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The 7 best crime novels of the winter

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The 7 best crime novels of the winter

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Greatest Crime Novels of the Winter

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With spring tantalizingly shut at hand, it’s time to take inventory of this winter’s bounty of thrillers — from installments of beloved sequence to eye-opening debuts. Listed here are essentially the most notable crime reads via the top of the season.

GREAT STAND-ALONES

The Violin Conspiracy
By Brendan Slocumb
Doubleday: 352 pages, $28

Slocumb, skilled in violin and viola, is among the many small quantity — lower than 2% — of classical musicians who’re Black. He attracts on greater than 25 years of performing and instructing for a debut thriller that toggles deftly between two storylines. Within the first, North Carolinian Rayquan “Ray” McMillian suffers a tragic setback as he’s getting ready for a Tchaikovsky competitors — an important of his profession. The second, equally charming, covers teenage Ray’s wrestle to turn out to be a classical violinist within the face of racist slights and slurs.

The MacGuffin that unites the thriller with the bildungsroman is a fiddle as soon as performed by PopPop, Ray’s enslaved great-great-grandfather, in all probability the son of the grasp of the Marks plantation. Grandma Nora encourages Ray to seek for PopPop’s instrument in her attic regardless of the jeers of Ray’s mom, a Dickensian money-grubber who desires him to stop his “foolishness,” get his GED and work at Popeyes.

When Ray finds the badly broken violin one Christmas, Grandma offers it to the younger man along with her blessing. In gratitude, Ray performs Vivaldi’s “L’Inverno” for his household, and the novel takes flight on Slocumb’s hovering prose. “The melody began gradual, a plucking of strings, snowflakes falling dreamily,” Slocumb writes, “then a burst of chilly air poured down on them, and flakes eddied, biting within the chill, the north wind coursing via the lounge.”

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At a regional competitors, Ray connects with a Black classical music professor who mentors him via faculty and the skilled restoration of the fiddle, which seems to be a $10 million Stradivarius. The hell that breaks unfastened brings unhealthy actors out of the woodwork, together with most of Ray’s household; the descendants of the Marks household, who need the violin returned after the alleged “theft”; and an actual thief who steals the heirloom weeks earlier than the nice competitors.

Even for readers unfamiliar with the music so vividly described, the end result of the competition, the destiny of Ray’s violin and the conspiracy behind its theft will present greater than sufficient top-shelf leisure. (Slocumb additionally gives a useful playlist.) The e-book additionally serves as an vital affirmation that Black classical musicians matter.

Lady in Ice
By Erica Ferencik
Scout Press: 304 pages, $28

"Girl in Ice," by Erica Ferencik

Val Chesterfield, the protagonist of Ferencik’s third thriller, is a Boston linguist whose love of languages belies a locked-in life crippled by anxiousness and quite a few phobias. She’s the polar reverse of her twin brother, Andy, an adventurous climatologist, whose concern in regards to the growing incidence of lethal ice storms spurs him to affix his mentor, Wyatt Speeks, to conduct experiments at a distant Arctic outpost. There, he ventures out in subzero climate and freezes to loss of life, leaving his twin bereft and their 91-year-old father satisfied Speeks murdered his son. 5 months later, Speeks emails Val a recording of the vocalizations of a woman discovered frozen within the ice; can she assist decipher them? Paralyzed by her insecurities, Val hesitates to get entangled, however her father, desperate to show himself proper, points an ultimatum: “Go, Val, or don’t hassle coming to see me anymore.”

Earlier than lengthy, Val has confronted each her worry of flying and her claustrophobia trapped in shut quarters with the woman, Speeks, a taciturn mechanic and two polar marine scientists. A sinister cloud of suspicion surrounds the encampment, as unforgiving as an Arctic storm. Val calls it “‘the Enormity,’ an emotional and bodily area so overwhelming, I couldn’t face it with out medicine or alcohol.”

