Courtesy of TIFF

At a screening for Joker, Phillips claimed reports of a sequel caught him off guard.

Joker director Todd Phillips has denied rumors of a sequel, stating that an earlier report by the Hollywood Reporter that the follow-up was confirmed “came out of nowhere.”

As reported by The Playlist, Phillips made the comments at a WarnerMedia awards screening of Joker in New York Wednesday night. He claimed that, contrary to THR’s reporting just earlier that day, no meetings to discuss the sequel with Warner Bros executives had taken place, and that neither he, nor screenplay writer Scott Silver, nor star Joaquin Phoenix had deals in place to create a second film.

“I thought it was anticipatory at best,” Phillips reportedly stated in reaction to THR’s report, which was later refuted by Deadline.

Notably, however, Phillips didn’t rule out the possibility of another Joker movie down the line. “Obviously, sequels have been discussed when a movie that cost $60 million made $1 billion, but we have not had any serious conversations about it,” he said.

Phillips didn’t address THR’s further reporting that he was seeking to oversee an entire portfolio of DC character origin stories. Instead, he seemed clearly focused on the still-warm media frenzy surrounding Joker.

“We were not really prepared for the level of discourse,” he said.

“Joaquin and I went to theaters around New York the night it opened, and there were six cop cars parked outside of every theater. There were armed police in the theaters. We were like, ‘This is what we’re up against? For real?’ But this is something that was created, not to sound like a wacko, but created by the media.”

Phillips compared the journalistic worry surrounding the film to the 1989 premiere of Spike Lee’s now-venerated film Do the Right Thing, which provoked similar alarmist media coverage that the movie might stoke violence.

But Phillips also hand-waved attempts to definitively state the film’s politics, claiming that both right-wing fans and left-wing fans “see it as an indictment of the other side, which speaks to our times more than anything.”

Phillips also commented on the recent furor from comics fans surrounding director Martin Scorsese, who said that he almost produced Joker, and whose films Taxi Driver and Kings of Comedy are notable influences on the movie. Scorsese recently called Marvel movies non-cinematic, a statement he later attempted to clarify. Phillips didn’t exactly disagree with Scorsese, but said, “my only issue … is that he’s lumping a lot of movies into one thing, and I think that’s a tough thing to do.”

Clearly, Phillips wanted to downplay the rumors of a Joker sequel and move on. But with awards buzz high for Joker, and the movie recently topping $1 billion worldwide, if a “serious conversation” hasn’t happened yet, it’s only a matter of time.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook talks to President Donald Trump as the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, looks on, at a meeting in the White House in 2017. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Trump keeps saying Apple just opened a plant in Texas. The problem: The facility in question has been around since 2013.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg raised eyebrows this week after a new report that he had a private dinner with President Donald Trump in October, the second closed-door meeting between the pair in a month. But Zuckerberg is hardly the only tech executive trying to curry favor with the president: Apple’s Tim Cook is doing something similar, and unlike the Facebook executive, he’s doing it out in the open.

Remember Tim Apple — the alter ego Trump created for the Apple CEO earlier this year? Well, he’s struck again. And he’s letting the president blatantly lie about the goings-on at his company in order to use Apple as a marketing tool for his presidency.

On Wednesday, Cook accompanied Trump, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, and the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, on a tour of a manufacturing plant in Austin, Texas. Both at the plant and after, the president suggested that the plant had just opened and that it was the result of his presidency. No one at Apple corrected him, even though it’s not at all the case: The plant, which is run by a company called Flex, has been making Mac Pro computers there since 2013.

“For me, this is a very special day,” Trump said on the factory tour, apparently indicating the plant had just opened. Cook spoke after him and didn’t clarify what was going on, instead thanking the Trump administration, particularly those in attendance. “I’m grateful for their support and pulling today off and getting us to — this far. It would not be possible without them,” he said.

You could argue that Cook wasn’t quite sure that the president was saying the plant had just opened. Also on Wednesday, Apple announced the start of construction on a new office campus in Austin, so maybe Trump was referring to that. (Also, Apple building a new campus in Texas is good!)

But later in the day, it became abundantly clear that Trump was, in fact, making up a plant opening — and Apple still isn’t saying a word about it. On Wednesday evening, Trump tweeted out a campaign video of himself with Cook at the plant and wrote that he had “opened a major Apple Manufacturing plant in Texas” that day. But it’s just not true.

