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      Damar Hamlin and the Existential Crisis of ESPN ‘Monday Night Football’

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      Fans are used to seeing gruesome injuries. But there was no media playbook for what happened to Hamlin.A seeming eternity of live television had elapsed since Damar Hamlin, a 24-year-old safety for the Buffalo Bills, collapsed on a field in Cincinnati after a hard blow to chest. “Monday Night Football” had ground to a halt, and like everyone else who had been tasked with speaking on air while emergency medical personnel tried to save Hamlin’s life, the ESPN studio anchor Suzy Kolber was at a loss for words. “There’s really not much more we can say,” she said, ashen-faced. “I think we’re all feeling the emotions, we’re all joined in prayer together.” Then she paused and, with a measure of disbelief, teased a commercial break: “And we’ll be back.”Sports fans in general, and football fans in particular, have been coarsened over time to gruesome injuries — to the sight of joints bending in unnatural ways and grown men writhing in pain while their teammates huddle up, yards away, for the next play. What happened to Hamlin on Jan. 2, in front of a prime-time audience of millions, was a chilling reminder that silence and stillness can be far worse. You could see that this time was different, because you could hear it: Hamlin fell silently, and then he lay there silently, and then the hush around him spread, fast, from the playing field to the sidelines and then over the stadium. Eventually it reached the broadcast booth, where Joe Buck, ESPN’s play-by-play announcer, tried to let the images of sobbing players and the jarring sight of an ambulance on the field do the talking, and tried not to sound too astonished that league officials appeared intent on resuming the game. A broadcast production crew has a whole playbook for these situations: which replay angles to show and a sense of how often to show them, a list of bromides announcers can use to paper over the discomfort while we wait for the fallen player to give us a reassuring thumbs-up as he’s stretchered off the field. But this time there was no thumbs-up. ESPN just kept repeating the playbook, over and over, until all we could see was the artifice of it.It was around 8:55 p.m., late in the first quarter, when Hamlin first went into cardiac arrest. The N.F.L.’s commissioner, Roger Goodell — the only person in the league with the authority to not just temporarily suspend the game but also postpone it altogether — didn’t officially do so until 10:01. This left the corporate broadcaster with an impossible hour of live television to fill: The game was, technically, still in progress, making it difficult to simply cut away to whatever was on ESPN2 or to skip ahead to SportsCenter and its flawless anchor, Scott Van Pelt. The network’s “Monday Night Football” crew performed with remarkable grace, under the circumstances. But for viewers, it was still an hour of talking heads’ acknowledging that there was nothing to say, with seasoned on-air personalities all but pleading into their earpieces to get off the air. A live N.F.L. broadcast is a preposterously large, complex and expensive operation that exists for one mass-entertainment purpose. Suddenly that purpose wasn’t merely gone; it was borderline unmentionable.The commercial breaks were a mixed blessing — a respite for the broadcasters, whose own emotions understandably kept tumbling out, but a lousy time to peddle light beer, and an inconvenient reminder that in the absence of news about Hamlin’s condition (which would not be forthcoming anytime soon), and in the absence of an actual football game (which no decent person was in the mood to resume), this advertising money was the only reason the cameras were still rolling. We were, in other words, watching a young man’s near-death be commodified in real time. The second time Buck repeated some variation on the phrase “there’s nothing left to say at this point,” it sounded less like a directive to the production truck — let someone else flail for a while — and more like a reproof to the audience. Why are you still watching? Why haven’t you changed the channel? What kind of person still cares about a football game now?More on Damar Hamlin’s CollapseA ‘True Leader’: As a professional football player and community mentor, Damar Hamlin has reached two of his life goals: making it to the N.F.L. and helping others along the way.N.F.L.’s Violent Spectacle: The appetite for football has never been higher, even as viewers look past the sport’s toll on players’ lives. Mr. Hamlin’s collapse