World
Wafa Al-Udaini, Palestinian Journalist, Told Story of Gaza That Was Full of Life
Before the answers to life’s questions fit in our pocket, you used to have to turn a dial. If you were lucky, Phil Donahue would be on, ready to guide you toward enlightenment. In a stroke of deluxe good fortune, Dr. Ruth Westheimer might have stopped by to be the enlightenment. He was the search engine. She was a trusted result.
Donahue hailed from Cleveland. The windshield glasses, increasingly snowy thatch of hair, marble eyes, occasional pair of suspenders and obvious geniality said “card catalog,” “manager of the ’79 Reds,” “Stage Manager in a Chevy Motors production of ‘Our Town.’” Dr. Ruth was Donahue’s antonym, a step stool to his straight ladder. She kept her hair in a butterscotch helmet, fancied a uniform of jacket-blouse-skirt and came to our aid, via Germany, with a voice of crinkled tissue paper. Not even eight years separated them, yet so boyish was he and so seasoned was she that he read as her grandson. (She maybe reached his armpit.) Together and apart, they were public servants, American utilities.
Donahue was a journalist. His forum was the talk show, but some new strain in which the main attraction bypassed celebrities. People — every kind of them — lined up to witness other people being human, to experience Donahue’s radical conduit of edification, identification, curiosity, shock, wonder, outrage, surprise and dispute, all visible in the show’s televisual jackpot: cutaways to us, reacting, taking it all in, nodding, gasping. When a celebrity made it to the “Donahue” stage — Bill Clinton, say, La Toya Jackson, the Judds — they were expected to be human, too, to be accountable for their own humanity. From 1967 to 1996, for more than 6,000 episodes, he permitted us to be accountable to ourselves.
What Donahue knew was that we — women especially — were eager, desperate, to be understood, to learn and learn and learn. We call his job “host” when, really, the way he did it, running that microphone throughout the audience, racing up, down, around, sticking it here then here then over here, was closer to “switchboard operator.” It was “hot dog vendor at Madison Square Garden.” The man got his steps in. He let us do more of the questioning than he did — he would just edit, interpret, clarify. Egalitarianism ruled. Articulation, too. And anybody who needed the mic usually got it.
The show was about both what was on our mind and what had never once crossed it. Atheism. Naziism. Colorism. Childbirth. Prison. Rapists. AIDS. Chippendales, Chernobyl, Cher. Name a fetish, Phil Donahue tried to get to its bottom, sometimes by trying it himself. (Let us never forget the episode when he made his entrance in a long skirt, blouse and pussy bow for one of the show’s many cross-dressing studies.) Now’s the time to add that “Donahue” was a morning talk show. In Philadelphia, he arrived every weekday at 9 a.m., which meant that, in the summers, I could learn about compulsive shopping or shifting gender roles from the same kitchen TV set as my grandmother.
Sex and sexuality were the show’s prime subjects. There was so much that needed confessing, correction, corroboration, an ear lent. For that, Donahue needed an expert. Many times, the expert was Dr. Ruth, a godsend who didn’t land in this country until she was in her late 20s and didn’t land on television until she was in her 50s. Ruth Westheimer arrived to us from Germany, where she started as Karola Ruth Siegel and strapped in as her life corkscrewed, as it mocked fiction. Her family most likely perished in the Auschwitz death camps after she was whisked to the safety of a Swiss children’s home, where she was expected to clean. The twists include sniper training for one of the military outfits that would become the Israel Defense Forces, maiming by cannonball on her 20th birthday, doing research at a Planned Parenthood in Harlem, single motherhood and three husbands. She earned her doctorate from Columbia University, in education, and spent her postdoc researching human sexuality. And because her timing was perfect, she emerged at the dawn of the 1980s, an affable vector of an era’s craze for gnomic sages (Zelda Rubinstein, Linda Hunt, Yoda), masterpiece branding and the nasty.
Hers was the age of Mapplethorpe and Madonna, of Prince, Skinemax and 2 Live Crew. On her radio and television shows, in a raft of books and a Playgirl column and through her promiscuous approach to talk-show appearances, she aimed to purge sex of shame, to promote sexual literacy. Her feline accent and jolly innuendo pitched, among other stuff, the Honda Prelude, Pepsi, Sling TV and Herbal Essences. (“Hey!” she offers to a young elevator passenger. “This is where we get off.”) The instructions for Dr. Ruth’s Game of Good Sex says it can be played by up to four couples; the board is vulval and includes stops at “Yeast Infection,” “Chauvinism” and “Goose Him.”
On “Donahue,” she is direct, explicit, dispelling, humorous, clear, common-sensical, serious, vivid. A professional therapist. It was Donahue who handled the comedy. On one visit in 1987, a caller needs advice about a husband who cheats because he wants to have sex more often than she does. Dr. Ruth tells Donahue that if the caller wants to keep the marriage, and her husband wants to do it all the time, “then what she should do is to masturbate him. And it’s all right for him to masturbate himself also a few times.” The audience is hear-a-pin-drop rapt or maybe just squirmy. So Donahue reaches into his parochial-school-student war chest and pulls out the joke about the teacher who tells third-grade boys, “Don’t play with yourself, or you’ll go blind.” And Donahue raises his hand like a kid at the back of the classroom and asks, “Can I do it till I need glasses?” Westheimer giggles, maybe noticing the large pair on Donahue’s face. This was that day’s cold open.
