Lifestyle
Securing the TikTok Vote
If all politics is theater, Consultant Tim Ryan is considered one of its subtler actors. A reasonable Democrat from Ohio’s thirteenth district who has represented the state for practically 20 years, his speeches and debate performances are sometimes described as popping out of central casting. His type decisions are D.C. commonplace. He’s not often the topic of late-night skits or memes.
That’s to not say he isn’t attempting. Again within the spring of 2020, as Covid-19 was overtaking the nation and a divided Congress was duking it out over a sweeping stimulus invoice, Mr. Ryan, 48, was so pissed off on the stalled laws that he determined to channel his emotion right into a TikTok video.
The 15-second clip options Mr. Ryan lounging round his workplace in a white button-down and gown pants, his tie barely unfastened, as he mimes a clear model of “Bored within the Home,” by Curtis Roach. It’s a rap track that resonated with cooped-up People early on within the pandemic, that includes a chorus (“I’m bored in the home, and I’m in the home bored”) that seems in hundreds of thousands of movies throughout TikTok. Most of them depict individuals shedding their minds in lockdown. Mr. Ryan’s interpretation was somewhat extra literal: Bored … within the Home … get it?
Mr. Ryan isn’t a politician one readily associates with the Zoomers of TikTok. His speaking factors are inclined to revolve round points like reviving American manufacturing moderately than, say, defunding the police. However the chino-clad congressman wasn’t naïve to the nontraditional locations from which political affect may circulation. Years in the past he was all in on meditation. Why not attempt the social platform of the second?
His teenage daughter, Bella, received him in control and taught him a few of the dances that had gone viral on the app. “I simply thought it was hysterical, and that it was one thing actually cool that her and I might do collectively,” Mr. Ryan stated in a cellphone interview.
Quickly sufficient, he was posting on his personal account, sharing video montages of his ground speeches and his views on infrastructure laws, backed by the sound of Taylor Swift’s “All Too Effectively.” (As any TikTok beginner would rapidly study, fashionable songs assist movies get found on the platform.)
“I began to see it as a chance to actually communicate to an viewers that wasn’t watching political speak exhibits or watching the information,” Mr. Ryan stated. This 12 months, he’s operating for Ohio’s open Senate seat; he thinks TikTok may very well be an important a part of the race.
However as primaries start for the midterm elections, the actual query is: What do voters suppose?
Privateness, Protest and Punditry
Social media has performed a job in political campaigning since not less than 2007, when Barack Obama, then an Illinois senator, registered his first official Twitter deal with. Since then, monumental numbers of political bids have harnessed the ability of social platforms, by means of dramatic announcement movies on YouTube, Twitter debates, Reddit A.M.A.s, hearth chats on Instagram Stay and extra. TikTok, with its young-skewing lively international consumer base of 1 billion, would appear a pure subsequent frontier.
To date, although, in contrast with different platforms, it has been embraced by comparatively few politicians. Their movies run the gamut of cringey — say, normie dads bopping alongside to viral audio clips — to genuinely connecting with individuals.
“TikTok continues to be within the novelty section by way of social media networks for political candidates,” stated Eric Wilson, a Republican political technologist.
Republicans specifically have expressed considerations concerning the app’s father or mother firm, ByteDance, whose headquarters are in China. Within the ultimate 12 months of his presidency, Donald J. Trump signed an govt order to ban the app in the US, citing considerations that consumer information may very well be retrieved by the Chinese language authorities. (President Biden revoked the order final summer season.)
After a short stint on the app, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Republican, deleted his account. He has since known as on President Biden to dam the platform solely. In an electronic mail assertion, Mr. Rubio, 50, wrote that TikTok “poses a critical menace to U.S. nationwide safety and People’ — particularly youngsters’s — private privateness.”
That time has been disputed by nationwide safety consultants, who suppose the app can be a comparatively inefficient approach for Chinese language companies to acquire U.S. intelligence.
“They’ve higher methods of getting it,” stated Adam Segal, the director of the Digital and Our on-line world Coverage program on the Council on International Relations, amongst them “phishing emails, directed focused assaults on the employees or the politicians themselves or shopping for information on the open market.”