should force a reconsideration, our columnist writes.Danger Across Sports: Mr. Hamlin’s collapse has brought attention to sudden cardiac arrest and the vulnerability of athletes from the youth leagues to the professional ranks.Faith and Football: The outpouring of public piety from players and fans shows how Christianity is embedded in N.F.L. culture in a way that goes beyond most sports.This was uncharted territory, the guy on the television more or less telling us to turn off the television. The very program itself was having an existential crisis. There was no game to show, no update on Hamlin’s condition to share, no cutting to black. The moment Joe Buck said “CPR,” “Monday Night Football” was over. Only it couldn’t end.Just 250 miles across Ohio, in a different sports universe separated only by a few TV channels, Donovan Mitchell of the N.B.A.’s Cleveland Cavaliers was pouring in 71 points against the Chicago Bulls. It was the highest single-game total in 17 years, and it makes Mitchell one of only seven players in N.B.A. history to top 70. Mitchell is powerful and balletic, with a 6-foot-10 wingspan that has earned him the nickname Spida; the Cavaliers, thanks in large part to him, will most likely reach the playoffs for the first time since 1998 without LeBron James on the roster. On the emotional spectrum of sports fandom, Mitchell’s night was the polar opposite of the tableau in Cincinnati: jubilation in the stands, gobsmacked teammates on the bench, escalating delirium in the announcers’ voices. When the Cavaliers won, in overtime, Mitchell’s teammates kept drenching him with water bottles, as if to put out flames, and then they all posed together for a photo with the night’s hero.This was all of the reasons we watch sports. But it didn’t merely happen on the same night as Hamlin’s injury; the two events unfolded in lock step, over the same hour of real time. On social media, many fans experienced both dramas at once. As I traded texts with friends about Mitchell’s swelling point total — 58! 66! 69! 70! — I kept toggling apps and scrolling through Twitter, where stats about the basketball game sat alongside uninformed speculation about blunt-impact cardiac arrhythmias and ghouls blaming Covid vaccinations for Hamlin’s collapse. This wasn’t just any regular-season N.F.L. game either: The Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals are Super Bowl contenders, and their matchup had major playoff implications, and it was “Monday Night Football,” a multibillion-dollar American institution. Then, suddenly, by swift consensus, the game didn’t matter at all. It was almost generous of Skip Bayless, the Elon Musk of sports trolls, to step up and tweet a take about not postponing the game abominable enough to give the entire platform someone to unite against in disgust. (He even managed to offend Shannon Sharpe, the ex-N.F.L. tight end with whom Bayless hosts Fox Sports 1’s “Undisputed,” enough for Sharpe to stand him up for their broadcast the next morning.)But social media also created avenues for catharsis. Hamlin was an unheralded sixth-round pick coming out of the University of Pittsburgh, near his hometown, McKees Rocks, Pa. He cracked the Bills’ starting lineup only in September, after the first-string safety Micah Hyde suffered a neck injury and had to leave the stadium in an ambulance. In 2020, Hamlin set up a GoFundMe to support a toy drive back home in McKees Rocks, and as of that Monday afternoon, just before the game, he’d raised about $2,500. By Friday, the helplessness we all seemed to be feeling on Hamlin’s behalf had poured more than $8 million into his toy drive.On Monday night, though, you could find Mitchell on one television broadcast, soaked and smiling. On another was the Bills’ wide receiver Stefon Diggs, his cheeks wet with tears. I couldn’t decide if there was something subhuman about juggling these two emotions, trying to compartmentalize them on the fly, or if that was closer to the definition of being human. Mostly I thought about Hamlin. I thought about how I’d feel if I were the one on the ground, how badly I’d just want people to look away, stop filming, turn off the television, go do something else, go watch Donovan Mitchell drop 71 on the Bulls — anything but watch me fight for my life in front my teammates, my friends and my mother, on the field during “Monday Night Football.” And I thought about Hamlin waking up, opening his eyes and hearing about his toy drive.Source photographs: Kevin Sabitus/Getty ImagesDevin Gordon is a writer based in Massachusetts. He is the author of “So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets — the Best Worst Team in Sports.” More