Nonetheless, Val kinds a bond with the 9-year-old woman, often known as Sigrid, and conducts a surreptitious and more and more harmful investigation into Andy’s loss of life. When you recover from the implausibility of Sigrid’s revival, Val’s braveness within the face of extreme limitations feels each inspiring and true.

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Identified for immersing herself in difficult environments, Ferencik infuses each web page along with her analysis within the fjords of Greenland (the place the Inuktun phrase for local weather change interprets to “a good friend performing surprisingly”). That plus a author’s eye for the telling element have produced a number of the most unique thriller writing about Arctic environments since Peter Høeg’s 1993 novel “Smilla’s Sense of Snow.” As science-driven thriller and probing exploration of worry, language and household bonds, “Lady in Ice” won’t be simply forgotten.

Don’t Know Robust
By Eli Cranor
Soho Press: 336 pages, $25
March 22

"Don't Know Tough," by Eli Cranor

The stakes are excessive in Cranor’s debut, set in a football-mad Arkansas city on the foot of the Ozarks. The Denton Excessive Pirates have two secret weapons that would propel them to the state championship — Billy Lowe, a unstable however gifted working again, and Trent Powers, a deeply non secular soccer coach newly arrived from Southern California.

In alternating chapters, the story of Billy’s violent household unfurls, as does the stress on Trent to succeed, egged on by his spouse, Marley, a daddy’s woman to Trent’s mentor, a demanding athletic director again in California. Issues come to a head when Billy, livid in regards to the informal cruelty of his mom’s boyfriend, Travis (a.okay.a. “Him”), lashes out throughout observe at a teammate, injuring him badly: “There’s a cracking sound — not thunder, not lightning, and rattling positive not sheet steel — that is the sound of my coronary heart breaking, the sound of violence pouring out.”

Everybody, from the sufferer’s influential father to Denton Excessive’s principal, desires to banish Billy. Coach Powers, nonetheless, shares one thing with the teenager that transcends the game and hints at a darker previous.

Billy’s subsequent suspension units off a sequence of violence that culminates in a vicious assault on Travis. When Momma finds Travis useless, readers might imagine they know what occurred, however Cranor has some twists in retailer — in a plot that calls to thoughts Megan Abbott’s depictions of claustrophobic aggressive cultures. A former quarterback who coached for 5 years at an Arkansas highschool, Cranor brings an insider’s understanding of the sport, the area and human nature.

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INSTALLMENTS WORTH A READ

Murder and Halo-Halo
By Mia P. Manansala
Berkley: 304 pages, $16

Shady Palms’ nascent baker and entrepreneur Lila Macapagal should overcome PTSD, melancholy and related household stigma to assist cousin Bernadette, suspected of the homicide of an obnoxious teen pageant choose. Extra sobering than the delectable “Arsenic and Adobo,” this stable second entry in a sequence options Lila’s ever-engaging household dynamics and engaging Filipino recipes.

Homicide on the Porte de Versailles
By Cara Black
Soho Press: 360 pages, $28
March 15

Within the aftermath of 9/11, within the final of Cara Black’s long-running sequence organized round Paris’ arrondissements, Aimée Leduc should clear a good friend from suspicion for being concerned in what seems to be like a terrorist bombing whereas finding out her more and more sophisticated private life. Whereas followers could surprise what’s subsequent for the redoubtable Leduc after Paris, it’s clear from the intricate plotting and tantalizing unfastened ends that Black has loads of tales left to inform.

QUEER MYSTERY PIONEERS

Joseph Hansen reissued
Syndicate Books

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"Fadeout," by Joseph Hansen

At this time’s rising era of LGBTQ crime writers stands on the shoulders of Joseph Hansen (1923-2004), the pioneering crime author. This 12 months, Syndicate Books is reprinting all 12 of his books, with 5 out to this point. They are going to introduce a brand new era of readers to the brazenly gay (Hansen’s most well-liked time period) insurance coverage adjuster David Brandstetter, as iconic and influential a sleuth as Philip Marlowe, Kinsey Millhone or Straightforward Rawlins. An introduction by Michael Nava, one among Hansen’s literary progeny, in “Fadeout,” the primary within the sequence, gives helpful context and evaluation.

