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</figure>Days after his acquittal and as protests continued, he likened his jail cell to “a one-star hotel” and lashed out at the American legal system.
Ever since Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed two men and injured a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during racial justice demonstrations last year, legions of conservatives and far-right extremists have celebrated an 18-year-old as both a hero and a victim. Soon after receiving a “not guilty” verdict last Friday, Rittenhouse attempted to take part in his own beatification.
Adopting a posture both confrontational to his critics and satiating for his most ardent supporters, Rittenhouse appeared in his first national television interview on Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight after a Wisconsin jury acquitted him on all charges in the August 2020 shooting deaths of Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber and injury of Gaige Grosskreutz. Even as Carlson’s interview aired during primetime, protests over the verdict that began over the weekend continued in major cities.
The interview came as Rittenhouse’s trial and subsequent verdict has stirred up fierce debate on some of the nation’s most contentious issues, including gun rights and the right to protest without threat of violence. However, the court proceedings were often deeply unserious, starting with Judge Bruce Schroeder declaring that the attorneys in the case were not allowed to refer to Rittenhouse’s victims as “victims.” The defendant himself actually helped randomly select the jury, using an unusual, old-fashioned lottery-style draw. And lest we forget, there was a day of dubitable sobbing on the witness stand.
Contrary to that weepy court testimony, Rittenhouse mostly spoke with a calm voice as he swung at Carlson’s softballs. The host did his utmost to center Rittenhouse’s trauma and pain, teeing him up to lash out at President Joe Biden and invoke incorporeal forces like a “mob mentality” that he blamed for his legal plight.
His guest also said that he supported Black Lives Matter and that those committing violence during the demonstrations following Jacob Blake’s shooting by Kenosha police were “opportunist, taking advantage of the BLM movement.”
It was odd to hear Rittenhouse say that, particularly in the middle of a Fox News interview. Stating one’s social-justice bona fides serves, for white liberals, to signify allyship. But for conservatives or people playing to that audience’s sympathies, doing so is often a move to seek cover from charges of racism. The resurgence of extremist, white supremacist violence, and intimidation during the last several years has been, in their view, an act of self-defense.
How, then, in that context, are we to take it when we see Rittenhouse argue to Carlson, “It wasn’t Kyle Rittenhouse on trial in Wisconsin; it was the right of self-defense on trial”? When the same people who support Rittenhouse believe the country needs defending from people who aren’t white and don’t believe in defending Black lives, he can say he supports Black Lives Matter all he wants.
What’s evident, no matter Rittenhouse’s intent, is that he came to the right show on the right network.
True to his program’s formula, Carlson’s hour was devoted to stoking misguided cultural grievances on Rittenhouse’s behalf. Known for its reckless demagoguery and fabulism, Tucker Carlson Tonight regularly focuses on convincing his heavily white audience that they’re right to fear a society supposedly out to get them (and only them). Throughout the broadcast, the host promoted a forthcoming documentary about Rittenhouse’s trial, despite the ongoing controversy about his revisionist January 6 special.
Acquittal, in the Fox News arena, became absolution. “What a sweet boy,” Carlson remarked about the 18-year-old before a commercial break.
It was the seventh anniversary of the day that an actual boy, 12-year-old Tamir Rice, was mistaken for a man by Cleveland police before an officer shot him dead. But on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Rittenhouse was supposedly the victim this November 22, and the host gave him every chance to deny the most injurious claim his detractors have made. No, not that he is a murderer — that he is a bigot.
“I’m not a racist person,” Rittenhouse said, adding that he felt his case was not about race. (The victims in the case were all white, but prosecutors noted earlier this year that Rittenhouse had been photographed with Proud Boys and flashing a hand sign known as a symbol for “white power.” ) Whether this is about race is not Rittenhouse’s decision, though, and whether he is in fact racist seems irrelevant. He likely won’t dissuade his critics in the press and elsewhere who have labeled him a white supremacist, nor the self-identifying neo-Nazis celebrating his acquittal. More interesting, however, was how Rittenhouse described being affected by his time spent within American jurisprudence.