It’s not new for Trump to lie; he does it a lot. But for one of the most valuable companies in the world to allow itself to be used as part of a false marketing campaign from the president of the United States is, to put it lightly, not great.

Apple did not return multiple requests for comment on the matter and Cook hasn’t commented on it publicly. He could do so easily, even from his Twitter account, which he used to tout the plant’s launch when it first started shipping back in 2013.

Tariffs are why Tim Cook is letting this slide from Trump

Cook isn’t letting Trump make things up about Apple because he’s polite — it’s because, business-wise, it’s advantageous for him to do it, particularly in the context of the trade war with China.

Trump has consistently pushed Apple to manufacture more of its products in the US, even though some of his policies have made it harder for them to do. As Jack Nicas at the New York Times lays out, Apple and the White House have been going back and forth for months over where the company’s new Mac Pro will be made. Apple says it needs waivers on the tariffs to make it in Texas, and Trump initially said no but eventually gave in. And so, the computers are shipping from the US, complete with an “Assembled in USA” tag.

Cook knows that’s what matters to Trump — and was sure to emphasize it on the manufacturing tour on Wednesday.

“We cannot be more proud of the product,” he said. “It’s an example of American design, American manufacturing, and American ingenuity.”

Tim Cook sometimes criticizes the White House. Other times, he looks like its chief marketing officer.

Cook and Trump have at times had an adversarial relationship, but as time has gone on, they’ve leaned into the mutually beneficial parts of their dynamic instead.

On the 2016 campaign trail, Trump called for a boycott of Apple, and he has consistently pressured it to make more of its products in the United States. After Trump was elected, Cook sent a memo to Apple employees that didn’t directly mention the president but took a clear stance against his divisiveness. Cook has criticized Trump’s immigration policies and been vocal on family separation. Apple also warned early on that Trump’s tariffs might force it to raise prices.

But whatever their differences, they haven’t kept Cook from Trump’s orbit. He’s met with the president in the White House and done public events with Ivanka Trump and the president. He sits on a workforce policy advisory board to the president.

In one meeting at the White House earlier this year, the president mistakenly referred to Cook as “Tim Apple.” It was an admittedly funny moment, and afterward, Cook played along, changing his Twitter name to Tim and the Apple logo. (He’s since changed it back.) Trump, on the other hand, lied and insisted he hadn’t made the mistake.

Cook appears to have decided that while he might not agree with the more unsavory parts of Trump’s presidency, there’s a lot the company he runs has to gain from it.

The tax cut bill Trump signed in 2017 has been a huge windfall for Apple. It allowed the company to bring back billions of dollars in cash it had stashed abroad, save billions of dollars in taxes, and return billions of dollars in savings to its shareholders via stock buybacks. Apple has delivered public thank-yous to Trump with splashy announcements about investments in the US, which Trump name-checked during his 2018 State of the Union address. Call it some mutual free advertising.

So sure, it’s easy to be mad at Zuckerberg for having dinner with Trump (which is honestly not that big of a deal, especially in comparison to letting Trump lie in campaign ads, or, you know, having built a platform that’s being used to do enormous damage to democracy). But we shouldn’t just let Cook slide. He is at the helm of an iconic American brand in Apple, and he’s lending it to Trump, who’s using it to make false claims to boost his presidency.

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Fiona Hill, the National Security Council’s former senior director for Europe and Russia, and David Holmes, an official from the American embassy in Ukraine, are sworn in before testifying before the House Intelligence Committee on November 21, 2019. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Gordon Sondland and Kurt Volker were not telling the whole truth.

Two witnesses in Thursday’s impeachment hearing said President Donald Trump’s allies clearly saw investigating Ukrainian gas company Burisma as a way to investigate Joe Biden’s family — providing more evidence the administration’s Ukraine policy was built around harming a potential 2020 political opponent.

Fiona Hill, formerly the senior director on the National Security Council responsible for coordinating US policy on Europe, and David Holmes, a counselor for political affairs at the US embassy in Kyiv, both told lawmakers the administration’s pressure campaign to get Ukraine to probe Burisma was really all about Joe and Hunter Biden.

Toward the end of the Democrats’ questioning of the witnesses, the Democrats’ counsel Daniel Goldman asked, “Was it apparent to you that when President Trump, Rudy Giuliani, or anyone else was pushing for an investigation into Burisma, that the reason why they wanted that investigation” was to look into the Bidens?

