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.
When Li Jiao’e moved to Hengdian, a major filming hub in eastern China, in 2024, he had only bit parts in microdramas. Still, he was thrilled. After years of bouncing between unrelated jobs, he was finally chasing his dream of being an actor.
As time passed, he started getting a few speaking lines, often in comedic roles. Sometimes, people recognized him in public.
But in recent months, roles evaporated, he said. Group chats where people shared opportunities went silent.
“There’s nothing,” he said. “It’s like it was raining, and then suddenly the rain stopped.”
He said the drop was partly because a major streaming platform raised its standards for what it was buying. was trying to weed out lower-quality shows. But he thought the hype around A.I. was another reason.
Fears of actors being replaced by A.I. gathered steam recently after a major streaming site announced that it had created a database of more than 100 actors whose likenesses could be available for future A.I. productions. While the platform described the move as a way to ease actors’ workloads, many commenters online said it would only accelerate job losses.
A different microdrama platform also announced that it had removed a popular show after two social media users discovered that their likenesses had been used, without their permission, to create villains in the show. The platform, which is owned by ByteDance, said it would strengthen its review mechanisms to prevent similar cases in the future.
Chinese regulators last month introduced rules requiring people’s consent before they can be used as digital avatars.
Mr. Li said he did not oppose the use of A.I. in entertainment but thought the industry was applying it in the wrong way.
“They’re still just imitating humans or trying to make things more humanlike,” he said. “They should be trying to unleash more imagination, taking a more unconventional route.”
He continued: “After all, our fundamental value as humans is in our ability to imagine.”
The Director
Wang Yushun, 37
World
May Day protests across Europe and Asia turn into anti-American, anti-Israel political battlegrounds
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May Day demonstrations across Europe and Asia on Friday revealed how International Workers’ Day is increasingly transforming from a traditional labor rights event into a broader political battleground, where demands over wages, inflation and worker protections are now frequently intertwined with anti-war activism, anti-Israel rhetoric and wider ideological struggles over global power.
From Paris to Istanbul, Madrid, Manila and Seoul, protests often expanded far beyond workplace grievances, with demonstrators linking rising living costs and social inequality to war in the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy and broader anti-capitalist narratives.
Nile Gardiner, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital that the demonstrations reflected what he described as a ‘troubling moral inversion’.
600 GROUPS WITH $2B IN REVENUE MOBILIZE 3,000 MAY DAY PROTESTS IN ‘RED-BLUE’ ALLIANCE, PROBE FINDS
Supporters of the Iraqi Communist Party hold a symbolic hammer and sickle as they take part in the May Day celebration in Baghdad, Iraq, Friday, May 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)
“These May Day protesters should be demonstrating against the brutal tyranny in Tehran instead of protesting against U.S. military action, and this is an illustration of the complete moral vacuum that exists in Europe today,” Gardiner said.
In Paris, May Day protests reportedly escalated into clashes as police used tear gas grenades and forceful arrests after projectiles were thrown during demonstrations, according to publicly circulated social media footage.
Earlier, French labor leaders had focused on inflation, wages and social protections, but parts of the protests also featured anti-war slogans, Palestinian symbolism and criticism of military spending.
MAY DAY PROTESTS TO TAKE PLACE FRIDAY AS AGITATORS ACROSS THE US PUSH ‘WORKERS OVER BILLIONAIRES’ MOTTO
Protesters march during the May Day demonstration in Rennes, western France, Friday, May 1, 2026. (AP)
In Madrid, thousands marched under banners reading “Capitalism should pay the cost of their war,” while demonstrators protested stagnant wages, housing shortages and militarism. Placards targeting President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu highlighted how international conflict featured prominently alongside domestic labor concerns.
Germany also saw unrest in Munich, where publicly circulated reporter footage showed riot police using batons to disperse radical leftist protesters after pyrotechnics were repeatedly ignited during a revolutionary May Day demonstration.
Emma Schubart, Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based think tank, warned that May Day demonstrations increasingly serve as platforms for ideological movements extending beyond labor activism.
“The May Day demonstrations across Europe increasingly feature Islamist elements. Militant anti-war, anti-capitalist rhetoric is now routinely accompanied by Palestinian flags and explicit anti-Israel slogans,” Schubart said, adding that far-left activism and Islamist-linked networks are increasingly converging under broader anti-Western narratives.
In Istanbul, police blocked leftist groups from marching to the banned Taksim Square, the historic center of Turkey’s labor movement, where demonstrations have long carried symbolic political weight. Protesters attempted to break through barricades and clashed with police as authorities detained some of the protesters.
MORE KEY US ALLIES BLOCK MILITARY FLIGHTS AS IRAN WAR RIFT WIDENS WITH TRUMP
Protester take part in a rally to mark May Day in Athens, on Friday, May 1, 2026 (Petros Giannakouris/AP Photo)
Outside Europe, similar themes emerged across Asia.
In Manila, workers clashed with police near the U.S. Embassy while protesting higher fuel and commodity prices, demanding wage increases and calling for an end to war in the Middle East.
A left-wing labor group paraded a giant effigy depicting Trump, Netanyahu and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. as a three-headed monster, symbolically tying domestic hardship to both local and international political leadership.
In South Korea, thousands gathered near Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Square for major labor rallies centered on collective bargaining and worker rights, but speeches also incorporated broader geopolitical messaging.
Korea Confederation of Trade Unions Chairman Yang Kyung-soo called on demonstrators to “unite with the Iranian and Palestinian workers and people suffering from American imperialist aggression,” explicitly connecting labor solidarity to anti-American and Middle East political narratives.
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People march with Chilean flags during a May Day event in Chile in 2026. (Juan Gonzalez/Reuters)
While local priorities varied, from wages in France to labor rights in Seoul, May Day 2026 demonstrated a growing global pattern: labor demonstrations are increasingly becoming arenas for broader ideological and geopolitical confrontation.
“The United States is fighting to defend the free world against tyranny, and yet across Europe and beyond we are seeing protesters direct their outrage at America and its allies instead of the brutal regimes driving so much of this global instability,” Gardiner said. “That should deeply concern anyone who cares about the future of Western civilization.”
Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
The US president says he will ‘soon be reviewing the plan Iran has just sent to us’, but doesn’t think he can make a deal.
Published On 3 May 2026
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