They were children of salesmen, these two; his father was in the furniture business, hers sold what people in the garment industry call notions. They inherited a salesman’s facility for people and packaging. When a “Donahue” audience member asks Westheimer whether her own husband believes she practices what she preaches, she says this is why she never brings him anywhere. “He would tell you and Phil: ‘Do not listen to her. It’s all talk,’” which cracks the audience up.
But consider what she talked about — and consider how she said it. My favorite Dr. Ruth word was “pleasure.” From a German mouth, the word conveys what it lacks with an American tongue: sensual unfurling. She vowed to speak about sex to mass audiences using the proper terminology. Damn the euphemisms. People waited as long as a year and a half for tickets to “Donahue” so they could damn them, too. But of everything Westheimer pitched, of all the terms she precisely used, pleasure was her most cogent product, a gift she believed we could give to others, a gift she swore we owed ourselves.
I miss the talk show that Donahue reinvented. I miss the way Dr. Ruth talked about sex. It’s fitting somehow that this antidogmatic-yet-priestly Irish Catholic man would, on occasion, join forces with a carnal, lucky-to-be-alive Jew to urge the exploration of our bodies while demonstrating respect, civility, reciprocation. They believed in us, that we were all interesting, that we could be trustworthy panelists in the discourse of being alive. Trauma, triviality, tubal ligation: Let’s talk about it! Fear doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. Or if it did, it was never a deterrent. Boldly they went. — And with her encouragement, boldly we came.
Wesley Morris is a critic at large for The New York Times and a staff writer for the magazine.
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Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has spent nearly three months in hiding as tensions with the U.S. escalate — a disappearance that counterterrorism analysts say mirrors the final years of al Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden.
The comparison comes amid a critical standoff between Washington and Tehran that prompted President Donald Trump to pause a planned strike on May 19. On Wednesday, Trump told reporters he was in “no hurry.”
Khamenei, meanwhile, appeared to share three posts on his official X account on May 18 but remains out of public view.
“For the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic, the United States has done to Tehran what it spent two decades doing to al-Qaeda and ISIS,” counterterrorism expert Dr. Omar Mohammed told Fox News Digital.
THE MISSING MULLAH: IRAN’S ‘SUPREME LEADER’ A NO-SHOW FOR NEGOTIATIONS, THEN HID AS US POUNDED NUKE SITES
Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is shown in a portrait image. (Fox News)
“The U.S. has driven its leader into the same kind of operational invisibility that bin Laden lived in for 10 years in Abbottabad,” he added.
“Both Mojtaba Khamenei and bin Laden inherited their status on the back of an American operation, and both responded the same way: by ceasing to exist publicly,” Mohammed said before adding that bin Laden “stopped releasing dated videos around 2007 and confined himself to audio messages carried by hand.”
Bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in the late 1980s and masterminded the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States.
After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, bin Laden evaded capture for a decade by hiding inside a fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
To avoid Western electronic surveillance, he severed his digital footprint and relied exclusively on a network of physical couriers, said Mohammed, an expert with the Antisemitism Research Initiative at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.
U.S. intelligence eventually tracked one of those couriers to the compound, culminating in the 2011 Navy SEAL raid that killed the al Qaeda leader.
OPERATION EPIC FURY: HOW AMERICA’S AIR POWER IS CRUSHING IRAN’S TERROR REGIME
Portrait of former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden was killed in 2011 in a daring SEAL Team 6 raid in Pakistan. (Photo by Stephane Ruet/Sygma via Getty Images)
“Bin Laden survived with no cables out of the Abbottabad compound. Communications were carried by hand by two trusted couriers, the Kuwaiti brothers,” Mohammed said.
“Bin Laden stayed hidden for the rest of his life because the moment he surfaced was the moment he died. Mojtaba’s incentives point the same way. Mojtaba Khamenei won’t emerge,” he said.
“The Abbottabad lesson, which Tehran will have studied closely, is that the safest hiding place is not a cave in Tora Bora but a walled compound in a garrison town,” Mohammed added, recalling how U.S. forces targeted bin Laden in the cave complex before he escaped.
Bin Laden also lived roughly a mile from Pakistan’s top military academy, hiding in plain sight behind high concrete walls and barbed wire, Mohammed noted.
“The logical Iranian equivalents are hardened sites under or alongside IRGC facilities,” Mohammed added, referring to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and possible locations where Khamenei could be.
As previously reported by Fox News Digital, one of Khamenei’s few recent communications was an X post declaring a “holy war,” framing the geopolitical clash as a mandatory religious obligation.