Survivor’s Guilt
By Robyn Gigl
Kensington: 352 pages, $27

Artwork imitated life in Gigl’s gripping 2021 debut, “By Method of Sorrow,” which launched readers to Erin McCabe, a transgender New Jersey protection legal professional. In “Survivor’s Guilt,” McCabe defends one other trans consumer, Ann Parsons, who has confessed to murdering her adoptive father, a rich businessman. McCabe and accomplice Duane Swisher reveal an online of exploitation, lies and darker deeds, and a killer who will upend sympathies for the sufferer and villain alike. One other barrier-breaking thriller from a voice lacking too lengthy from the thriller refrain.

Woods is a e-book critic, editor and writer of the “Charlotte Justice” thriller sequence.

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Who's afraid of Roy Cohn? Not Jeremy Strong

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Who's afraid of Roy Cohn? Not Jeremy Strong

Brutal. Vicious. Crooked. Cruel.

So filmmaker Ali Abbasi’s new biopic “The Apprentice” describes its dominant figure, a New York and Washington, D.C., power broker who lies, cheats, charms and browbeats his way into the uppermost ranks of American business and government.

No, it’s not Donald Trump. It’s Roy Cohn.

As the film depicts with garish flair, the pugilistic, Bronx-born attorney — who first came to prominence prosecuting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage, then served as chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy during his anticommunist witch hunt — took Trump under his wing in the 1970s, handing the ambitious real-estate developer’s son a fiendish playbook for success. Attack, attack, attack. Deny everything. Never admit defeat. By the time of his disbarment and death from AIDS complications in 1986, however, the roles were reversed, and Cohn lost sway with his erstwhile mentee as Trump stepped out of his shadow.

Throughout “The Apprentice,” Cohn comes across not only with his renowned ferocity, but also with uncommon empathy, courtesy of actor Jeremy Strong.

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“If Roy Cohn walked into this room right now, I don’t think I would want to shake his hand,” says Strong, 45, seated in a bar off the sun-dappled courtyard of the San Vicente Bungalows on an early fall afternoon. “But from the distance of a piece of work and trying to understand him — humanistically and creatively — I had to find, for lack of a better word, love. Which is a bit of a grenade to say out loud.”

Fresh off a silent meditation retreat in upstate New York, the “Succession” star folds the same circumspection into nearly all of his stacked, erudite sentences, which are peppered with literary allusions (Kafka’s “The Zürau Aphorisms”) and film-industry names (Danish director Tobias Lindholm). At times Strong pauses so long that I launch into my next question, only to be interrupted by the continuation of an apparently unfinished thought. He denies being “gun shy” about press since the publication of a viral 2021 New Yorker profile in which a number of his collaborators — some named, others anonymous — looked askance at the lengths to which he’ll go to embed himself in a character.

“I think I’m a fairly earnest person, and that’s gotten me in trouble,” Strong insists, “but I’m not interested in camouflaging or disguising myself. Life is too short.”

Strong, left, as Roy Cohn, with Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump in “The Apprentice.”

(Festival de Cannes)

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The topic at hand isn’t just the life and times of Roy Cohn, of course. When “The Apprentice” premiered earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, the Trump campaign swiftly threatened a lawsuit, calling the film “pure malicious defamation” and suggesting it “should not see the light of day.” Then, as if the former president’s wish had come true, the project languished for months without a distributor. Despite repeated reassurances from Abbasi, Strong, writer Gabriel Sherman and actor Sebastian Stan, who plays Trump, that “The Apprentice” was not a political polemic but a character study, it seemed plausible, as recently as August, that the film would remain on the shelf until after next month’s election, if not indefinitely. (It was ultimately picked up by Briarcliff Entertainment.)

