epstein files, and everyone who isn’t is definitely in those files.” — JIMMY FALLON“You can’t take this away from your base — that is MAGA’s favorite conspiracy. What are we going to find out next? That immigrants aren’t eating cats? That if you sail to the horizon, you don’t fall off the world?” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingElmo stopped by “The Daily Show” to explain his recent out-of-character X posts to Jon Stewart.What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightThe “Too Much” star Megan Stalter will appear on “The Late Show.”Also, Check This OutThe famous shower scene from “Psycho.” With so many cuts, you can only see a piece of the action.Peek behind the curtain to see what made Alfred Hitchcock the master of suspense. More

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    in Theater

    ‘The Gospel at Colonus’ Review: Singing Hallelujah on the Hudson

    In an open-air revival on Little Island in Manhattan, Lee Breuer and Bob Telson’s musically sumptuous play follows Oedipus at the end of his life.Back at the start of this century, Tom Stoppard raised some eyebrows with the copious program notes theatergoers received at his brainy Broadway play “The Invention of Love.” The Times review advised reading them, as context for understanding the performance, “before the curtain goes up.”Audience members traipsing onto Little Island in Manhattan for the handsome revival of Lee Breuer and Bob Telson’s “The Gospel at Colonus” don’t get anything of the kind, but it would have been a help. An aurally sumptuous quasi-Passion play that sings hallelujah to the heavens in the island’s open-air amphitheater, the show retells an ancient Greek drama through the prism of a Black Pentecostal church service.“Welcome, brothers and sisters,” the Preacher (Stephanie Berry) says at the beginning, with the Hudson River glinting as a backdrop in lieu of an upstage wall. “I take as my text this evening the Book of Oedipus.”It is a clever line. But while a pastor might be able to presume a congregation’s familiarity with a book of the Bible, it is riskier to count on a crowd knowing Sophocles’ drama “Oedipus at Colonus.” Breuer, the great downtown experimentalist who died in 2021, was all about risk. Still, let’s recap, shall we?In “Oedipus at Colonus,” Oedipus is old, infamous and exiled from Thebes, where he once was king. His life has been a litany of scandals, which you might recall from another of Sophocles’ Theban tragedies, “Oedipus Rex”: Abandoned as an infant, he did not know his parents, so when he later killed his father in a fight, he didn’t realize who it was, and when he married his mother and had children with her, he likewise had no idea. After learning the truth, he gouged his eyes out.Now, in his wanderings, his beloved daughter Antigone is his indispensable guide. Upon their arrival at Colonus, Theseus, the king of Athens, takes pity and offers them sanctuary.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Television

    When Americans Agreed on History, for 60 Seconds

    Fifty years ago on CBS, the revolution was televised, if only for a minute at a time.From July 4, 1974, through the end of 1976, “Bicentennial Minutes” took 60 seconds in prime time between some of TV’s most popular shows to have celebrities, artists and politicians tell viewers what had happened 200 years ago that day, in the early years of the American Revolution.Charlton Heston kicked off the series, backed by a giant American flag, telling of George Washington’s worries after the Boston Tea Party. Representative Bella Abzug, in her trademark hat and thick New York accent, related a British man-o-war attack on the city’s waterfront. Lucille Ball described “corn-shucking parties” in colonial New England. (Not every day in history can be equally action-packed.) In a twist on the CBS anchor Walter Cronkite’s famous sign-off, each one concluded, “That’s the way it was.”The series was a simple act of civic education — earnest, unflashy, a little corny and mockable. It was not big on geopolitics, gray areas or the moral failings of the home-team rebels. Writing in The New York Times, the TV critic John J. O’Connor called its early episodes “so insubstantial as to be almost meaningless.” (The series nonetheless won an Emmy in 1976.)But a half-century later, as America prepares to celebrate a bigger mouthful of a birthday, the Semiquincentennial, the “Bicentennial Minutes” series is educational in a different way. It’s a time capsule of 20th-century mass civics, a reminder of how — for good, bad or mediocre — TV once formed a kind of public square that is probably irretrievable.Clockwise, from top left: President Gerald Ford, the actress Dina Merrill, Senator Joseph R. Biden and the activist Gloria Steinem in the 1970s educational shorts “Bicentennial Minutes.” CBS, via IMBDPro“Bicentennial Minutes,” like many American inventions, was a creation of commerce. Shell Oil bought each minute of airtime for two years, its logo ending each star-spangled broadcast. (Other sponsors took over after July 4, 1976.) It was a crossover ad for gasoline and America.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Theater