“It was very apparent to me that that was what Rudy Giuliani wanted, yes,” Hill responded. Holmes agreed. And then when counsel asked, “Do you think that anyone involved in Ukraine matters in the spring and summer would understand that as well?” Holmes also said “yes.”

This is damaging for two previous witnesses in the impeachment hearings: former special envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker, and US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. Both those officials were central to the scheme to pressure Ukraine into opening investigations in the Bidens and Democrats in exchange for nearly $400 million in military support and a White House meeting. If anyone would know the true meaning behind “Burisma,” it would be them.

But both testified this week — under oath — that they didn’t make the Burisma-Biden connection. “I was not made aware of any reference to Vice President Biden or his son by President Trump” until the summary of a July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was released on September 25, Volker said on Tuesday. “Apparently, a lot of people did not make the connection,” Sondland told Congress the next day. “I didn’t.”

Those assertions were always hard to believe, even for some Fox News personalities. “They both knew that the president and Giuliani were demanding this investigation of Burisma, that they never associated it with the Bidens,” Chris Wallace said on Wednesday. “If they didn’t, they seem to have been the only people in the government who didn’t.”

Hill and Holmes just confirmed that. While not involved in the pressure scheme, both officials worked every day on Ukraine policy and were aware of what Trump and his allies were up to. Hill even mentioned that Giuliani “repeatedly” made the connection himself in public.

Especially after Thursday’s testimony, it’s not really credible that Volker and Sondland didn’t know what Burisma was code for. What’s almost more damning is that they evidently didn’t search the internet for why that Ukrainian company was so central to the administration’s supposed anti-corruption efforts.

Believing their account, in light of Thursday’s testimony, means accepting that everyone knew what Trump was after — except two of the top people helping him achieve it.

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. | Amir Levy/Getty Images

This is a huge, huge deal.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been indicted on charges relating to corruption and bribery on Thursday, according to multiple reports in the Israeli and international press.

The official announcement will come from Avichai Mandelblit, Israel’s attorney general, on Thursday afternoon. The charges are serious, relating to three cases of financial and political misconduct, and carry the possibility of jail time. This is not an idle threat: Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert got caught in a bribery scandal during his time in office in the late 2000s, and eventually served over a year in prison.

This indictment had been expected since nearly the beginning of the year. But now that it’s finally happening, the implications are absolutely massive. Netanyahu has been in office since 2009, taking over shortly after Olmert resigned in disgrace, and has become an increasingly authoritarian figure as time has gone on.

Two of the cases against him involve attempts to corruptly court the media, using policy favors to get more favorable coverage. The formal indictments represent the Israeli legal system striking back against his anti-democratic tendencies.

The announcement also came at crucial time in Israeli politics: the aftermath of an inconclusive election. Neither Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party nor its chief rival, the centrist Blue and White party, have been able to form a governing coalition. The parties had been in talks to ally with each other and form a national unity coalition, but one of the key sticking points has been Netanyahu himself. He wants to keep the top job in some capacity, while Blue and White leaders have adamantly refused to allow him to do so while an indictment is still on the table.

Now, with the indictment formally filed, it will be easier for Netanyahu’s rivals within the Likud to dump him and then join in coalition with Blue and White. So this announcement could very well spell double doom for Netanyahu: first losing his job, then losing his freedom.

Why the formal indictment is such a big deal

The indictment against Netanyahu covers three different cases.

The first, called Case 1000, involves Netanyahu and his wife Sara receiving inappropriately valuable personal gifts from Israeli-American billionaire Arnon Milchan and Australian businessman James Packer. It’s pretty garden-variety political corruption and bribery.

The second and third, Cases 2000 and 4000, involve some more insidious stuff: the abuse of the powers of office for political gain. In this respect, they’re similar to the Ukraine scandal in the US — except the quid-pro-quo is with domestic media rather than a foreign power.

In Case 2000, Netanyahu allegedly attempted to strike a deal with the owner of Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s largest newspaper: He would pass a law limiting circulation of one of its rivals, the already pro-Netanyahu Israel Hayom, in exchange for more favorable coverage in the Netanyahu-skeptical Yedioth. This scheme apparently never entered force.

In Case 4000, Netanyahu allegedly manipulated regulatory powers in order to benefit Bezeq, a major Israeli company. In exchange, the Bezeq-owned news organization Walla gave the prime minister more favorable coverage. Unlike Case 2000, this allegedly went beyond the conspiracy stage, with Netanyahu trading regulations for good press over a five-year period.