“We sort of narrowly escaped the jaws of being effectively censored in this country,” Strong says. “That’s something that happens in Russia, North Korea. Not democratic countries. I think people in Hollywood were really wary of touching this, and that was disheartening.”

In theaters Friday, “The Apprentice” arrives in the home stretch of a bruising, chaotic presidential election campaign, sure to be scrutinized as closely as any film of the fall. Supporters of the Republican nominee will likely follow the Trump camp’s lead in calling the movie — in which Trump rapes first wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova) and undergoes multiple cosmetic surgeries — a hit piece, while his most ardent opponents may see any attempt to humanize Trump or Cohn as beyond the pale.

Given the fraught political environment, Strong strains to frame his approach to the character as a historian might, decoupling understanding from endorsement. Although he uses words like empathy, kinship and love to explain how he got under Cohn’s skin, he also describes the attorney as a “cancerous conundrum” and a “demonic Peter Pan.”

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“God, it’s really dangerous,” Strong says. “I feel like I could get in trouble for saying anything positive about him. When I say these things, I only really mean them in a creative arena, because creatively a character like Roy is like Iago. You don’t want to say anything nice about Iago. But as an actor, Iago is one of the great roles. This feels like one of the great roles.”

Strong is not alone in his estimation. As a key character in Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer-winning 1991 play “Angels in America,” Mike Nichols’ 2003 HBO miniseries adaptation thereof, the 1992 TV movie “Citizen Cohn,” last year’s miniseries “Fellow Travelers” and numerous documentaries, Cohn has inspired more major films and TV series than even Harvey Milk. His many portrayals have resulted in two Tonys, an Emmy and a Peabody. I ask Strong if he thinks there’s any merit to the criticism about straight actors playing gay characters, and receiving acclaim for doing so, when such opportunities and plaudits remain a rarity for out gay actors.

“Yes, it’s absolutely valid,” Strong says. “I’m sort of old fashioned, maybe, in the belief that, fundamentally, it’s [about] a person’s artistry, and that great artists, historically, have been able to, as it were, change the stamp of their nature. That’s your job as an actor. The task, in a way, is to render something that is not necessarily your native habitat. … While I don’t think that it’s necessary [for gay roles to be played by gay performers], I think that it would be good if that were given more weight.”

Then, as I begin to follow up, he interjects, “What do you think?”

I think it’s complicated, if I’m being honest. I think it might be passé of me even to ask about it. At least for cis, white gay men, who have consistently dominated LGBTQ+ representation in film and television, the flagrantly stereotypical performances — the ones that treat the character’s sexuality as if it were another layer of hair, makeup or wardrobe — are now few and far between. It’s hard to muster one’s revolutionary fervor for Cohn, the man the “Bad Gays” podcast once labeled “the polestar of human evil.”

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And yet that is exactly what makes this real-life character — a closeted, self-hating homosexual who helped launch the Lavender Scare and remained silent about the AIDS crisis even as it killed him — an ideal test case. The fact remains that no out gay man has ever won an Oscar for playing a queer character in the 96-year history of the Academy Awards. Meanwhile, this season alone could conceivably add two more names — Strong and Daniel Craig for “Queer” — to the list of nine straight men who’ve previously done so. (The numbers for women, and nominations, are scarcely any better.) In light of the disproportion, one can’t help but draw the conclusion that pundits and voters still understand playing gay as one mark in the column for “outstanding performance.” Which raises the question: Might a gay actor get more credit if he opted to play our community’s most notorious supervillain, instead of another tragic hero we’re determined to uplift? Would that appear, to the film academy’s approximately 10,000 members, a little more like “acting,” and less like life?