Rittenhouse had already twice stated his support for the Black Lives Matter movement (which strongly rebuked him in a tweet about the interview) when he took note of the inequities and degradation he experienced while in jail.
“I believe there needs to be change,” Rittenhouse said, “I believe there’s a lot of prosecutorial misconduct — not just in my case, but in other cases. And it’s just amazing to see how much a prosecutor can take advantage of somebody. If they did this to me, imagine what they could have done to a person of color who doesn’t maybe have the resources I do or isn’t widely publicized, like my case.”
Rittenhouse spoke of a jail cell he likened to “a one-star hotel,” where he had a mobile phone and tablet, but allegedly no running water. He didn’t shower for nearly a month, he told Carlson. Though he complained of being pepper-sprayed in Kenosha, Rittenhouse spoke glowingly of law enforcement — even thanking the guards at his first jail and praising their professionalism. But he also detailed how he spent more than 80 days in jail due to a problem too many defendants have: incompetent counsel. His allies at the time included QAnon conspiracy theorist Lin Wood; Rittenhouse alleged Wood exploited his case after Wood sought to claw back money raised for Rittenhouse’s bail. But some defendants are far unluckier, and some end up on death row.
Carlson reacted to these details as if he was shocked to hear such things could happen in America, as if a man named Julius Jones professing his innocence in Oklahoma had not narrowly escaped lethal injection the day before Rittenhouse’s verdict. Carlson’s only reference to the man whose shooting prompted the Kenosha protests where Rittenhouse fired on the three men was a baseless claim that “the media lies about the shooting of Jacob Blake.”
Still, almost by accident, Carlson’s program reinforced that there are many things wrong with the American project. They could have done an hour on Monday night reexamining Rice’s death and the family’s campaign to have his killing reconsidered for prosecution by the Department of Justice. Such a show might have made the same or similar points, but it’s foolish to expect Carlson, known for his openly racist appeals to white grievances, to recognize what’s wrong with America without peering through the lens of victimhood.
If only Carlson and Rittenhouse were able to discuss the terrible state of American jurisprudence without putting themselves in the spotlight. For all of Rittenhouse’s recognition of America’s faulty system of criminal punishment, the two still failed to acknowledge that it was the AR-15-style rifle he wielded that instigated the intimidation and harassment. Had they, the ridiculous spectacle on Fox News might have come close to having some worth.
New tests promise lab-quality results in under an hour — all without having to get up off your couch.
As many of us rush around trying to find the perfect Thanksgiving turkey and holiday gifts, there’s another thing experts recommend we stock up on: at-home tests for Covid-19.
“At-home testing will be essential over the next few months,” said Leana Wen, an emergency physician and professor of health policy at George Washington University.
The most common form of at-home testing is the rapid antigen test — think BinaxNOW, QuickVue, or Ellume — where you swab your own nostrils and get results back in around 15 minutes. These can be found at your local pharmacy, though supply has been erratic (more on this below). Antigen tests are typically contrasted with molecular tests — think lab-based PCR — which are better at picking up the virus, though you have to get swabbed by a professional and then wait, sometimes several days, until results come back.
Now, however, companies like Cue Health and Detect are selling a new class of tests: molecular tests that can be performed entirely at home. They promise PCR-quality results in under an hour — all without ever having to get up off your couch.
If you can find and afford at- home tests — whether they’re the relatively cheap antigen tests or their more expensive molecular cousins — experts say it will be particularly useful for you to have them on hand this fall and winter, for a few reasons.
For Americans who got their first two doses this spring, immunity may well be waning. Data so far shows the vaccines’ effectiveness against infection tapers off around the six-month mark. And so far, only 18 percent of Americans have gotten a booster shot (though that may well rise now that all adults are eligible). That, together with the fact that infection rates are climbing in the US, means breakthrough cases are likely to rise here, as they’ve already begun to do in Europe. And with the weather getting colder and the holidays coming, we’re all going to be spending more time indoors with others.