    An Indispensable Theater Incubator Faces a Troubled Future

    On a sun-kissed summer day at the Connecticut shore, some 200 people huddled in a darkened room. They had come to the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., to hear “Dead Girl Quinceañera,” a new play by Phanésia Pharel. The story of a Miami teenager who goes missing during her own birthday party, the play was performed by four young actresses, their scripts propped atop metal music stands.When Pharel, a playwright newly sprung from graduate school, arrived at the O’Neill a week before, the play was much shorter. It lacked an ending. But she had since found one. After the reading, she floated back into the afternoon on an artist’s high. “It’s a dream,” she said of her time at the center. “It’s a little bit of a utopia.”Pharel and three colleagues are the newest members of the National Playwrights Conference, which the O’Neill has hosted annually (barring a brief pandemic hiccup), since 1966. It is perhaps the country’s premiere spot for play development, its alumni functioning as a who’s who of American theater in the last half century.John Guare was among the first cohort, with “The House of Blue Leaves.” Those who followed him include August Wilson, Wendy Wasserstein, David Henry Hwang, Beth Henley, Samuel D. Hunter, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Dominique Morisseau, Jeremy O. Harris. (Musical theater alumni include Jeanine Tesori, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Robert Lopez.) Celine Song, another alum, sets a scene from her recent film, “The Materialists,” at the center.Actors rehearse a season from “Dead Girl Quinceañera,” a new play by Phanésia Pharel (seated in a yellow dress).Jillian Freyer for The New York TimesThe actors performing work by participants of the National Playwrights Conference, which the O’Neill has hosted annually (barring a brief pandemic hiccup), since 1966.Jillian Freyer for The New York TimesLula Britos, center, an actor.Jillian Freyer for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How to Watch Hitchcock: 5 Steps to Unlock the Master of Suspense

    Look up “suspense” in the dictionary, and there should be a little sketch of Alfred Hitchcock’s silhouette next to it. He never won an Oscar — the academy finally gave him an honorary one in 1968 — but the British director is inarguably one of cinema’s most influential auteurs, the kind of filmmaker even a casual movie watcher has heard of.Even if you don’t know his movies, chances are you can recognize the shower scene from “Psycho,” or have seen a spoof of his work on “The Simpsons.” My own introduction to Hitchcock came at the tender age of 3 or 4: In “Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird,” a plane flies over Big Bird in a cornfield to get his attention — a homage to a famous scene from “North By Northwest.”Hitchcock’s work is marked by carefully framed images and a fondness for playing with our emotions, but his greatest talent was making us freak out, and showing other filmmakers how to do that, too. With a selection of his movies now on Netflix, here is a beginner’s guide to understanding how the Master of Suspense creates suspense.‘Rear Window’ (1954)Step Inside a Character’s Point of ViewHitchcock loved to stick us right in the minds of his characters — many of whom are in the throes of obsession and desire — and thus play on our own passions and nerves. “Rear Window” centers on an all-too-familiar pastime for city dwellers: peering curiously, and a tad illicitly, into the neighbor’s window.Jeff (Jimmy Stewart) is a photojournalist who’s stuck in his Greenwich Village apartment because his whole leg, from hip to foot, is encased in a cast. Thus stranded and frustrated, he becomes intrigued by the lives of the people living across the way, an assortment of typical New Yorkers — a composer, a dancer, a lonely single woman, a bickering couple — and he starts to wonder if one of them is a murderer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Hacker Makes Antisemitic Posts on Elmo’s X Account

    The owner of “Sesame Street” said it was working to restore control of Elmo’s social media account after the cyberattack on the fuzzy red monster, a beloved character on the children’s show.A hacker shared a string of racist and antisemitic posts from the X account of Elmo, the fuzzy red monster from “Sesame Street,” the owner and producer of the children’s show said on Sunday.The posts, on a verified account with more than 600,000 followers, contained racial slurs, antisemitic language and commentary about President Trump and the so-called Epstein files, the remaining investigative documents of the sex-trafficking investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. The posts were removed shortly after they were published on Sunday afternoon.“Elmo’s X account was compromised today by an unknown hacker who posted disgusting messages, including antisemitic and racist posts,” a spokeswoman for Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind “Sesame Street,” said in a brief statement. “We are working to restore full control of the account.”Elmo, the perpetually 3-and-a-half-year-old beloved Muppet character on “Sesame Street,” often teaches his young audience life lessons like kindness and patience.Elmo’s account had not posted any new messages as of midnight. X could not immediately be contacted for comment.The social media platform X, formerly Twitter, has experienced a surge in racist, antisemitic and other hateful speech since Elon Musk took it over in 2022.Last week, Grok, X’s A.I. chatbot, posted antisemitic comments including praising Hitler. The company deleted some of the posts and issued an apology. The chatbot’s posts mirrored the “extremist views” of X’s users, xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company which created Grok, later said.Experts have recorded a surge in antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents since Hamas led an attack on Israel in 2023 that prompted the Israeli military to invade Gaza.The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy group, recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents across the United States in 2024, the highest number on record and a 344 percent increase over the previous five years. These included online incidents where individuals or groups were harassed on social media or via direct messages, although the organization said it did not attempt to assess the total amount of antisemitism online.“Elevated antisemitism has become a persistent reality for American Jewish communities,” the organization said in its report about the 2024 incidents.In early June, a man threw Molotov cocktails at a Jewish group calling for the release of hostages in Gaza. One of the victims later died of her wounds. Prosecutors charged a man with first degree murder and a hate crime, among other offenses.The previous month, two employees of the Israeli Embassy in Washington were fatally shot outside an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. A man was later charged with crimes that included first-degree murder.And in April, a man set fire to the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion on the first night of Passover, forcing Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish, to flee with his family. More