The technical charges are bribery, fraud, and breach of public trust — the former the most serious under Israeli law, and the most damaging to Netanyahu.

In full context, these allegations are even more troubling than they may appear. Under Netanyahu’s leadership, Israel passed a law declaring that “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people” — an exclusive vision of national identity that excludes Arabs and other non-Jewish minorities. It passed a law aimed at silencing NGOs that monitored the Israeli military’s human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories, and attacked the independence of the judiciary.

So the media manipulation isn’t an isolated offense. It’s part of a broader pattern of authoritarian drift that has made Israeli observers quite concerned about the health of their country’s political system.

“What many of the allegations against Netanyahu point to is a systematic attempt to skew media coverage of the prime minister in his favor. And this is no piffling matter,” writes eminent Israeli journalist David Horovitz. “If a leader can line up most or even many of the ostensibly competing media organizations that cover national events reliably on his side, he can subvert their role as independent watchdog, misdirect the reading and watching public, and advance a long way toward cementing his position as prime minister — his non-term-limited position as prime minister in Israel.”

This indictment, then, represents the guardrails of Israeli democracy working as they’re supposed to: stepping in at a key time to protect the system from venal leadership.

And indeed, the timing really is vital. On Wednesday, Blue and White leader Benny Gantz announced that he had been unable to form a coalition in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, during the time allotted to his party alone (Netanyahu’s repeated racist attacks against the leading Arab political faction, which could have joined with Gantz, did not help matters). It seems like Israel is close to having yet another election, the third in less than a year.

Amir Levy/Getty Images

Yet there’s still a three week period in which any faction, not only Gantz’s, can attempt to form a coalition. And now the indictment might well put enough pressure on an anti-Netanyahu fashion within Likud to finally dump the long-serving prime minister. It’s kind of a natural coalition: Blue and White is more of a center-right than purely centrist party, with the biggest dividing line between it and Likud centering on Netanyahu personally and his attacks on the democratic system. Some analysts believe that the indictment might just remove the key sticking point to this solution.

“It could shuffle the cards by giving Likud cover to break with Bibi [Netanyahu],” writes Natan Sachs, the Director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, adding that there’s “already a public challenge to Netanyahu in his party” from Likud MK Gideon Saar.

This is not to say Israeli democracy is out of the woods. The reason for democratic backsliding in the country are, at root, linked to its occupation of Palestinian land. Israel administers a military dictatorship in the West Bank that imposes its whim on Palestinians with little accountability, a kind of unlawfulness that corrupted democratic institutions inside legally recognized Israel territory. If it annexes part of the West Bank, as Netanyahu promised to do, then this occupation would likely become permanent — and turn into formal apartheid.

Blue and White doesn’t have a plan to end the occupation, and it seems unlikely that it even wants to put one together. It has even signaled willingness to conduct a partial annexation., revealing just how seriously we need to take the threat facing both Palestinians and Israeli liberalism. But if Netanyahu is forced out, it’s at least a rare victory for democracy.

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Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg speaks during a campaign stop at the Rex Theater in Manchester, New Hampshire, on November 8, 2019. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Buttigieg’s surge could to hit a major obstacle in South Carolina.

Pete Buttigieg is getting his second wind.

The South Bend, Indiana, mayor enjoyed an unexpectedly good start to his campaign — thanks in no small part to a wave of breathless media coverage — but then faded out of the top-tier contenders. Until now.

Capitalizing on steady momentum in Iowa, Buttigieg is now leading polls there, per a RealClearPolitics average of the state. He’s also on the rise in New Hampshire, although Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Vice President Joe Biden both are slightly ahead. He also was treated like an ascendant frontrunner toward the later part of Wednesday night’s Democratic debate, fielding attacks from other candidates on stage.

The picture is starkly different in national polls, where Buttigieg hasn’t yet cracked double digits in the RealClearPolitics average. This discrepancy drives home a key point: Buttigieg is gaining popularity in the first two, overwhelmingly white early voting states, but he has yet to gain traction in more diverse states where Biden, Warren, and Sen. Bernie Sanders are still leading. He’s still at single digits in Nevada and South Carolina polling averages, and a recent Quinnipiac poll of South Carolina shows him at zero percent among black voters there.

Buttigieg’s campaign chalks the numbers gap up to the fact that his time spent in Iowa and New Hampshire has made his name recognition go up, and the campaign believes more time on the ground in other states will have the same effect.

