The White House unveiled a new portrait of President Trump this week, replacing the image taken in January that had drawn comparisons to a mugshot.

In the new photograph, announced by the White House on Monday via X, Trump stares directly into the camera. His right eye is slightly squinted and his mouth is pressed into a straight line. He is dressed in a blue suit with one of his signature red ties, and an American flag is pinned to his left lapel.

The backdrop is dark and blank.

The new photo contrasts the January depiction of the president, which showed the president seemingly lit from below – drawing comparisons to a camper with a flashlight under their chin telling ghost stories – and casting what could be perceived as a menacing stare at the lens. The red and white stripes of the American flag fill in behind his head.

“The first portrait done in January was done with something called up lighting — which is lighting from below — which isn’t found in the natural world often,” said Jeff Whetstone, director of the visual arts program at Princeton University.

“In the new portrait, the lighting is more natural but still dramatic. And it’s lighting that shows one side of the face more than the other, so there’s a duality there,” Whetstone continued, comparing the style of photography to the famous 1941 portrait of U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, as captured by Yousuf Karsh.

The January presidential portrait led to immediate comparisons with Trump’s official mugshot, taken at Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail when he turned himself in for allegedly attempting to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.

In that mugshot, Trump’s eyebrows appear to be raised, and his eyes look upward to the camera as he glares into the shot.

In both of his recent official portraits, Trump has chosen not to smile, breaking with the longstanding tradition of presidents posing with smiles. This contrasts with the toothy grin he displayed in the 2017 portrait from his first term, where he wore a blue suit and a blue dotted tie.

Another notable difference is the absence of the American flag in the latest portrait. America’s most iconic symbol has served as the backdrop for every president since the 1970s.

“The flag to the right hand of the president has been around since Gerald Ford,” Whetstone said.

A White House official said that Trump’s January portrait was never meant to be permanent.

“The old one was always meant to serve as a placeholder,” the official said. “The President is the most well-known person on the planet and this new portrait taken during his second term reflects the optimism and resolve of America, especially after a disastrous four years of the Biden administration.”

Trump is famously aware of his public image.

Earlier this year, a Colorado artist faced Trump’s ire and outrage over an oil painting commissioned by the state’s Republican legislature.

Trump accused the artist, Sarah Boardman, of purposefully distorting his likeness, claiming that she had lost her touch with age.

Boardman said her business suffered as a result of the attack on her talents and motives.

When you watch “The Matrix” at Cosm, you’re essentially seeing a film within a film. A shot inside an apartment becomes a glimpse into an entire complex. A fight scene on a rooftop is now one small part of a giant cityscape. Look to the left, and a once off-screen helicopter is suddenly entirely visible.

Cosm has won attention and a fan base for its focus on sports programming. A domed, 87-foot-diameter wraparound screen surrounds audiences at the Inglewood venue, creating an illusion of in-the-flesh presence. Can’t make it to that NBA Finals or World Series game? Cosm wants to be your fallback plan, combining front-row-like seats with unexpected views.

And now, Cosm aims to redefine the moviegoing experience. A revival of “The Matrix” opens Thursday in what the company calls “shared reality,” a marketing term that ultimately means newly created CGI animation towers, over, under and around the original 1999 film. Cosm has in the past shown largely short-form original programming, and “The Matrix” marks its first foray into feature-length films.

The hope is to not only see the film with fresh eyes but to create a sensation of being in the same environment as Keanu Reeves’ Neo, Carrie-Anne Moss’ Trinity and Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus. “The Matrix” is an ideal film for this experiment, its anti-AI message decidedly topical while its themes grapple with dual visions of reality.

There’s been a host of so-called immersive ambitions to alter the moviegoing experience over the decades, be it the on-and-off flirtation with interactive cinema, a brief trend in the ’90s that recently lived again on Netflix (see “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch”), to more recent 4-DX theaters with movement-enabled seats (see the light, water and wind effects of “Twisters”). Cosm, like the bigger, more live music-focused Sphere in Las Vegas, seems to have a different pitch: an all-encompassing screen that can provide previously unexplored vantage points, even at times creating a theme park ride-like sense of movement.

Cosm’s interpretation of “The Matrix,” a collaboration with experiential creative agency Little Cinema, envelopes audiences from its opening action sequence when a nighttime view of a city skyline seemingly places us on a rooftop. Elsewhere, Neo’s office building becomes a maze of cubicles. The film’s centerpiece red pill versus blue pill moment centers the frame among oversized, glowing capsules. When Neo awakens, we are lost amid mountainous, industrial pods.

The challenge: To not make it feel like a gimmick, yet to also know when to pull back and let the film stand for itself. “The No. 1 core principle was to enhance and don’t overshadow,” says Jay Rinsky, founder of Little Cinema. “Metaphorically for us, the movie itself is the lead singer and we are the backing band. Let the movie be the star. Let it sing. And basically follow the key beats — follow the sound design, the emotional moments and enhance the action.”

The red versus blue pill scene in “The Matrix” is framed with newly created animation.