To be clear, if you’re fully vaccinated, the data shows you’re still well protected from severe disease or death from Covid-19, and reported infections in the US are so far still mainly among unvaccinated people. But should you get a breakthrough infection, you could infect others who are unvaccinated, have waning immunity, or are elderly and thus more at risk for severe illness even if they are vaccinated. That’s what testing can prevent.
“We need to shift from thinking about at-home testing as just a diagnostic tool to thinking about it as a preventative tool,” said Wen, who recommends taking a test before an indoor social gathering even if you’re not feeling symptoms.
Neil Sehgal, a health policy professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, told me he’s about to fly from Washington, DC, to California to spend Thanksgiving with relatives there. Everyone in his family plans to take a rapid test before the holiday meal, he said, to help ensure they don’t pose a risk to others.
“The challenge right now is that even if you are vaccinated, your breakthrough infection is a link in a chain that may end up infecting somebody for whom consequences may be more serious than for you,” Sehgal told me. “We all have to make a decision about whether or not we want to participate in those chains of transmission.”
Likewise, Wen said she’s planning to use rapid tests for holiday get-togethers. She also finds them useful for birthday parties and dinner parties; now that it’s getting too cold for outdoor meals, her family and her invited guests test before gathering in her home.
Both experts noted that there’s an additional reason why it’s useful to keep a few tests in your house in the coming months: Antiviral pills for Covid-19, produced by Merck and Pfizer, will probably soon be available in the US under an emergency use authorization. But these treatments are most effective if you take them soon after you’ve become infected. That means it’s in your interest to catch the virus early on — and having a test close to hand can help you do that.
One issue clouds these expert recommendations: The availability of at-home test kits has been spotty at best.
An American, looking at how easy it is to snag a rapid test across the pond in the UK or Germany, could be forgiven for feeling a pang of envy — and a hefty dose of frustration. More than a year and a half into the pandemic, over-the- counter antigen tests are often sold out at stores like CVS or Walgreens.
Despite the Biden administration’s decision to invest $1 billion in rapid tests, the market remains constrained, in part because of regulatory hurdles. Early on, the US decided to categorize these tests as medical devices, which means they needed to pass a stringent FDA approval process, Sehgal explained. As a result, only a few companies’ tests squeezed through to market in 2021.
“We’ve been slow to adopt and approve them in the US because they’re not as sensitive as PCR tests,” Sehgal said. But even though antigen tests are not foolproof at detecting the virus, “they are sensitive enough to give you a pretty realistic sense of whether you pose a risk to the people you’re gathering with” — that is, of whether you’re actively contagious.
“I do think a more public-health-minded mental model would have led to quicker approval of more rapid antigen testing options,” Sehgal continued. In other words, the US should have conceived of the tests as a harm reduction measure: We know they’re not perfect, but if we deploy them at scale, they’ll reduce harm overall.
“The FDA would still have to approve them under an emergency use authorization to make it to market, but the urgency with which the FDA has acted with vaccines could have been similarly applied to testing. If so, I think we’d have seen earlier approvals for more domestic manufacturers of rapid tests,” he added.
Another reason for the low stock is simply that bigger purchasers snapped up a lot of the tests early on. Companies, sports teams, and school systems placed bulk orders in the spring and ate up a lot of the stock before the general public could get to it. “They made contracts because they knew that to resume in-person activity, this would be a good strategy,” Sehgal said.
The upshot is that when regular individuals walk into their drugstores to try and buy a couple boxes, there’s not much left on the shelf.
Under the Trump administration, officials at times appeared to discourage testing, for fear that it would reveal more positive cases. Instead, the US focused on developing vaccines at warp speed, thinking of them as the silver bullet that would destroy the pandemic.
But this fall, the Biden administration decided to make testing a more integral part of its pandemic strategy. White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients said in October that the $1 billion investment “puts us on track to quadruple the amount of at-home, rapid tests available for Americans by December. So that means we’ll have available supply of 200 million rapid, at-home tests per month starting in December.”
Many experts hailed it as a welcome, if overdue, commitment.