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      Jennifer Shah, ‘Real Housewives’ Star, Sentenced in Fraud Scheme

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      Ms. Shah, who appeared on “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” was sentenced to more than six years in prison for her involvement in a telemarketing scheme, prosecutors said.Jennifer Shah, who gained fame as a cast member on the reality television show “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” was sentenced on Friday to six and a half years in prison for her involvement in a telemarketing scheme that defrauded thousands of victims, prosecutors said.Ms. Shah used the scheme to finance her luxury lifestyle, which included a rented 9,420-square-foot mansion in Park City, Utah, that she referred to as the “Shah ski chalet,” a rented apartment in Midtown Manhattan and a leased Porsche Panamera, prosecutors said.The criminal case against Ms. Shah had been heavily featured on the Bravo reality series, which turned the charges against her into a dramatic plot point.In her tagline for the second season of the show, she declared, “The only thing I’m guilty of is being Shah-mazing.”In court papers, prosecutors cited that line to argue that Ms. Shah had mocked the charges against her.Ms. Shah’s lawyers wrote in court papers that the show was a “semi-scripted, heavily edited facsimile of ‘reality’ intentionally manipulated to maximize ratings” and that it did not accurately reflect her feelings about the case.Her lawyers blamed the show for making it seem, as her sentencing date approached, as if Ms. Shah was “intransigent, defiant, and often even unrepentant, about her actions here.”“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Ms. Shah’s lawyers wrote. “Just as Jen Shah has never been a ‘housewife,’ little else is real about her persona and caricature as portrayed by the editors” of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.”A spokeswoman for NBCUniversal, Bravo’s parent company, declined to comment.The show, which premiered in 2020, purports to depict women living glamorously while negotiating issues like sex and religion in a city that is home to the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.At her sentencing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Friday, Ms. Shah said she was sorry for her role in the scheme, which prosecutors said had defrauded victims by selling them bogus “business services” that promised to help them make money online.She was ordered to pay about $6.6 million in restitution and to forfeit $6.5 million and 30 luxury items, including designer handbags and jewelry, prosecutors said.In addition to the 78-month prison sentence, Ms. Shah, 49, of Salt Lake City, was sentenced to five years of supervised release.“I want to apologize to all the victims and families and I take full responsibility for the harm I caused and will pay full restitution to all of the victims,” Ms. Shah said, according to NBC News. She added, “I recognize that some of you lost hundreds, and others lost thousands, and I promise to repay.”Prosecutors said that from at least 2012 until March 2021, when she was arrested, Ms. Shah had been a leader of the wide-ranging scheme and had facilitated the sale of leads, or contact information for potential victims.Victims were told during “coaching” sessions that the sessions would help them earn money from online businesses, prosecutors wrote in court documents.Instead, the coaching sessions were designed to convince victims that, to make their internet businesses succeed, they would need to buy additional products and services, which were of little or no value, prosecutors wrote.Many of the victims were over 55 and some reported losing tens of thousands of dollars, depriving them of much of their life savings, prosecutors said.Ms. Shah was not deterred by Federal Trade Commission investigations and enforcement actions or by the arrest of dozens of others involved in the scheme, prosecutors said.Instead, they said, she tried to cover up her criminal conduct by telling others to lie and delete text messages, placing businesses and bank accounts under other people’s names and taking steps to move some of her operations to Kosovo.Before she pleaded guilty in July to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, Ms. Shah sold “Justice for Jen Shah” T-shirts that featured “NOT GUILTY” on the front and “#justiceforjenshah” on the back, prosecutors said.“With today’s sentence, Jennifer Shah finally faces the consequences of the many years she spent targeting vulnerable, elderly victims,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.“These individuals were lured in by false promises of financial security, but in reality, Shah and her co-conspirators defrauded them out of their savings and left them with nothing to show for it,” Mr. Williams said.Prosecutors had asked the judge to sentence Ms. Shah to 10 years in prison. Ms. Shah’s lawyers had asked for a sentence of three years, writing in court papers that she was “an exceptional mother and a good woman who has already been punished extensively as a result of the sins of her past.”“Though Ms. Shah admittedly played an important role in the particular fraud in which she was involved, she was only one of many people involved, was not involved in all facets of the conspiracy, never communicated with any of the victims, and she clearly did not invent this particular fraud,” her lawyers wrote. “Nor was she a mastermind.”Claire Fahy More

