The first thing you notice about Gutfeld!, Greg Gutfeld's ratings-gobbling, Colbertbattling, have-some-of-that Don-Lemon phenomenon of a late-night political-satirical talk show on Fox News, is the silences. The pockets of dead air. Gutfeld cracks a joke, one of his reliably and knowingly terrible jokes, and you hear not well-fed mirth but crickets, tumbleweeds, a nightclub vacuum: maybe a few reluctant yuks from his guests, maybe a whoop or a groan from some a » hollow depth beyond the set. It's as if he's bombing on his own show.
You notice this, of course, because like me you're a simpering liberal reared on toothless consensus comedy. We're used to The Daily Show With Trevor Noah and Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, where a oneliner about Ted Cruz's facial hair will be bathed in eager applause. Clapping as ideology, tier upon tier of it, an orgy of herd affirmation.
Not for Gutfeld. His gags die of exposure, they perish proudly in a frisson of awfulness, while Gutfeld, very charming, gleams and grins and does heavy work with his eyebrows.
Because it is currently one of the most popular late-night shows on television—it regularly beats Jimmy Kimmel Live and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in the ratings and has even, on occasion, supplanted The Late Show with Stephen Colbert—I watched Gutfeld! for a week, growing more and more fascinated as the days went by. Here's Gutfeld on Monday. “Hope you had a great weekend," he says. “I know I did.” A jovial leer into the camera. “Although the last thing I remember was Larry Kudlow putting on the leather mask ...” Cue a split screen with Kudlow, Donald Trump's former economic adviser and one of Monday's guests, cackling and rocking creakily in his chair. What?! What is happening?
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Catching the Carjackers - On the road with an elite police unit as it combats a crime wave
On August 7, 2022, Shantise Summers arrived home from a night out with friends around 2:40 a.m. As she walked from her car toward her apartment in Oxon Hill, a Maryland neighborhood just southeast of Washington, D.C., she heard footsteps behind her. She turned and saw two men in ski masks. One put a gun to her face; she could feel the metal pressing against her chin. He demanded her phone, wallet, keys, and Apple Watch. She quickly handed them over, and they drove off in her 2019 Honda Accord.
The Most Remote Place in the World - Point Nemo is Earth's official "middle of nowhere." A lot seems to be going on there.
Itâs called the âlongest-swim problemâ: If you had to drop someone at the place in the ocean farthest from any speck of landâthe remotest spot on Earthâwhere would that place be? The answer, proposed only a few decades ago, is a location in the South Pacific with the coordinates 48 52.5291ဩS 123 23.5116ဩW: the âoceanic point of inaccessibility,â to use the formal name. It doesnât get many visitors. But one morning last year, I met several people who had just come from there.
You Are Going to Die - Oliver Burkeman has become an unlikely self-help guru by reminding everyone of their mortality.
"The average human lifespan," Oliver Burkeman begins his 2021 megabest seller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, "is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short." In that relatively brief period, he does not want you to maximize your output at work or optimize your leisure activities for supreme enjoyment. He does not want you to wake up at 5 a.m. or block out your schedule in a strictly labeled timeline.
Washington's Nightmare - Donald Trump is the tyrant the first president feared.
Last November, during a symposium at Mount Vernon on democracy, John Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general who served as Donald Trump's second chief of staff, spoke about George Washington's historic accomplishmentsâ his leadership and victory in the Revolutionary War, his vision of what an American president should be. And then Kelly offered a simple, three-word summary of Washington's most important contribution to the nation he liberated.
The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books - To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University's required greatbooks course, since 1988. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading, College kids have never read everything they're assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames's students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem.
What Zoya Sees
Long a fearless critic of Israeli society, since October 7 Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi has made wrenching portraits of her nation's sufferingand become a target of protest.
Malcolm Gladwell, Meet Mark Zuckerberg
The writerâ insistence on ignoring the web is an even bigger blind spot today than it was when The Tipping Point came out.
Alan Hollinghurst's Lost England
In his new novel, the present isnt much better than the pastâand its a lot less sexy.
Scent of a Man
In a new memoir, Al Pacino promises to reveal the person behind the actor. But is he holding something back?
THE RIGHT-WING PLAN TO MAKE EVERYONE AN INFORMANT
In Texas and elsewhere, new laws and policies have encouraged neighbors to report neighbors to the government.