“What rapid tests do is they allow us to live more peacefully with this virus — to actually be able to not have it be so disruptive to society,” Michael Mina, an epidemiologist who’s been one of the most vocal proponents of rapid tests, told the Washington Post. These tests can make quarantines unnecessary, allowing us “to keep students in school, to keep businesses running and to stop the need for shutdowns, even amid outbreaks.”
Up till now, at-home testing has been pretty much synonymous with antigen tests, such as BinaxNOW or QuickVue. Overall, these tests’ sensitivity tends to be in the range of 85 percent, meaning they miss about 15 percent of people who are infected. That said, they’re very good at detecting an infection when people have high viral loads, which is when they’re likeliest to infect others.
Molecular tests are considered the gold standard in Covid-19 testing. They take your sample and amplify the genetic material in it many times over, so if there’s even a tiny shred of virus in it, they will almost certainly detect it. Traditionally, the downside has been that you need a professional to swab you and a lab to process your results.
At-home molecular testing is starting to change that.
This month, the health tech company Cue Health began selling directly to consumers a molecular test that can be performed entirely at home. You can buy it online, no prescription needed, and get lab-quality results without leaving home, according to the company. The Cue test shows results in line with lab PCR results 97.8 percent of the time, as verified in an independent study conducted by the Mayo Clinic. And it’s quick, offering results in 20 minutes, similar to the wait time for antigen tests.
There’s a catch, though: It’s not cheap. A three- pack of single-use tests will run you $225, and that’s not counting the reusable reader, which costs $250. At that price point, it’s far from ripe for equitable access. (For comparison, antigen tests are priced from about $10 to $40 per test.)
“We’re not priced like an antigen test, but we don’t perform like an antigen test,” said Clint Sever, Cue’s co-founder and chief product officer, adding that the test is used by the likes of Google, NASA, and the NBA. “It’s a breakthrough technology.”
Detect is another health tech company offering an at-home molecular test (the product will be available soon). This one will also come with a reusable hub and single-use individual tests. With the hub priced at $39 and each test at $49, Detect’s system will be more affordable than Cue’s, though still pricier than an antigen test. The Detect test is 97.3 percent accurate, similar to a PCR lab test, according to Axios. It returns results in one hour.
Both Cue’s and Detect’s tests have earned an emergency use authorization from the FDA, and both companies have their sights set on much more than just Covid-19 testing. With a bit of tweaking, their platforms should be able to test for other health issues, too.
Detect’s plan “is that you’ll be able to get a flu test or a Covid test or whatever you need, at home,” Owen Kaye-Kauderer, the company’s chief business officer, told Axios.
Cue envisions a future where its reader will be able to test you for everything from the flu and strep throat to chlamydia and gonorrhea. “Covid has basically accelerated the transition to virtual care services and connected diagnostics,” Sever told me.
The fundamental innovation here — giving your humble home the diagnostic capabilities of a professional lab — will likely become popular in many areas of health care over the next few years. That helps explain why companies like Cue and Detect are eager to get into the game, even though many experts say that as we approach springtime, Covid-19 will likely be entering the endemic phase: It’ll keep circulating in parts of the population, but its prevalence and impact will come down to relatively manageable levels, so it becomes more like the flu than a world-stopping disease.
“When we get to the point where transmission has slowed and we enter the endemic phase,” Sehgal said, “at-home testing becomes much less important.”
In the meantime, Wen recommends that each family keep a few at-home tests in the house. Don’t fret too much about whether they’re antigen or molecular; get what you can find and afford.
“This is a case of ‘don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,’” she said. “These tests can allow us to go from Covid-19 as a threat that feels almost existential to just another risk among all the risks we take into account every day. They can let us get back the normalcy we’re craving.”
Lady Gaga blows a potential dud of a movie straight into the stratosphere.
I’ve tried for days now to decide exactly when my soul left my body and ascended to paradise during my House of Gucci screening. Looking through my increasingly loopy notes, it appears it was when Jared Leto, playing paunchy middle-aged failson Paolo Gucci, declares to his cousin- in-law Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga — we’ll get to her in a moment), with so very much pathos, that he “was-a in-a bed, with a bowl-a of gelato cioccolata, and-a very dark-a thoughts.” If you read that in the voice of an American pasta sauce ad, you did it right.