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      Late Night Finds More Laughs in Kevin McCarthy’s Third Day of Failure

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      Jimmy Kimmel says he “can’t wait for Lin-Manuel Miranda to make a musical out of it.”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.This Seems FamiliarRepresentative Kevin McCarthy lost several more rounds of voting on Thursday, the third day of his attempt to become speaker of the House — stymied, so far, by a band of Republican rebels.Jimmy Kimmel lamented that Nancy Pelosi “was supposed to be on our show tomorrow night but she can’t fly home because she needs to be in Washington to watch Kevin McCarthy lose 11 more times.”“I can’t wait for Lin-Manuel Miranda to make a musical out of it.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The House of Representatives adjourned last night after a sixth round of voting for a House speaker and reconvened today at noon. Because nothing says ‘We’re working hard to solve this problem’ like starting at noon.” — SETH MEYERS“McCarthy’s stuck in some sort of nightmarish existential purgatory like the waiting room scene in “Beetlejuice,’ you know, but next to someone scarier than anyone in that movie.” — SETH MEYERS, referring to Representative Matt Gaetz“And get this: I read that some Democrats and Republicans are considering a deal for a speaker both parties can get behind. So congratulations to our new speaker of the House, ‘Top Gun: Maverick.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Meanwhile, McCarthy is now in the negotiation phase, where he’s making a bunch of concessions with the Republicans who are against him, and one of those concessions is a change to the rules that would make it easier to remove him. You know it’s bad when the only way you can get hired is if you promise to get fired, you know what I’m saying?” — JIMMY FALLON“Why does he keep going? I’m beginning to think losing floor votes might be his kink.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Why else would Kevin McCarthy keep doing this other than to make me happy? Because I cannot get enough of this.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Royal Rumble Edition)“In his forthcoming book, Prince Harry claims that Prince William once knocked him to the floor during an argument about Meghan. Apparently, the fight happened at the Buckingham Waffle Palace.” — JIMMY FALLON“They got in a fight after William insulted Harry’s wife, Meghan Markle. Harry claims William called Meghan ‘difficult,’ ‘rude’ and ‘abrasive,’ which he probably could have saved time and just said she’s American.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Two brothers who are the result of generations of inbreeding got in a fight? The only surprise to me is it didn’t happen in Florida.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It’s fun when royals fight, ’cause they keep their pinkies out.” — JIMMY FALLON“Harry also writes in his new book that before he married Meghan, William and Kate were religious viewers of her show ‘Suits.’ I feel like I believed everything Prince Harry said until just now. I don’t think even the stars of ‘Suits’ were religious viewers of ‘Suits.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingStephen Colbert teased Prince Harry’s upcoming “Late Show” appearance to promote his book, “Spare” (“either a gripping tell-all about the royal family or a book of handy bowling tips”). Also, Check This OutRaúl Castillo in “The Inspection” as Rosales, a character he describes as “someone who looks out for an underdog.”Patti Perret/A24Raúl Castillo plays a drill instructor who takes a bullied recruit under his wing in Elegance Bratton’s “The Inspection.” More

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      Jimmy Kimmel Roasts Kevin McCarthy as He Falls Short, Again

