May

22

2026

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): When I was in my mid-20s, I listened to Democracy Now! as a primary news source every day. I was working as a personal assistant at the time, and could listen to podcasts during my routine cleaning and organizing. I hadn’t grown up listening to the news on TV or radio, and it was through Democracy Now! that I developed the habit.

I suspect that many leftists have their own personal relationship to Democracy Now! and its inimitable host Amy Goodman, who rapidly reads telecaster prompts for the first 15 minutes and stewards conversations with interview guests for the remaining 45. Goodman’s voice—metaphorically and physically—has been a staple of the progressive and radical reporting of the last three decades.

The new documentary Steal This Story, Please! follows the span of Goodman’s career and, by extension, the trajectory of Democracy Now!. Alongside current-day interviews with Goodman and other members of her team, past and present, there is a ton of footage from her work over the decades. It’s incredible to see her as a 20-something, as determined and persistent as ever. The documentary traces the major milestones of her career as a journalist. In 1991, she and a colleague were brutally assaulted covering a massacre of pro-independence demonstrators in East Timor; their testimony was instrumental in bringing international attention and pressure against Indonesia’s occupation of the now-independent country. In 1997, in its first year, Democracy Now! aired commentary from Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther Party member, calling in from death row—and many affiliates threatened to pull the show. In 2001, the Democracy Now! staff hunkered down in their lower Manhattan recording studio for several weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center, knowing that if they evacuated, they wouldn’t be allowed reentry until rubble was cleared. In footage I recognized, in 2016, Democracy Now! brought attention to the activists in Standing Rock, North Dakota who were fighting against the construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline through Indigenous land.

There is levity in the documentary, amidst the consistently depressing and devastating stories. We meet Goodman’s small dog Zazu, named after the anti-Nazi group in France (“I didn’t even know about the character in The Lion King until people started asking me if that was the reason for the name”). Goodman recounts a call with Bill Clinton during his 2000 get-out-the-vote campaign for Al Gore for president and Hillary Clinton for senate, in which she kept the president on the air for 30 minutes with her hardball questions; when White House staffers threaten to ban her, she shrugs and says, “He called me!”

One of the highlights of the documentary was seeing Goodman’s impact on other journalists who went on to create their own media platforms. Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of The Intercept in 2014 and Drop Site News in 2024, got his start at Democracy Now! He recounts the early days—the office stacked with newspapers and documents, Goodman meeting deadlines by editing reels of interview clips mid-air, and tenacious investigative reporting trips that no other news program would have pursued.

At a time when national media is increasingly corporatized and aligned with business interests, independent news sources remain critically important for the health of the nation (in fact, last fall, Jewish Currents contributing editor David Klion went on Goodman’s show to discuss the takeover of CBS News by David Ellison and Bari Weiss). Steal This Story, Please! will deepen anyone’s appreciation for Democracy Now!, and it’s a roadmap for how to build and sustain better journalism.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Miserabilisme doesn’t get much more miserable than in Brazilian director Marianna Brennand’s Manas. Set among the wretchedly poor population that lives along the Amazon River, the film is not a call to action to save the forests from the predations of white Brazilians. Executive produced by, among others, Oscar winner Walter Salles and the Belgian Dardenne brothers, it eschews the warmth and humanism of the films of Salles. In all regards it bears the earmarks of the Dardennes, whose films almost invariably feature the lowest strata of society struggling to survive financially and morally. The social problem Manas deals with is incest, which seems to be rampant in this part of the world. The filmmaker João Moreira Salles—co-founder, with his brother Walter, of the production company Videofilmes—told me that “It’s very hard to do what Marianna achieved: a film about sexual abuse in which you don’t see anything but know exactly what’s happening. She was able to turn something ethically unfilmable into the core of her film. It’s a woman’s movie, a woman’s sensibility, a woman’s gaze into something we men are still unable to deal with visually.”