“Pete has spent a lot of time in these places,” campaign spokesperson Chris Meagher told Vox. “One of the things we’ve found is the more people know Pete, the more they like him, so it’s continuing to introduce him to folks. He wasn’t a national figure. … Pete hasn’t spent the last 20 years marinating in Washington.”

Iowa and New Hampshire are key momentum drivers, but their demographics aren’t reflective of the US as a whole. Winning the Democratic nomination rests on winning over nonwhite voters. And so far, Buttigieg has had more than a few stumbles in his outreach attempts.

“I think it’s a trust issue, I think it’s a connectivity issue,” Antjuan Seawright, a South Carolina Democratic consultant, told Vox. “He’s had continual missteps from a campaign standpoint.”

Buttigieg’s surge, briefly explained

Over the past few weeks, Buttigieg slowly and surely has been gaining polling ground in Iowa, a state he’s spending a lot of time and resources on. His campaign has 100 staffers and 20 offices in the state, and his campaign is depending on a good result there. That’s about on par with the number of Iowa staffers Warren and Biden has, and fewer than Sanders.

“I think we plan on winning Iowa,” a Buttigieg campaign staffer told Vox. “Iowa can definitely be a jumping-off point to success down the road.”

The candidate’s real polling breakthrough in Iowa came last weekend, when the Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom poll conducted by veteran Iowa pollster Ann Selzer’s firm showed Buttigieg leading the pack at 25 percent, with Warren at 16 percent and Sanders and Biden each with 15 percent. An early November Monmouth University poll of Iowa also found him on top, albeit with a narrower lead.

Then on Tuesday, a New Hampshire poll by Saint Anselm College Survey Center showed Buttigieg suddenly in the lead in the Granite State. The New Hampshire poll had obvious caveats; it sampled 255 likely Democratic voters, and overrepresented voters who were college educated or had gone to graduate school — a demographic Buttigieg performs well with.

This is Buttigieg’s second surge since he launched his campaign, and it comes at a time when the top tier of candidates is very fluid. Buttigieg has sat in this group for the last few weeks along with Warren, Biden, and Sanders. But Biden was the frontrunner in September, Warren was the frontrunner in October, and now Buttigieg is fighting for that mantle — at least in the earliest states.

It’s worth pointing out the Buttigieg surge isn’t quite on par with Warren’s last month. He’s still in fourth place nationally, and has significant ground to make up in states that aren’t Iowa or New Hampshire.

Selzer’s main takeaway about why the top tier is constantly fluctuating is that voters are still uneasy about who can beat President Donald Trump in the general election. While Selzer’s Iowa poll showed Buttigieg is the most well-liked candidate right now, there are still concerns in the state about his general election viability.

“There’s a skittishness about the chances of these top four candidates,” she told Vox.

Buttigieg’s campaign has been building out an impressive organization in all four early states, pollsters and political experts told Vox. He’s been fundraising at a rapid clip and using that money to build out large teams in each states to be ready to capitalize on momentum if and when the dominoes start to fall.

“It’s not an apples to apples analogy, but it’s the same strategy Obama used in 2008 which is hope to do well in Iowa and then change the dynamic suddenly he’s the frontrunner, then does well in New Hampshire, and has the infrastructure to do well in Nevada,” said Jon Ralston, a Nevada political journalist and the dean of that state’s press corps.

Buttigieg is struggling with black voters

As well as Buttigieg might be doing in Iowa and New Hampshire this month, he still has a big problem: persuading black voters in South Carolina.

Multiple polls, including ones from Quinnipiac and Winthrop University, have shown Buttigieg at zero percent with South Carolina’s African American voters, who make up 60 percent of the state’s overall electorate.

Black political experts in the state told Vox that despite the Buttigieg campaign’s outreach to the community, voters are looking to black surrogates to vouch for Buttigieg personally. And so far, they’re not seeing much.

“The questions I continue to get asked is, ‘show me some other African Americans somewhere else in America who have Pete Buttigieg’s back,’” said Anton Gunn, Obama’s 2008 South Carolina political director, who is not affiliated with any current campaign. “Where are the other leaders in South Bend? If they’re not down here regularly, then that speaks volumes.”