Regardless, TikTok appears to have empowered a brand new technology to turn into extra engaged with international points, attempt on ideological identities and take part within the political course of — even these not sufficiently old to vote.
There have been uncommon however notable examples of TikTok inspiring political motion. In 2020, younger customers inspired individuals to register for a Tulsa, Okla., rally in assist of former President Donald Trump as a prank to restrict turnout. Forward of the rally, Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s 2020 marketing campaign supervisor, tweeted that there had been greater than one million ticket requests, however solely 6,200 tickets have been scanned on the area.
Such exercise isn’t restricted to younger liberals on the platform. Ioana Literat, an affiliate professor of communication at Academics Faculty, Columbia College, who has studied younger individuals and political expression on social media with Neta Kligler-Vilenchik of the Hebrew College of Jerusalem, pointed to the political “hype homes” that turned fashionable on TikTok throughout the 2020 election. The house owners of these accounts have livestreamed debates, debunked misinformation spreading on the app and mentioned coverage points.
“Younger political pundits on each side of the ideological divide have been very profitable in utilizing TikTok to succeed in their respective audiences,” Ms. Literat stated.
You’ve Bought My Vote, Bestie
Most of the politicians lively on TikTok are Democrats or left-leaning independents, together with Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Consultant Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and the mayors of two of America’s largest cities, Lori Lightfoot and Eric Adams (who introduced he had joined this week with a video that featured his morning smoothie routine).
This may very well be as a result of the platform has a big proportion of younger customers, in accordance with inner firm information and paperwork that have been reviewed by The New York Occasions in 2020, and younger individuals are inclined to lean liberal. (TikTok wouldn’t share present demographic information with The Occasions.)
“If you’re a Democrat operating for workplace, you’re attempting to get younger voters to exit and assist you,” stated Mr. Wilson, the Republican strategist. “That calculation is totally different for Republicans, the place you’re attempting to mobilize a unique sort of voter” — somebody who is probably going older and spends time on different platforms.
For his half, Mr. Markey has cultivated a following on TikTok with movies which might be a mixture of foolish (akin to him boiling pasta in acknowledgment of “Rigatoni Day”), critical (for instance, him reintroducing the Inexperienced New Take care of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cori Bush) and severely fashionable (him stepping out in a bomber jacket and Nike excessive tops). The feedback on his movies are crammed with followers calling him “bestie” (“go bestie!!”, “i like you bestie,” “YES BESTIE!!!!”).
The sensation is mutual. “Once I submit on TikTok, it’s as a result of I’m having enjoyable on-line and speaking with my pals concerning the issues all of us care about,” Mr. Markey, 75, wrote in an electronic mail. “I pay attention and study from younger individuals on TikTok. They’re main, they know what’s occurring and so they know the place we’re headed, particularly on-line. I’m with them.”
Dafne Valenciano, 19, a school pupil from California, stated that she’s a fan of Mr. Ossoff’s TikTok account. Throughout his marketing campaign season, “he had very humorous content material and urged younger voters to go to the ballots,” Ms. Valenciano stated. “Politicians accessing this social media makes it simpler for my technology to see their media moderately than by means of information or articles.”
A number of of the movies posted by Mr. Ossoff, 35, who has moppy brown hair and boyish beauty, have been interpreted by his followers as thirst traps. “YAS DADDY JON,” one consumer commented on a video of him solemnly discussing local weather change. One other wrote, on a submit celebrating his first 100 days in workplace, that Mr. Ossoff was “scorching and he is aware of it,” calling him a “assured king.” The senator has greater than half one million followers on TikTok.
Some politicians find yourself on the platform unwittingly. Take, as an example, the viral audio of Kamala Harris declaring, “we did it, Joe” after successful the 2020 election. Although the vice chairman doesn’t have an account herself, her sound chew has hundreds of thousands of performs.