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      Kimmel joked that the “last time a Kevin felt this abandoned in his house was in the movie ‘Home Alone.’”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.Biden to the RescueAfter three more rounds of voting on Wednesday, Representative Kevin McCarthy still couldn’t get enough support to become speaker of the House.“Who would’ve guessed that a bunch of insurrection apologists would have trouble certifying a vote?” Jimmy Kimmel joked.“McCarthy needs 218 votes from his fellow Republicans to be speaker. He started with 203, he’s down now to 201. The last time a Kevin felt this abandoned in his house was in the movie ‘Home Alone.’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The last time something like this happened was 100 years ago. And I’ll tell you something, damn it, Joe Biden solved it then, and he can solve it again.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Unpopularity Contest Edition)“As of tonight’s taping, Republicans still have not chosen a speaker of the House after Kevin McCarthy lost his sixth vote in Congress. To be honest, it’s hard to get every Republican on board. It’s like getting 218 friends to agree on where to have brunch.” — JIMMY FALLON“At this point, McCarthy is so unpopular, even Southwest Airlines feels bad for him, you know?” — JIMMY FALLON“You guys can’t even have a red wave amongst yourselves.” — SETH MEYERS“But this is interesting — according to the Constitution, if they don’t have a speaker by tomorrow, the top contenders have to compete in a dance-off.” — JIMMY FALLON“The White House said yesterday that President Biden has no plans to intervene in the House Speaker election after Republican leader Kevin McCarthy failed to secure enough votes during the second ballot to ascend to the speakership — at least not until it stops being hilarious.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Wednesday’s “Late Show,” the country singer Shania Twain shared how isolated she needs to be to write her songs.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightThe actress Laura Dern will appear on Thursday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutMichelle Williams.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesMichelle Williams, the Golden Globe-nominated actress, says her varied career has prepared her to play a nuanced role based on Steven Spielberg’s mother in “The Fabelmans.” More

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      Good Fantasy Writing Is Pure Magic