INSIDE IRAN’S RULING IDEOLOGY: HOW A ‘HOLY MISSION’ AND MESSIANIC DOCTRINE FUEL REGIME EXTREMISM
President Donald Trump said, “I got him before he got me” after Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several top leaders were killed in an Israeli strike in Tehran during the U.S.-Israeli military offensive called Operation Epic Fury. (Majid Saeedi/Getty Images; Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“This is a religious leader calling for sacred war against America and the Jews from an undisclosed location because his enemies have publicly vowed to kill him on sight,” Mohammed said, describing the narrative as “the bin Laden template, almost line for line.”
Mohammed also suggested Khamenei’s retreat into the shadows marks a watershed moment for Washington and the future of the Iranian regime.
His predecessor and father, Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed Feb. 28 in a targeted U.S.-Israeli airstrike in Tehran during Operation Epic Fury.
“This regime that for 47 years projected its power through a single visible Supreme Leader at the Friday prayer pulpit can no longer produce that figure on demand,” he said, calling it a “strategic milestone.”
“Predecessors killed by U.S. strikes and successors who cannot show their faces. Real power exercised by a security apparatus rather than by the nominal figurehead.”
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“Now one side is announcing operations on three continents through its president; the other is governed on paper by a man whose own population is uncertain where he is or what state he is in,” Mohammed said.
“The contrast is also about the optics of leadership during this war,” he added.
France’s Minister for Foreign Trade, Nicolas Forissier, says the European Union must stop being “naive” and shift its mindset when addressing trade imbalances, saying that the approach should encompass all countries weaponising foreign trade.
World
Inside ‘Sh(AI)ved,’ the AI-Created Vintage Adult Film Collection Unveiled at Cannes: ‘Splendid, Volcanic Orgasms’
Fifty years ago, a young woman named Hannah pleasured herself in a erotic magazine photo spread. This week, thanks to generative AI, she did it again – this time with a voiceover.
The first volume of “Sh(AI)ved” — a collection of AI-generated short films drawn from erotic magazine photo spreads published 50 years ago — made its debut on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival, and is now streaming on Cultpix.
Thomas Meier, of the Norwegian firm Multiformat, deployed the latest generative AI tools to convert still images from 1976 magazine photo spreads into fully animated video, complete with color, synchronized sound, dialogue and voiceover.
Variety took a deep dive into the films to see what the fuss is all about.
The first short in the collection, the titular “Sh(AI)ved,” begins with the usual montage of naked women pleasuring themselves that mid-70s adult films normally commenced with. It’s all set to a soundtrack known variously as “wah-wah music” or “porn funk” – the latter referring to the strutting, bass-heavy funk grooves that became synonymous with the era. The genre is also sometimes called “sexploitation music” or, more colloquially, “bow-chicka-wow-wow,” heavy on electric guitar riffs.
The film itself begins with a tight close-up of the shaved pudenda of a young woman named Hannah (as a voiceover informs us), who is engaged in self stimulation. At the same time, the VO reminisces about a “tender time” with a young female friend, but how “something was missing.” The VO continues in a philosophical manner as the self stimulation advances. Hannah then makes a phone call to a male friend and in his absence, makes do with a vibro-massager.
This is followed by what the VO describes as “a randy orgy with best friends,” where three women have arrived with clean-shaven pudenda (you can see there’s a theme emerging here). “Gone were the annoying and wearisome little hairs that used to get in their way, often completely destroying the frail, sensuous atmosphere,” we are informed. The women then proceed to enjoy acrobatic sex in a number of positions, permutations and combinations, sometimes involving dildos and strap-ons, with plenty of loud moaning and the aforementioned bow-chicka-wow-wow music. All of these result in “splendid, volcanic orgasms” for all.
The final short in the first volume is titled “After-Movie Party,” where two male-female couples (who we are told swap partners) get amorous after a late-night movie and begin having sex. One of the men isn’t enjoying himself while performing cunnilingus on his partner, as her pubic hair gets in the way. The men proceed to shave the women’s pudenda — you may have noticed this theme by now — and much energetic sex is had by all.
For aficionados of 1970s adult films, “Sh(AI)ved” — and others that will surely follow it its wake — will be of much interest. For those who are not, and might only be interested in the march of AI, the films should still be fascinating. In terms of how it looks, the decor is authentic 1970s and the humans are amazingly photo-realistic, especially in their faces and bodies. Its only when it comes to extreme close ups of genitals do the plasticky nature of AI, aspiring to be photo-realistic, become evident.
“Sh(AI)ved” is, depending on your perspective, a novelty, a provocation, or a genuine milestone in the long, complicated history of moving images. Probably all three. The technology is not yet seamless – AI, it turns out, handles faces and mid-shots with remarkable aplomb but loses its nerve in extreme close-up, where flesh turns to plastic and the illusion slips. But as a proof of concept for what generative AI can do with archival still photography, and as a time capsule that captures both the aesthetic and the philosophical innocence of 1970s erotica, it is hard to look away. Future volumes will presumably iron out the technical wrinkles. For now, the most arresting thing about “Sh(AI)ved” may be how quaint it all feels – which, one suspects, is precisely the point.
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