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    ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty,’ Plus 6 Things to Watch on TV This Week

    The Prime Video show returns with its third and final season — and maybe an answer for Lola’s love triangle.Teenage DreamsTeam Jeremiah? Team Conrad? I’m team “date someone outside the family who aren’t brothers,” but maybe that’s just me. “The Summer I Turned Pretty” follows Lola Tung as Belly, who navigates high school, then college. But the central plot is the will-they-won’t-they relationships between her and two brothers, Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno) and Conrad (Christopher Briney). Based on the young adult novels of the same name by Jenny Han, the series returns with its third and final season, dropping one episode each week — which means we won’t find out whom Belly ultimately chooses until mid-September. Han, who also serves as the creator, co-showrunner, and an executive producer on the show, has teased that the ending of the show might differ from the book’s, so only time will tell. Streaming Wednesday on Prime Video.Musical SpecialsMiley Cyrus at the premiere of “Something Beautiful.”Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for Tribeca FestivaMiley Cyrus’s visual album movie “Something Beautiful,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last month, is now coming to streaming. The film, which has the same name as her new album, features 13 songs with their corresponding visuals, all based on a world of fantasy. Streaming Wednesday on Disney+.Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the rest of the gang seem to be quite busy this summer — they’re on Coach bags, Uniqlo T-shirts, an entire Kith collection, and now they have to save their favorite summer camp. In “Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical,” the first musical in the franchise in over 30 years, the group is headed on an outdoorsy adventure: Sally is nervous as a first-time camper, Snoopy and Woodstock go on a treasure hunt, and Charlie Brown works to keep their beloved camp’s doors open. Streaming Friday on Apple TV+.Missing PersonsIn 1995, Jodi Huisentruit was 27 years old and working as an anchor for the local news station, KIMT, in Mason City, Iowa. On the morning of June 27, she didn’t show up for work, and when the police later went to her apartment to investigate, they found some of her personal items — including car keys and red high heels — strewn near her car in the complex’s parking lot. She was never found and, in 2001, was declared legally dead. The new three-part documentary series “Her Last Broadcast: The Abduction of Jodi Huisentruit” features interviews with family members, detectives, witnesses and friends in an attempt to figure out what happened. Streaming Tuesday on Hulu.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Love Island USA’: The Finale and Season’s Biggest Moments

    After the finale, here are the big moments and takeaways for the seventh season of the show.After a dramatic six weeks of “Love Island USA” that generated constant headlines and social media controversy, the seventh season wrapped up on Sunday night with a lukewarm outlook on love.The show was a pop culture constant this summer, with Peacock airing six new episodes per week. It became one of the most streamed programs, and its popularity was also reflected in the millions of votes that viewers cast to try to keep their favorite islanders in the villa on the Pacific island of Fiji.Just because the season is wrapped doesn’t mean that “Love Island” will be off our screens for long. Far from it. The show’s host, Ariana Madix, will be joined by Andy Cohen for a reunion special on Aug. 25. And on Sept. 16, Peacock will begin airing “Love Island Games,” a spinoff coming back for its second season. It features contestants from different iterations of the show — U.S., U.K., Australia and others — as they compete in challenges while also trying to date.After the finale, here are the big moments and takeaways for the show’s seventh season.A finale usually celebrating love instead featured a breakup.Though “Love Island” seasons are often unpredictable, finales always tend to follow a set formula. The four final couples go on elaborate dates, film slow-motion make-out scenes and talk about how they will approach their relationship outside the villa.And then, based on viewer votes, a winning couple is crowned.On Sunday night’s finale, most things went according to that blueprint — until the date between Huda Mustafa, 24, and Chris Seeley, 27. Instead of sharing kind words and dreaming about the future, they broke up and decided to go “no-contact” after leaving the villa — a franchise first. While other couples literally rode off into the sunset, Mustafa downed a glass of champagne before walking away from dinner by herself. In the past, couples have broken up shortly after the finale wrapped but never during.Because fans’ votes were locked in before the finale, the noncouple of Mustafa and Seeley took home third place, ahead of Iris Kendall and Pepe Garcia.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More