What even is this movie? An image tweeted from the set last March — featuring Gaga and co-star Adam Driver in cable-knit sweaters, him decked out in huge glasses and her in a towering furry hat, standing against a snowy backdrop — lit a pandemic-crazed Twitter ablaze. Then the trailer dropped in July, and … well, I mean, just go watch it. It’s exquisite.
The movie the trailer is selling is actually a little more dishy and wild than the real House of Gucci, which would be a pointless and somewhat perfunctory dud if it weren’t for the brilliance, or madness, of the performances. Screenwriters Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna crafted the tale of the murder of Maurizio Gucci (Driver), based on the book by Sara Gay Forden, into a kind of rags-to-riches story crossed with some serious Machiavelli vibes, but the psychological reality never quite lands. Ridley Scott, who seems to have slid joyfully into his “I’m 83, why wouldn’t I make this movie” phase, settled into the director’s chair and proceeded to direct the daylights out of his cast.
That cast: Gaga, Driver, Leto, plus Jeremy Irons and Al Pacino as the Gucci patriarchs and Salma Hayek in a bit part as a psychic. (This doesn’t matter, but I can’t stop thinking about it: Hayek is married to François-Henri Pinault, the chairman and CEO of luxury fashion group Kering, which owns, among other things, Gucci.) Look, when you’re Ridley Scott, you get the cast you want.
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As you may have noticed, none of these people (well, okay, half-credit to iconic Italian Americans Pacino and Gaga) are actually from Italy, despite playing some very famous people who were. The movie is not in Italian; it’s in English, and everyone is doing some degree of an accent. Irons and Driver are fine. Gaga is going for it (though there’s some debate over whether or not she actually sounds Russian). Leto is absurd. Pacino is kind of half-assing the accent, but this does not matter when you are Al Pacino. They drink espresso and dance in clubs and moon around giant estates arguing about who is a disappointment to the family — basic rich people activities.
Actually, Rich People Activities would have been a decent working title for the film, which never really finds a way to make us care about the characters outside of the people playing them. From the first scene, we know that this is a movie about how Maurizio Gucci was murdered, which happened on March 27, 1995, on the steps of his office in Milan. But Gaga plays Patrizia, his wife, and the story is really about her.
And how. Patrizia is a ball of fire from the moment we meet her, swaying through the parking lot of her family business as the men hoot catcalls in her direction. She meets Maurizio at a party, by chance, and charms him enough that he’s willing to give up his place in his family’s lucrative fashion business, to the angst of his actor father Rodolfo Gucci (Irons), to be with her. All of which is fine, for a time, but Patrizia gets tired of being poor for no reason, and works Maurizio’s uncle Aldo (Pacino), who runs the business, to get her beloved husband back in the door. Luckily, Aldo’s son Paolo (Leto), whose wild ideas about fashion are not in keeping with the elder generation’s image of Gucci, is what Rodolfo calls “a triumph of mediocrity,” and Aldo is more than happy to invest his trust in his nephew instead.
House of Gucci spans decades, during which Patrizia and Maurizio go through an awful lot together. Yet somehow, despite running nearly three hours long, the film never really gets a grip on its characters’ motivations or psychology (with the possible exception of sad sack Paolo). They’re characters in a stock play, reenacting a tale that’s already been told. You can imagine a version of this made by Ryan Murphy, which would be both worse and more legible, emotionally, to the audience.
On the other hand, who cares? House of Gucci is probably the funniest comedy and dopiest tragedy of the year. Everyone chomps on the scenery. (Driver is, somehow, the most boring person in the movie.) People deliver frankly preposterous lines; Paolo replies to everything with melodically delivered nonsense, like “does an elephant-a sheeeet in the jungle?” or “I will finally soar, like a pigeon!” Aldo arrives to meet with his brother Rodolfo and finds him on the back terrace, staring into the distance, with the world’s biggest, camel-colored, presumably cashmere scarf flung dramatically around his neck. I couldn’t stop laughing.