Compared with Pacino’s outraged and outrageous Cohn, spraying a vulgarian’s spittle across Nichols’ magisterial “Angels,” Strong’s performance is a model of white-knuckle control, swaggering when Cohn exerts his power, wilting when he can’t. When Cohn learns that Trump has gifted him fake-diamond cuff links for what will turn out to be his final birthday, Strong invests the petty indignity with pathos, as a man who would step over anyone to get ahead realizes he’s subject to the same ruthless forces. Along with Will Brill’s turn in “Fellow Travelers,” painting Cohn as practically lovesick for his partner in anticommunism, G. David Schine, “The Apprentice” is the closest any screen actor has come to reflecting the description of the attorney on the AIDS Memorial Quilt: “Bully. Coward. Victim.”

“What I do feel, whoever plays any part ever, is that you have to take these things as seriously as you take your own life, and it is not a game, and that these people and their struggles and the experiences you’re trying to render are not a plaything,” Strong says. “If I didn’t believe that I could understand on some deep level his anguish and turmoil and his need, and the sort of Gordian knot that every character has but Roy has particularly — if I didn’t believe that I could understand it or connect to it in a way that is faithful or voracious, I wouldn’t have done it. I certainly don’t do these things just for my own self-aggrandizement.”

An actor in a hat looks into the lens.

“You have to take these things as seriously as you take your own life,” says Strong of diving into the role of Roy Cohn. “And it is not a game.”

(Marcus Ubungen / Los Angeles Times)

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Strong has become an almost scholarly fount of biographical information about Cohn, littering our conversation with enough details about the man’s home decor (porcelain frog figurines), taste in poetry (Joaquin Miller’s “Byron”) and dinner order at Le Cirque (Bumble Bee tuna, off-menu) to give Cohn‘s biographers a run for their money.

When Abbasi offered the role to Strong, the actor was already familiar with Cohn, not only from “Angels in America,” but also from the research he did after being approached to play Cohn in another film project about five years ago. Signing on to “The Apprentice” sent Strong’s prep work into overdrive, including studying video of Cohn to learn his “sui generis” voice — a hectoring New York sneer that’s authoritative but rarely loud — and interviewing Cohn profiler Ken Auletta. Strong says Cohn also represents his most dramatic physical transformation.

“I haven’t had to alter my body in that way,” says Strong, who underwent a doctor-supervised “starvation diet” and a regimen of tanning booth visits and biweekly spray tans to match Cohn’s notoriously leathery look. “He was obsessed with his physical appearance. He had a tremendous amount of vanity.”

With an Emmy for “Succession” and a Tony for this spring’s revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People” under his belt, and Oscar buzz for his performance in “The Apprentice” already building, Strong’s own motivations are evolving. While career disappointment once spurred him, he is now just “looking for a limb to go out on.” I liken it, during the course of our conversation, to gymnast Simone Biles developing never-before-attempted vaults to challenge herself.

“I no longer feel thwarted in that way and I can pay my rent,” Strong says. “And I don’t take any of that for granted because it happened late for me. I have the luxury of choice and the luxury, more importantly, of getting to choose things that matter most to me, things that feel meaningful. I want to keep pushing myself — that Simone Biles thing of finding new ways to find the frontier and work that kind of requires a radical courage to do. Which for me is most things, because I find it all pretty fearful.”

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After we’ve parted ways, Strong texts me a quote by Bruce Springsteen — “The pressures of the business are powerless in the face of what is real” — from music journalist Fred Goodman’s history “The Mansion on the Hill,” which Strong is reading to prepare to play Springsteen manager Jon Landau in the upcoming biopic starring Jeremy Allen White. I, too, am a collector of quotations, and after joking that newspaper stories should have epigraphs, I suggest one, from Wallace Stegner, that seems apropos to our conversation about Cohn: Present your subject in his own terms, judge him in yours.

“That’s a good one,” Strong texts. “For actors too.”

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Film Review: Psychosis is an absurd Aussie experiment that defies categorization – The AU Review

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Film Review: Psychosis is an absurd Aussie experiment that defies categorization – The AU Review

A film like Psychosis is a difficult one to review.  Whilst there’s never a shortage of features that prove wildly divisive (the Joker sequel says hello), Pirie Martin‘s ambitious debut defies categorization as it blends technique and genre, submitting to an extreme eccentricity that, as off-putting it may be to some, is difficult to not be impressed by.