South Carolina state Sen. Marlon Kimpson, who has not endorsed any candidate yet, told Vox he agrees that not a lot of people have heard of Buttigieg. And what they’ve heard isn’t necessarily positive, Kimpson added. Buttigieg has apologized for how he handled race relations as mayor of South Bend, including firing the city’s black police chief, and later criticized over an officer-involved shooting of a black man named Eric Logan.

“People don’t know him, and what they do know about him is not impressive in terms of his history on African American issues,” Kimpson said. “It did not help him having to spend weeks handling a racial incident in his own city, and the media exposing his record with respect to the lack of diversity with his chief positions in his own city.”

Buttigieg’s campaign has had more stumbles in its attempt to do outreach to black voters, including using a stock photo of a woman from Kenya on its plan to address racial inequality.

Furthermore, Kimpson said momentum in Iowa and New Hampshire likely won’t move the needle much for black voters in South Carolina, unless that momentum belongs to a black candidate like Cory Booker or Kamala Harris.

“I don’t think African Americans will be swayed by what happens in New Hampshire or Iowa,” he said. “Pete Buttigieg is not Barack Obama.”

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Air France CEO Anne Rigail said that flying shame has taken root in her own home. | Pascal Pavani/AFP/Getty Images

Leaders of two major airlines said this week they need to do more to fight against climate change.

Airline executives are feeling the headwinds of the growing alarm among travelers about the climate consequences of air travel — and acknowledging their industry isn’t doing enough to curb emissions.

Air France CEO Anne Rigail told the audience of the Fortune Global Forum on Monday that flying shame had taken root in her own household among her husband and children. “It’s very good because I was not at all surprised by this whole thing about ‘flight shaming’,” she said. “I think it’s our biggest challenge.”

Flights account for about 2.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and some travelers, most notably Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish climate activist who gave up flying, are cutting back on flying to reduce their personal carbon footprint. The Swedes have even coined a word for flying shame: flygskam. An October survey of 6,000 travelers in the US, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom found that one in five travelers had reduced the number of flights they took in the past year.

Rigail’s remarks were followed on Wednesday by praise from Tim Clark, the president of Emirates, of the attention environmental activists like Thunberg have drawn to the problem of airline emissions.

“[W]e [in the aviation industry] aren’t doing ourselves any favours by chucking billions of tons of carbon into the air. It’s got to be dealt with,” Clark told the BBC. “I quite like Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg for having brought a real focus to the issue; a focus on the fact that we are not doing enough at the speed we should be.”

These business leaders haven’t said what they’ll do about climate change, and this week Emirates announced a $16 billion order for new aircraft. But their comments show that flying shame isn’t just a fringe movement that the industry can ignore.

Shortly before its collapse in September, airline Thomas Cook said that the environmental movement against air travel was hurting its business. Scandinavian airline SAS and Sweden’s airport authority have also reported declines in air travelers that they blame on flight shame.

Over the summer, Dutch air carrier KLM launched an environmental campaign that obliquely acknowledged the flying shame movement, encouraging customers to “fly responsibly” and to be judicious about their air travel. KLM CEO Pieter Elbers also wrote in a letter that “we invite all air travellers to make responsible decisions about flying.”

However, environmental activists aren’t united behind the message of flight shaming. Some argue that the focus on personal habits like plane travel shifts the burden away from the larger institutional changes needed among businesses and governments to combat climate change.

And while some air carriers are reporting a slowdown in ticket sales, others don’t seem to be affected at all. Finnair, for example, reported an increase in passengers this year. The overall market for air travel is poised to grow dramatically, particularly in regions like China, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa.

Air travel is notoriously difficult to decarbonize. There are almost no alternatives to fossil-derived jet fuel that can deliver the energy density needed to cross oceans by air, at least at a price that passengers can afford. If a carbon-neutral jet existed, “we would immediately buy one”, Rigail said Monday.

The growing awareness of air travel’s impact on the environment has helped inspire a renewed push for cleaner air travel technologies — electrification, biofuels, electrofuels, and hydrogen — but these tactics may be decades away from making a dent in air travel emissions. That means there are few good options for the climate-conscious traveler in the meantime other than simply flying less.

This tension between rising air travel demand and mounting climate change concerns is creating more uncertainty for the airline industry. To help address this, the United Nations is working on setting up an emissions trading scheme for airlines to offset their contributions to climate change.

Thunberg, for her part, is currently sailing back from North America to Europe to attend the United Nations climate conference in Madrid, Spain, in December. At the meeting, groups like the European Union plan to press the airline industry to do more to limit their emissions.