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      All too often clunky dialogue breaks the spell of CGI-heavy TV epics. To be reminded what language can do by itself, try E.R. Eddison’s novel “The Worm Ouroboros.As I watched last fall’s showdown of TV’s big-money epic fantasy franchises, I was wincingly reminded that language is the most underrated special effect. Unforced errors of word choice — loose talk of “focus” and “stress” in HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” for example — kept pulling me down from my fantasy high and into the diction of emails from human resources. Case in point: “I have pursued this foe since before the first sunrise bloodied the sky,” says the elf warrior-princess Galadriel in Amazon’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.” “It would take longer than your lifetime even to speak the names of those they have taken from me.” She’s adrift on a life raft with a mysterious stranger after a sea-monster attack, and certain dark intimations suggest that eldritch evil draws nigh. So far, so OK, but then her speech reaches its climax: “So letting it lie is not an option.”Clangalang! Descending from a tagline fashioned by writers of the movie “Apollo 13” from something a NASA flight director said, “X is not an option” has become a staple of business-speak and coach-talk. The writers of Galadriel’s speech couldn’t have killed the buzz any deader if they’d followed up with, “I’m all about laserlike focus 24-7 on getting some closure on this whole Sauron thing.” It galls me that Hollywood spends zillions on C.G.I. dragons and cities and hosts on the march, but then from sheer tin-eared laziness or a misplaced desire for “relatability,” allows their wondrous spell to be undone by script screw-ups that any half-competent swords-and-sorcery writer — or reader — could fix overnight for a hundred bucks and a six-pack.With the limitless budget afforded by Eddison’s language, I can outspend even the most obscenely expensive production a thousandfold in my head.To be reminded what language all by itself can do, try E.R. Eddison’s novel “The Worm Ouroboros,” first published in 1922. At some point in the 1970s, I bought a plump Ballantine paperback edition for a dime or two in a used bookstore on the South Side of Chicago. I read it in a fugue state of mounting joy on my way home from school on the Jeffery 6 bus, as I walked from the bus stop to my house, and straight on into the night. Visions filled my head — King Gorice conjuring amid his alembics and grammaries in the Iron Tower of Carcë; wet sands gleaming with the lights of the besieged seaside castle of Owlswick — as I gorged on Eddison’s sentences. The words themselves, even more than the scenes they described, pulsed with possibility and invitation.“The Worm” ranks among the greatest epic fantasies of all time, keeping company with pound-for-pounders like the “Iliad” and the King James Bible, mostly on the strength of its diction, which resembles 16th-century English. So put aside for the moment the story it tells of a great war between the righteous Demons and the nefarious but far more interesting Witches, and put aside as well its characters, world-thinking, action set pieces and the like. They’re all gorgeous, though some readers claim to have trouble with trivial quirks like the merely gestured-at setting on Mercury; the framing device of a traveler from Earth who disappears after a few pages; or the naming of various peoples as Demons, Witches and Goblins. None of that matters anywhere near as much as the language Eddison concocted to take you somewhere extraordinary and keep you gloriously, deliriously there.The novel features the requisite euphonious place names (Zajë Zaculo, the Straits of Melikaphkhaz, Thremnir’s Heugh), swordplay (“Nor had they greater satisfaction that went against Lord Juss, who mowed at them with great swashing blows, beheading some and hewing some asunder in the midst, till they were fain to keep clear of his reaping”) and sorcery (“ ‘Abase thee and serve me, worm of the pit’”). But the book is at its best when characters just go about their daily business. They eat: “When the Lord Corund knew of a surety that he held them of Demonland shut up in Eshgrar Ogo, he let dight supper in his tent, and made a surfeit of venison pasties and heath-cocks and lobsters from the lakes.” They gossip: “ ‘Truly this foreign madam with her loose and wanton ways doth scandal the whole land for us.’” They look up at the sky: “A great wind moaning out of the hueless west tore the clouds as a ragged garment, revealing the lonely moon that fled naked betwixt them.”Hollywood keeps promising that further advances in computer-generated imagery will produce ever-braver new worlds of immersive experience. But our most enduringly potent fantasies consist of words, and part of their potency lies in inviting your imagination to do the work. The more work it does, the more capable it gets. If you had a choice between taking either J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” books or their movie adaptations to the proverbial desert island, which would you choose? Would you take the Old Testament or the Charlton Heston version of it? The films would rapidly become spectacles you’d seen too many times, but you could keep coming back to the books and finding further dimensions, fresh visions, novel experiences in their language-generated imagery.I’m not eager to see a movie version of “The Worm.” With the limitless budget afforded by Eddison’s language, I can outspend even the most obscenely expensive production a thousandfold in my head. His prose can exalt anything into the stuff of epic fantasy, even the contents of a chamber pot: “A bucketful took Corund in the mouth, befouling all his great beard, so that he gave back spitting. And he and his, standing close beneath the wall, and little expecting so sudden and ill an answer, fared shamefully, being all well soused and bemerded with filth and lye.” I wouldn’t trade “bemerded” for all the special-effects magic in this world or any other.Carlo Rotella is a professor of English at Boston College and the author of “The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood” (University of Chicago Press, 2019). More

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      Stephen Colbert Is Thrilled Over Kevin McCarthy’s Troubles