(Cosm)

The accompanying images get more aggressive as the film races toward its climax. The animations are most effective when they’re expanding the screen rather than echoing the action — showing us the viewpoint of a careening helicopter for instance, rather than repeating or mimicking a beat of the film. Having seen “The Matrix” before, I know the story and its cadence, and was perhaps more willing to turn my attention away from the film, which is placed in the center of the screen and often set within a picture frame.

In turn, I was dazzled by the scenes shot inside Morpheus’ hovercraft the Nebuchadnezzar, in which the vessel’s surroundings — its buzzing, electrical core and its assortment of monitors — are fleshed out around the screen. Film purists, I wonder, may balk at seeing images beyond the director’s vision — Rinsky says he hasn’t been in touch with directors Lana or Lilly Wachowski — but I found it could help build a world, especially for revival cinema on a second or third viewing.

A scene of “The Matrix” starring Carrie-Anne Moss is surrounded with an all-surrounding view of a skyline.

(Cosm)

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Expectedly, the film’s final act becomes a bevy of secondary action. Bullets that fly off the frame of the film now find a landing spot, as building walls shatter and crumble around us. Cosm’s screen is crisp and encompassing enough that it can mimic movement or flight, and thankfully this is used sparingly, twisting only when the film’s characters take to the skies.

When Cosm opened last summer Chief Executive Jeb Terry stressed the venue wasn’t in the business of showing films, wanting to focus on sports or original programming. “We’re not a first-run theater,” said Terry. “We’re leaning into the experiential side.” Seemingly, “The Matrix” fits this plan, as the accompanying CGI images have been in the works since about August 2024, says Rinsky, with the bulk of the heavy lifting beginning in January.

Rinsky acknowledges “The Matrix” fits the format particularly well because it “plays in a realm of fantasy that allows you to change environments around,” but is quick to add that Cosm and Little Cinema hope to expand the program of enhancing Hollywood products. “It is a bit of a mission and a philosophy,” he says. “Every film in every genre has its own unique propositions and can be adopted and suited well. We’re excited about horror, and we’re excited about comedy.” Future projects have not yet been announced.

Cosm also has a venue in Dallas, with spots in Atlanta and Detroit on the way. Rinsky’s hope, of course, is that Cosm someday has enough market penetration that filmmakers can create the format from the ground up.

“I’m really bullish about this being the new cinema,” Rinsky says. “I think in five to 10 years, there will be 100 of these around. Once it hits scale, then big studios will have releases created specifically for this format.”

It’s an optimistic view of the future that’s arriving at a time of disruption in Hollywood, from shake-ups due to the streaming market to artificial intelligence. For Cosm, it’s the early days, but it’s a vision that needs neither a red nor blue pill. Its outlook is much more rose-colored.

Since 2009, comedian Marc Maron has recorded his topical and entertaining podcast WTF from his garage studio, interviewing famous people such as Robin Williams, Nicole Kidman and former President Barack Obama.

Before talking to comedian John Mulaney on his latest episode, the podcast pioneer broke the news that he’s calling it quits.

“We have put up a new show every Monday and Thursday for almost 16 years and we’re tired. We’re burnt out. And we are utterly satisfied with the work we’ve done,” he told his listeners.

The WTF With Marc Maron Podcast has produced more than 1,600 episodes and boasts 55 million listens every year. It’s one of the most-streamed and downloaded podcasts around.

Maron began the podcast with producer Brendan McDonald in 2009 after losing the late night radio show he co-hosted at Air America Radio network, whose opening line of every episode was, “Good evening geniuses, philosopher kings and queens, working class heroes, progressive utopians with no sense of humor, lurking conservatives.”

At the time, the podcast genre was new.

“No one knew what a podcast was. I was coming out of a horrendous divorce. I was wanting to figure out how to continue living my life. Things were not looking good for me,” he explained on WTF. “There was no way to make money. There was no way that we knew how to build an audience or anything. And it was crazy. We were doing it in a garage at the beginning. That was just a garage. It was filled with junk.”

WTF with Marc Maron grew a huge audience, gained sponsors and became influential. In 2010, Robin Williams spoke to Maron about suicide before his death. That episode was inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry, which noted that “Marc Maron’s popularity has helped to legitimize the podcast as a media format and created an idiosyncratic document of this moment of American culture.”

His 2015 interview with Barack Obama was noted by The New York Times as “almost certainly the first time that a sitting president has recorded an interview in a comedian’s garage.”

With Maron in his Los Angeles garage and McDonald producing from Brooklyn, the two-man operation “had a great run, but it’s time, folks. It’s time,” Maron said. “WTF is coming to an end. And it’s our decision.”

The podcast will end “sometime in the fall,” and Maron says it doesn’t mean he won’t do another podcast. The 61-year-old author of The Jerusalem Syndrome: My Life as a Reluctant Messiah and Attempting Normal has been busy acting. He starred in the Netflix series GLOW, as well as in his IFC series Maron. He has also had his own standup comedy specials and movie roles, including Joker (2019), Respect (2021) and The Bad Guys (2022).

This week, he has a new Apple show, Stick, with Owen Wilson, and next week the Tribeca Film Festival will premiere a documentary about him, Are We Good? The film explores how Maron’s life changed after the death of his partner, filmmaker Lynn Shelton, in 2020.