Catering to such viral impulses could appear gimmicky, but it surely’s a needed a part of any candidate’s TikTok technique. Political promoting is prohibited on the platform, so politicians can’t promote a lot of their content material to focus on particular customers. And the app pushes movies from all around the world into customers’ feeds, making it laborious for candidates to succeed in those who may truly vote for them.
Daniel Dong, 20, a school pupil from New Hampshire, stated that he usually sees posts from politicians in different states in his TikTok feed, however “these races don’t matter to me as a result of I’m by no means going to have the ability to vote for a random particular person from one other state.”
The Artwork of the Viral Video
Christina Haswood, a Democratic member of the Kansas Home of Representatives, first began her TikTok account in the summertime of 2020, when she was operating for her seat.
“I went to my marketing campaign supervisor and was like, ‘Wouldn’t it’s humorous if I made a marketing campaign TikTok?’” Ms. Haswood, 27, stated.
She received the race, making her considered one of a handful of Native People within the Kansas state legislature. “Plenty of of us don’t see an Indigenous politician, a younger politician of coloration. You don’t see that each day throughout the state, not to mention throughout the nation,” Ms. Haswood stated. “I need to encourage younger individuals to run for workplace.”
At first, Ms. Haswood created TikToks that have been purely informational — movies of her speaking on to the digital camera, which weren’t getting a lot traction. When one of many candidates operating in opposition to her within the main additionally began a TikTok, she felt she wanted to amp issues up.
Conner Thrash, on the time a highschool pupil and now a school pupil on the College of Kansas, began to note Ms. Haswood’s movies. “I actually liked what she stood for,” Mr. Thrash, 19, stated. “I spotted that I had the power to bridge the hole between a politician attempting to broaden their outreach and other people like my younger, teenage self.”
So he reached out to Ms. Haswood, and the 2 began making content material collectively and perfecting the artwork of the viral TikTok. A video ought to strike a cautious steadiness of entertaining however not embarrassing; low-fi with out seeming careless; and classy however revolutionary, bringing one thing new to the endless scroll.
One in every of their most-watched movies lays out key factors of Ms. Haswood’s platform, together with the safety of reproductive rights and legalizing leisure marijuana. The video is about to a viral remix of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” and follows a pattern by which TikTok customers push the digital camera away from themselves midsong. (Ms. Haswood used a Penny skateboard to attain the impact.)
TikTok might have helped Ms. Haswood win her race, however few candidates have had her success. A number of politicians with giant TikTok followings, together with Matt Little (a former liberal member of the Minnesota Senate) and Joshua Collins (a socialist who ran for U.S. consultant for Washington), misplaced, “fairly badly — of their respective elections,” Ms. Literat stated, “so technically they didn’t succeed from a political perspective.”
The habits of younger voters specifically might be laborious to foretell. Within the 2020 presidential election, about half of People between the ages 18 and 29 voted, in accordance with the Middle for Data & Analysis on Civic Studying and Engagement at Tufts College — a report turnout for an age group not recognized for exhibiting as much as the polls.
Nonetheless, “younger individuals assist drive the tradition,” stated Jennifer Stromer-Galley, the writer of “Presidential Campaigning within the Web Age” and a professor of knowledge research at Syracuse College.
“Although they might or might not ever vote for Jon Ossoff, being on TikTok does assist form Ossoff’s picture,” she added. “Extra persons are going to know Ossoff’s identify as we speak due to his TikTok stunt than they did earlier than.”
Lifestyle
Opinion: Happy Halloween? Living with unease, uncertainty and the uncanny in a scary season
One of the best parts of new parenthood is figuring out what your child is going to be for Halloween. Considering the costume possibilities for my 15-month-old, I have been surprised and often delighted by what one can find on the internet. For a reasonable price, you can dress your baby up as Cher Horowitz, Doc Brown, Lord Farquaad, Mary Poppins or a Rydell High cheerleader while you yourself take on the persona of Austin Powers, Forrest Gump, Harry Potter or Wonder Woman. The holiday seems nostalgic and innocent, even unifying in its appeal to the one thing we all share: that we were children once.