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Elsa’s back. | Walt Disney Pictures

Disney used to always be looking forward. These days, it increasingly only looks back.

Nobody was more nostalgic than Marcel Proust.

The French novelist’s six-volume masterwork In Search of Lost Time is narrated by a man who’s remembering his youth, and it explores how strange and unreliable memory can be. Throughout the series, the notion of “involuntary” memory is a recurring theme, but it’s particularly important in the famous “madeleine” scene.

The scene comes early in the first volume, Swann’s Way, when the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea immediately plunges the narrator into a vivid childhood memory. It’s so well-known that it remains a cultural reference point even today, more than a century after Swann’s Way was published: To say that something is your “madeleine” is shorthand for any sensory experience that brings back a flood of childhood memories (even though mounting evidence suggests that Proust’s version may have just been soggy toast).

That sensory experiences can trigger powerful memories, particularly of youth and childhood, was not a particularly earth-shattering insight on Proust’s part — lots of people have had similar episodes. And while not all of his narrator’s recollections are fond, a lot of them seem presented through a haze of affection — the reliability of which, as the narrator us himself, is a little suspect. “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were,” he writes.

Maurice Rougemont/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

Proust aptly describes the concept of nostalgia: a sentimental yearning for the past, which Merriam Webster defines, succinctly and evocatively, as “the state of being homesick.” And while we periodically recall certain moments as being worse than they actually were (I think of the 30 Rock episode in which Liz Lemon is shocked to discover that her memories of being bullied in high school are faulty, and she was the one doing the bullying), the past often takes on a rosy hue.

Time, distance, and the occasional dash of willful ignorance are effective modifiers. They’re why societies collectively hallucinate Golden Ages, and why so many people find the idea of making America “great again” appealing. It’s less about conserving the good of the past, and more about rejecting the present.

Nostalgia is not, as a mood, inherently bad. Sometimes, feeling a bit homesick is good. But when that feeling becomes our default posture, our guiding light, it starts to become … troubling? Inhibiting, maybe? Stifling? If the past was when things were good, why bother to build a new future? Better to just keep reinventing the past.

Which brings us to Disney, and to Frozen 2.

Disney used to be a company that looked forward. These days, it seems more interested in looking back.

Disney now controls the lion’s share of the movie industry. In 2019 so far, five of the six highest-grossing films worldwide have been Disney properties; the sixth (Spider-Man: Far From Home) was a joint endeavor between Sony and Disney-owned Marvel. The company’s reach is staggering: It owns, among scores other entities, Pixar, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, and as of earlier this year, the film and TV assets formerly held by 21st Century Fox — in addition to its own extensive and much-beloved back catalog, lots of which is now available to stream via the just-launched Disney+ service.

Disney is in the entertainment business. But what it’s selling isn’t entertainment, exactly — that’s just the vehicle for its real product, and that product has shifted and morphed over time. At one time, a big part of what Disney was selling was a vision of a utopian future, as you know, if you’ve been to Tomorrowland or Epcot at Walt Disney World.

In his speech at the opening day of Disneyland in 1955, Walt Disney himself pointed to his vision of the park as a place where nostalgia and forward-looking inspiration could coexist: “Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future.”

Allan Grant/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

But as we come to the end of this banner year for Disney, it’s clear that what the company wants to sell us, going forward, is a seemingly infinite heap of Proustian madeleines. Certainly the warm fuzzies have been one of Disney’s main exports for a long time, but some kind of tipping point was reached in 2019. Now, it seems evident that Disney sees provoking existential homesickness as its main job. Nostalgia is its real product.

Consider Toy Story 4, the fourth film in a series that debuted in November 1995. If you were 8 years old and saw Toy Story in theaters when it opened, you might have brought your own 8-year-old to see the new film earlier this year.

That’s a remarkable stretch of time, and the Toy Story series has stayed remarkably thematically coherent over that time. It’s a set of stories about the passage of time, about how nothing stays the same, about the fact that kids grow up and leave home — that’s why Toy Story 3 left parents bawling when Andy finally grew up and didn’t need his toys anymore. The toys, in a sense, are the parents’ stand-ins. And Toy Story 4, in which some of the toys opt to live a child-free life, feels an awful lot like a movie about being an empty nester, something that could render a parent munching popcorn with their third grader a bit verklempt, thinking about their own now-empty-nester parents who once took them to see Toy Story.