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      “But remember, there’s more important things in life than winning or losing — there’s making fun of Kevin McCarthy for losing,” Colbert said.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.Three-peatRepublicans were deadlocked on Tuesday after Representative Kevin McCarthy repeatedly lost his bid to become speaker of the House.Stephen Colbert opened his show by saying he was “0 for 2” on his New Year’s resolutions: “One was to drink less, and the other was to not gloat when bad things happen to Kevin McCarthy,” which he followed up with a big swig of bourbon.“It’s been a day of pure, uncut, Peruvian blue-flake schadenfreude, watching the G.O.P. stab each other in the throat,” Colbert said.“He needs 218 votes to win, but in the first two votes, he got only 203. OK, he lost twice, but you know what they say: ‘Third time’s the — he also lost.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Kevin McCarthy is being held hostage by a group of Republican extremists who don’t believe he leans far enough to the right. He lost three rounds of voting today, even though he’s made multiple offers to these lunatics. He even agreed to cut the Office of Congressional Ethics. This is one of their demands, which is basically like replacing seatbelts with fettuccine.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“You know, I looked it up. Technically, the Constitution does not require the speaker of the House to be an elected member of Congress — it could be any American, which, to me, sounds like the premise for a pretty solid Pauly Shore movie.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“But remember, there’s more important things in life than winning or losing — there’s making fun of Kevin McCarthy for losing.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Reportedly, interns in his office are already expected to call him ‘Mr. Speaker,’ and this weekend, staffers were seen moving his boxes into the speaker’s office. I wouldn’t be in a big hurry to unpack. He may not be great at counting votes, but he’s good at counting chickens before they hatch.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Catfish Edition)“George Santos was sworn in today as a member of the House of Representatives in the state of New York. And not, as he originally claimed, Pandora.” — SETH MEYERS“Santos just got elected in New York, and we recently learned that during the campaign, he lied about — and I’m rounding down here — everything.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“For starters, during his campaign, Santos claimed to have attended both Baruch College and New York University, but neither school could locate records to verify his claims. So, he may not have graduated, but he did get his B.S.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“He basically catfished an entire congressional district.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“He’s now being investigated by federal prosecutors who want to know how he was able to self-fund $700,000 of his campaign when he reported only making $55,000 a year. He must have one hell of an OnlyFans, is all I can figure.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“But despite all that, he did not resign. He showed up to his first day of work in Washington today where no one, not one of the many scoundrels wriggling around the House, wanted to sit with him. He just sat — imagine being so toxic not even Matt Gaetz wants to sit next to you.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Yep, it’s odd when a congressman holds up his right hand to be sworn in, and everyone’s like, ‘You know what? Don’t bother.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingJimmy Fallon paid tribute to Barbara Walters on Tuesday’s “Tonight Show,” sharing a story of a time he asked her for advice.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe country music star Shania Twain will chat with Stephen Colbert on Wednesday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutDionne Warwick performing in 2021. Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe five-time Grammy-winning singer Dionne Warwick is the subject of a new career-spanning documentary, “Dionne Warwick: Don’t Make Me Over.” More

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      Jeremy Renner Is in Critical Condition After Snow-Plowing Accident

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      The actor, known for his role as Hawkeye in Marvel’s Avengers movies, was stable, his representative said.The actor Jeremy Renner was in critical but stable condition after being hospitalized with serious injuries from an accident while plowing snow in Nevada, his representative said in a statement.“His family is with him, and he is receiving excellent care,” the representative, Samantha Mast, said in a statement on Monday.The sheriff’s office in Washoe County, Nev., said Mr. Renner had suffered a “traumatic injury” in the Reno area on Sunday morning. He was the only person involved in the accident and was flown to a nearby hospital, the sheriff’s office said. Mr. Renner has a house in the Mount Rose-Ski Tahoe area, according to The Reno-Gazette Journal.Mr. Renner, 51, has played Hawkeye, a member of Marvel’s Avengers superheroes team, in several movies and a television series. He has also twice been nominated for an Oscar, for his roles in “The Hurt Locker” (2008) and “The Town” (2010).Mr. Renner has shared several updates on social media this winter as the area received large amounts of snow.“Nearly done With sledding hill For the kids,” said a caption on an Instagram video clip showing a snow plow last week.“Lake Tahoe snowfall is no joke,” he said in a tweet last month that showed a vehicle covered in snow.Mr. Renner stars in “Mayor of Kingstown,” a thriller whose second season is set to be released on the Paramount+ streaming service on Jan. 15. Another show, “Rennervations,” which follows Mr. Renner as he helps communities to reimagine purpose-built vehicles, is scheduled to air on Disney+ early this year.The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning over the weekend for the areas around Reno, in addition to a warning that was in place for the Lake Tahoe Basin. On Saturday and Sunday, the Tahoe Basin at lake level received between 20 and 24 inches of snow, the Weather Service in Reno said.The Weather Service on Sunday advised those with travel plans through the Sierra Nevada to prepare for winter weather driving conditions and warned of icy roads as additional storms arrive. About 22,000 customers in Nevada were without power early Monday after the storm, according to poweroutage.us, which aggregates data from utilities across the country. More