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Jared Leto, Florence Andrews, Adam Driver, Lady Gaga, and Al Pacino in House of Gucci.
And at the center of it all is Gaga’s Patrizia, who Maurizio declares is a dead ringer for Elizabeth Taylor. (You can kind of see his point.) She schemes, she cries, she makes decisions Maurizio’s too spineless to make himself. She calls a psychic on TV and becomes her best friend. She strokes Paolo’s ego and stabs him in the back. Gaga climbs inside the skin of — if not the real Patrizia — a fantastical approximation who smokes like a chimney, narrows her eyes till you expect lasers to shoot out, and turns every single scene she appears in into a grand, glorious showcase. Her hand gestures alone are worthy of close reading. She’s Lady Macbeth as diva, darling, and dancing queen.
So if the story never lands — why should I care about the Guccis? why doesn’t Ridley Scott appear to care at all about fashion, even a little? — it basically doesn’t matter because each new scene is a fresh chance to watch some performers cram ham into a camp sandwich and then have another espresso.
It’s become fashionable for critics and the ill-informed alike to declare that they don’t make movies like this anymore. I rarely buy it; usually, if you’re saying it, you simply aren’t looking hard enough.
But in this case, okay, I buy it. It’s hard to imagine anyone other than Ridley Scott managing to get the budget, cast, and runtime to make a three-ring circus like House of Gucci for the big screen, a drama for adults that doesn’t lean on IP with a built-in fan base or effects-laden spectacle to suck audiences in. When he’s gone, hopefully at a time in the very distant future, I am worried this kind of movie will go with him.
For now, though, at least we have House of Gucci, the kind of movie where a woman can tell her husband “it’s time to take out the trash” and mean his family, a movie with multiple candlelit bathtub scenes, a film in which an entire scene is set to the sounds of “I’m a Believer” in Italian, where the imperfect is elevated to perfection. I left my screening elated and wanted to rewatch it immediately. Several times. Long live cinema.
House of Gucci opens in theaters on November 24.
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He shakes his head and thinks “I must have read that wrong.”
He continues on and a few minutes later see another sign, this one with a praying nun on it and the words “Sisters of Mercy House of Prostitution, Next Exit. So Good It’s Miraculous!”
He decides he has to see this so he pulls off, and following more signs soon pulls up in front of a large church. He knocks on the door and is greeted by an elderly nun. Very embarrassed, he mutters, “Um..I saw a sign by the highway … am I in the right place?” The nun smiles and says “Of course! Right this way!”
She leads him inside and down many twisting hallways, up stairs and down until he is thoroughly lost. Eventually they come to a large door and she says, “Give me $200 and go through this door and you will find exactly what you came for.”
He can’t believe this kindly old nun would lie to him, so he hands over the cash and opens the door. The nun pushes him through and the door slams and locks behind him.
He finds himself standing outside at the back of the church in front of another large sign that reads: “Thank you, you have just been fucked by the Sisters of Mercy.”
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Though initially embarrassed and uneasy over sharing a cabin, they went to bed, he in the upper berth and she in the lower.
At 1:00 AM, they were both still wide awake and they both knew it.
He said: “I’m sorry to bother you, but would you be willing to reach into the closet under your bed to get me a second blanket? I’m awfully cold.”
“I have a better idea,” she replied “Just for tonight,…… let’s pretend that we’re married.”
“That’s a great idea!”, he said, now totally aroused.
“Good,” she replied. “Get your own fucking blanket.”
After a moment of silence, he farted and did not care.
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They called the publican over to settle an argument.
“Are there two pints in a quart or four?” asked one.
“There are two pints in a quart” confirmed the publican.
They moved back along the bar and soon the barmaid asked for their order.
“Two pints miss, and they are on the house.”
The barmaid doubted that her boss would be so generous, so one of the guys called out to the publican at the other end of the bar, “You did say two pints, didn’t you?”
“That’s right,” he called back, “two pints.”
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, “We got along really well there for a while!”
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I don’t think I could ever repay you
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