That is, of course, until I walk outside, where I am reminded of my lifelong discomfort with the more lurid aspects of Halloween. All around me are homes festooned with terrifying man-made skeletons, goblins, clowns and witches. “How can anyone stand this?” I keep asking myself.
As it turns out, Halloween has always been rooted in dueling ideas of the otherworldly. Set aside in the 9th century as a day to honor the Catholic saints, it succeeded an even older Gaelic celebration of transition between seasons and states of being. Our modern holiday might be thought of as a portmanteau of All Hallows’ Eve — the Christian feast that precedes All Saints’ (or Hallows’) Day — and Samhain, an ancient Celtic holiday marking the final harvest of the year and the beginning of winter.
As Katherine May writes in her book “Wintering,” Samhain (pronounced sah-win) represents a seasonal and spiritual threshold at which the veil between this world and the next is at its thinnest, inviting loved ones we have lost to visit us. Between fall’s radiant foliage and the year’s first snow, it’s “a time between two worlds, between two phases of the year,” and “a way of marking that ambiguous moment when you didn’t know who you were about to become, or what the future would hold.”
Today we have lost much of this reverence for Halloween, yet the holiday continues to thrive. Oblivious to its original purpose, our modern version is an expression of the American idea that you can be whoever you want to be as well as a vehicle for our tensions and anxieties, turning death into a joke with temporary disguises and decorative one-upmanship.
Maybe the detached skulls and bloody hands on our lawns are part of an endeavor to harness or reclaim our fears. Or maybe the fantastical monsters of our imaginations have become easier to face than the human monsters running for our public offices — a process that culminates every few years, as it happens, just days after Halloween.
In the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, Elizabeth Bruenig wrote for the Washington Post that Halloween “gets its depth and intrigue from the layering of things that seem frightening but are really benign — toothy jack-o’-lanterns, ghoulish costumes, tales of ghosts and witches and monsters — atop things that seem benign but are really frightening, such as the passage of the harvest season into the long, cold dark.”
Yet what if we should really be frightened not so much of the “long, cold dark” as our unwillingness to confront it? Americans sometimes seem unable to face the real darkness of the world, much less embrace what can be gained from it: compassion for others’ suffering; acceptance of the seasonality of life; separation from the capitalist hustle; and a greater sense of gratitude, belonging and purpose.
The passage of time, grief for those we have lost, longing for a better world that seems perpetually out of reach — all of these things can be frightening. But they don’t have to be.
As election day looms just beyond this ancient celebration, it’s time to put the “hallow” back in Halloween. Amid the bare branches, flickering candles and migrating birds lies an invitation to reflect not only on the children we once were but also on the adults we aspire to become — and to dwell, for a moment, in the seasonal and spiritual in-between.
Cornelia Powers is a writer who is working on a book about the golfer Bessie Anthony, her great-great-grandmother.
Lifestyle
Keri Russell returns as 'The Diplomat,' which is just as savvy in Season 2
At a time when it seems political rhetoric couldn’t get more bitter or outrageous, it’s easy to see the world’s leaders and the people who support them in the worst possible light.
But Netflix’s The Diplomat offers a different vision of politics: one where sharp staffers are often the backseat drivers in government, and many of those involved are truly interested in improving lives – even when they do awful things along the way.
That’s the universe Netflix’s series thrives in, where The Americans alum Keri Russell plays a hard-nosed, practical mid-level diplomat suddenly elevated to serve as ambassador to Britain, amid plans to groom her to become America’s next vice president.
Starting season two with a bang
As the show’s second season kicks off, Russell’s Ambassador Kate Wyler is dealing with the aftermath of a cliffhanger that ended the first season. Her husband — former ambassador Hal Wyler — along with her deputy, Stuart Hayford and another aide were caught in the blast of a car bomb while trying to meet with an official from the British government.
The official may have had information about who really initiated a deadly attack against a British aircraft carrier from the first season. But instead of learning more, Kate’s husband and two members of her staff were caught in another attack.
While British and American officials scamper to figure out exactly what happened, we see The Diplomat ride a delicious, compelling line between serving up hefty slices of political drama and revealing the mournful humanity of co-workers trying to recover from a massively traumatic event.