Thirteen-year-old Tielle is the heart and soul of the film. She lives with her parents, two brothers, and a sister. She misses her older sister Claudia, who has left their miserable riverside hut and the grinding poverty for some city somewhere. The family, despite its difficult situation, seems to be a happy one. Tielle has an artistic bent, attends school, and goes to her evangelical church where she performs in a youth dance company. The hammock on which she sleeps is broken, so she must share a bed with her father, replacing her pregnant mother on the mattress. The suspicions raised by this are confirmed on a hunting trip she takes with her father.

Manas from that point on is a pointed exposé of incest, a problem so widespread that it is spoken about directly and indirectly everywhere in the village, even in church. It’s simply something that is, something the victims are told to accept. The problem is eternal and omnipresent, passing from mother to daughter, from sister to sister. Beyond that, the desperate poverty makes the possibility of sex for pay with passing bargemen a constant opportunity, even for girls like Tielle who are little more than children.

The horrors of this life are made all the more vivid by Brennand’s choice to shoot the film entirely with a handheld camera, which lends it all a documentary feel; in fact, the film was originally planned to be a documentary. So awful is the world in which Tielle and her peers move that an authority figure like the police social worker is presented as a caring, wise woman who truly wants to help Tielle escape her vanished sister’s fate. But in fact there is no hope, no escape save one, and Tielle takes it when she suspects that her father has designs on her little sister.

Manas is a chilling portrait of an isolated society that offers no opportunities besides ever deeper degradation. The cost of Tielle’s ultimate escape is unimaginable.

A. Gopalan (senior editor): The Devil Wears Prada has been my guilty pleasure since college. In low moments, when exhausted from the drudgery of work, or just on bad hair days, I could turn the movie on and be assured of a couple of hours of garden-variety escapism—makeovers! parties! Paris!—that nevertheless came with a sharp commentary on how work won’t love you back. Did I have to sit through triggering comments on weight and body size, the ceaseless objectification of women, and badly aging jokes? Yes, yes I did. But these off-color bits seemed part of the movie’s skewering of the fashion industry, so I was okay to put up with them, content in the knowledge that even if the movie wasn’t great, it was still great fun.

The Devil Wears Prada 2, out this month after a 20-year interval, takes an opposite approach. It is certainly fan service (it offers an almost frame-by-frame, outfit-by-outfit homage to the original), but it also takes itself seriously. No longer are the filmmakers content to expose the tyranny of one fashion industry “devil” and her minions; they are going after the whole structure—sweatshop-contracting firms, clicks-obsessed conglomerate owners, McKinsey consultants, AI-pilled billionaires, and various other magazine-destroyers. I was happy, of course, to watch the red sun rising over the media industry, and watching Anne Hathaway cry her Oscar-winning tears about private equity stripping everything for parts was more cathartic than I would have expected.

But still, there is something stilted about this sequel. Maybe it is the much looser writing and the strangely jarring cuts—a few more rounds of editing would have helped—or maybe it’s just that the movie is trying so hard to Say Something Big. The late-capitalist disasters facing Andy Sachs (Hathaway) and her colleagues at Runway are realistic, and their efforts to try and save their jobs equally so, but their emotional journeys are not. Some of this is because the characters’ rough edges have all been rounded out: Andy is no longer desperately needy, Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt) isn’t an anorexic mean girl, and worst of all, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) isn’t diabolical. You’re a beast who is chained, one odious Harvard MBA tells Miranda at one point. You need to be unleashed. I was sad to agree with him. I wanted a Miranda who ranted and raved as she lost her empire. I wanted her lashing out at everyone around her, instead of being policed out of her rude zingers by a head-shaking PA, or having to—gasp—quietly put her own coat away because HR said so. I wanted her, in short, to feel as unhinged and almost dangerous as she did the first time around, so that by the time the movie lets us get closer to that enigmatic, damaged character, it feels meaningful—armor cracking open, only to reveal more complex rot within.

Perhaps it is wrong to expect a sequel to employ the same formula that its predecessor used to such great effect. Perhaps it’s good that mainstream movies are getting better, the characters less offensive, the themes more serious. But I had more fun when our screen devils were more-or-less irredeemable, the bad workplaces unendurable, and the conclusions something other than what Miranda and Andy agree on at the end: God, I love working, don’t you?