An Australian experiment of sorts, this no-budget, square aspect-ratioed, black-and-white absurdist mystery is a noirish nightmare – complete with BBC-like narrator – about a criminal fixer, Cliff Van Aarle (Derryn Amoroso), who, thanks to a psychological condition, has a multitude of voices in his head fighting for prominence as he goes about cleaning up the many criminal world messes he’s assigned to.

A difficult film to follow (perhaps intentionally so), Psychosis adds even more obscure flames to its fire by introducing the notion of potential zombies, which a duo of amateur drug dealers claim they were attacked by; this ultimately explained by the fact that a drug lord is doping up his lackeys to the point of near-hypnosis.  With the voices continually conversing in Cliff’s head, as well as the constant narration, Psychosis does run the risk of being over-explained to the point that any of the film’s intended mystery is underwhelming, but such is the charm of Martin’s clear love of all the genres this film touches on, the surreal flourishes of it all become oddly enamoring.

Not unlike what Rian Johnson accomplished with Brick, mixed with another of this year’s black-and-white farcicalities, Hundreds of Beavers, it’s the pure cheek of Martin that pushes Psychosis past the point of audience detachment.  It can’t be stressed enough that this film has been made with a very specific target viewership in mind, and it’s mainly earning points here for the sheer fact that Martin had the gall to create such a film that takes glee in pushing against the usual grain.

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It can’t always escape its amateurish mentality, but Psychosis‘ retro-midnight-movie-madness personality will indeed win it the attention and respect it deserves from the type of audience who find glory in the gonzo.

TWO AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)

Psychosis is now available to rent and/or buy digitally through Prime Video in Australia.  It’s now available on Tubi in the United States.



Peter Gray

Seasoned film critic. Gives a great interview. Penchant for horror. Unashamed fan of Michelle Pfeiffer and Jason Momoa.

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Kamala Harris to appear on 'The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,' 'Call Her Daddy' and 'Howard Stern'

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Kamala Harris to appear on 'The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,' 'Call Her Daddy' and 'Howard Stern'

As she heads into the final stretch of the presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris will make a flurry of media appearances this week.

On Tuesday, she will visit “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” marking her first late-night appearance since President Biden dropped out of the race and she secured the Democratic nomination.

It will be her seventh overall visit to “The Late Show” and is one of many interviews she will be giving this week in both traditional and more unconventional forums.

Harris also recently sat down with the hugely popular podcaster Alex Cooper for an episode of “Call Her Daddy,” which is expected to be released Sunday. Topics of the conversation are said to include reproductive rights and other issues important to women voters, according to the Washington Post. The show has gained a vast following, particularly with young women drawn to Cooper’s take on sex, dating and relationships, but it also tackles current events and features interviews with people in the news.

On Monday, Harris will also appear on “60 Minutes,” broadcast TV’s most-watched news program, along with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. They will speak to correspondent Bill Whitaker from the campaign trail for a special episode of the CBS news magazine. According to CBS, Her Republican rival, Donald Trump, and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, initially accepted an invitation to speak with Scott Pelley in the “60 Minutes” special but then backed out last week.

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On Tuesday, Harris will also appear live on “The View” on ABC and will visit “The Howard Stern Show.” She will also take part in a town hall for Univision on Thursday.

Walz, meanwhile, will visit “Jimmy Kimmel Live” on Monday.

Former President Obama was known for making frequent late-night appearances and for trying to reach younger voters through unusual channels — once making the case for the Affordable Care Act on the spoof web series “Between Two Ferns.”

Both Harris and Trump have increasingly sought to mobilize specific voting blocs through targeted appearances on podcasts and social media platforms, rather than traditional journalistic outlets. Last week Harris appeared on “All the Smoke,” a podcast hosted by retired NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson. Trump has focused on influencers popular with young men, including Adin Ross.

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