Every performance here is golden. Rory Kinnear is particularly excellent as an egotistical blowhard of a British Prime minister, Nicol Trowbridge. Ali Ahn, currently earning raves for her performance as a witch on Disney+’s Agatha All Along, shines here as CIA station chief Eidra Park – trying to offer savvy, effective support to Kate while not-so-secretly fretting about Kate’s deputy Stuart, with whom she had a relationship.
Rufus Sewell is magnetic as Kate’s husband Hal; she suspects he sees her ascension to vice president as his best route back to power, but he insists otherwise, testing their relationship. David Gyasi plays U.K. foreign secretary Austin Dennison as a precise-yet-passionate power player, focused on doing the right thing for Britain, even as he grows closer to Kate and her marriage frays.
But it’s not until West Wing alum Allison Janney arrives as current Vice President Grace Penn that we see the show’s drama really come alive. As a brilliant vice president who may be forced to step down because of a financial scandal involving her husband, Penn excels at maneuvering others into doing what she wants while leaving them convinced it was all their idea.
Some may have been concerned that Janney is playing a souped-up version of her West Wing character, White House staffer C.J. Cregg. But ultimately, they don’t have much in common beyond a habit of speaking directly and a predilection for pantsuits.
A show centered on smart women leading
What both of Janney’s characters do have in common, however, is that they are accomplished, effective women – making a difference in environments where their talents and achievements are often underestimated or overlooked.
Indeed, several storylines in The Diplomat revolve around smart women deftly guiding powerful men into making better decisions than they could manage on their own. These men aren’t complete idiots, but also are not as smart as they believe – especially Trowbridge, a vociferous bully who leans heavily on several sharp-thinking women, including his wife.
In a particularly pointed exchange, as Hal notes all the humiliating reasons why Penn should accept her fate and resign without damaging the president’s agenda, Kate responds with a telling line. “What do you think my husband would do if it was him?” she says to Penn. “Would he quit?”
The answer – that Hal naturally assumes the benefits he brings would outweigh any political cost – neatly outlines the specter of sexism which hangs over The Diplomat. In a world free from that particular “ism,” you get the sense these women would actually occupy the seats of power, instead of acting as backseat drivers for the men who do.
Complicated plots that pay off
Compelling as all of this is, the plot gets even more complicated in the second season, as Kate and her team begin to sort what really happened in both the warship attack and the car bomb. New viewers trying to jump into the series now could be thoroughly confused — best to make sure you know the events of the first season before joining in for the second.
But once acclimated, you can sit back and enjoy a story set in a political universe where expertise is valued, competition plays out like a protracted, 3D chess game and several staffers caught in the middle truly believe in the possibility of using their offices to make life better for everyone.
Who knew a visceral, fast-paced series about a global political conspiracy could also – thanks to the terrible state of our real-world political clashes – feel like something of a fantasy?
Lifestyle
Hollywood Sign Lights 'D' To Celebrates Dodgers' World Series Win
One of the most iconic landmarks in Los Angeles is joining in on the Dodgers’ World Series party — with the Hollywood sign lighting up its “D” after the home team beat the New York Yankees!!
Shortly after Walker Buehler struck out Alex Verdugo to clinch the team’s eighth title in franchise history … the sign that attracts around 50 million visitors a year lit up the night sky with the last letter glowing in Dodger blue!!!
The team was also celebrated with a movie-inspired Nike ad … which rolled the credits on L.A.’s impressive season, which included earning the best record in baseball.
A classic Hollywood story for the @Dodgers. Roll Credits. pic.twitter.com/RJTVpyXg9c
— Nike (@Nike) October 31, 2024
@Nike
It marked one of many celebrations that took place across the city … with some city streets turning into chaos as the night rolled on.
It was a party from coast to coast, as the Dodgers went all out in their celebration at Yankee Stadium — which even saw Clayton Kershaw flex his dadbod!!!
While the party is over for now … it’ll be revving back up shortly — as the title parade goes down Friday morning in DTLA.
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