That’s the good kind of nostalgia. And the Toy Story series has successfully refreshed its basic premise over two decades — toys get lost, toys get found — in part through its willingness to surprise viewers, to crack jokes and be a little creepy and think outside the (toy) box with its narratives. So when we find ourselves feeling homesick, in a story about the passage of time, it works.

I think of this approach as generative nostalgia. It’s a way for Disney to use memory, to tap into the audience’s particular madeleines, to bolster the storytelling itself (and make an enormous wad of cash, too). Not every attempt lands, but when movie studios try to tap into nostalgia in order to generate fresh new stories with universal themes, to get creative with the familiar, it’s a good thing for art.

Pixar Animation Studios / Walt Disney Pictures

If Toy Story 4 was an example of Disney harnessing generative nostalgia, however, its so-called “live-action” remake of The Lion King was just the opposite. The film was never meant to be a standalone movie; its success was always fully dependent on the long-entrenched popularity of the 1994 animated film it recreates, in some cases shot for shot. It’s an entirely unnecessary movie — a way for Disney to test-drive high-end, lifelike CGI and get people to pay for it. And without the imaginative, sometimes visually wild artwork of the original, it falls very flat, with no new perspective on its source material.

Call it derivative nostalgia: For most audiences, The Lion King and Disney’s other live-action remakes (Aladdin was another huge hit this year) are interesting only insofar as they promise to deliver a (slightly) new spin on a beloved classic, without straying too far. We still get “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” but it’s Donald Glover and Beyoncé. A copy of the original with some of the details tweaked. That’s the appeal.

And while derivative nostalgia has its place — we rewatch our favorite movies for a reason, because we like the feelings and memories they provoke — Disney seems intent on adopting it as a modus operandi, judging from the number of remakes the company has announced. It will depend on the built-in audience of people who loved Lady and the Tramp or 101 Dalmatians to pony up for a ticket or subscribe to Disney+ and ensure these projects’ success.

But I’m convinced the urge to use your giant piles of money to endlessly replicate the past can’t be good for a culture. Certainly, human culture is cumulative; we’re always building on what came before. For millennia, storytellers have leaned on the same material, like myths and archetypes, to find new ways to tell stories. But derivative nostalgia stymies the creative impulse, miring us in the same thing over and over again and training audiences to demand the predictable. Vanilla pudding tastes good, but there’s a lot more to food than vanilla pudding.

You can witness the battle for Disney’s soul happening inside Frozen 2

These generative and derivative modes of nostalgia seem to be warring inside inside Frozen 2, which is pleasing and enjoyable even if it’s clearly designed to function as an ATM for Disney, with Frozen’s previously established fanbase acting as the bank account behind the screen. It is, thank God, no Olaf’s Frozen Adventure.

The Frozen films are aimed primarily at little girls and boys, of course — Disney’s long-running core constituency for stories about princesses and talking animals (or snowmen). But, given that the first movie came out six years ago, Frozen 2 is also for older kids. And one of the most notable things about the movie is that it’s also for their parents.

Perhaps following Pixar’s lead, the more traditional Disney Animation studio has caught onto the fact that if you want grown-ups to be happy when they take kids to the movie theater, you’ve got to make something they’ll enjoy, too. So Frozen 2 leans (more noticeably than its predecessor) into jokes the adults will appreciate, and one in particular: While the kids at my screening howled at Olaf’s slapsticky misadventures, the adults were the ones laughing as Princess Anna’s hunky boyfriend Kristoff crooned his very ’80s-sounding power ballad “Lost in the Woods.”

During a recent interview, Josh Gad (who voices Olaf) joked that the song “speaks to all of us that grew up in the ’80s.” And he’s totally right. The voice of Kristoff, Jonathan Groff, says he was surprised when the song was handed to him: “I couldn’t believe that they were going to go there,” he said, calling it “truly shocking” and later saying it has the energy of Michael Bolton. The song is about how much Kristoff needs Anna in his life; in the film, he sings it during a fantasy sequence of finding her, backed by a chorus of singing reindeer. (The official Frozen 2 soundtrack includes a version of the song by Weezer, which kind of says everything.)

As Gad pointed out, it’s definitely a sight gag for the olds in the room — the younger Gen X and older millennial parents who’ve come to see Frozen 2 with their kids, and are now being rewarded with their own extended musical joke. What’s funny about it is that the musical-style “Into the Woods” parodies was already ridiculous by the time most gen-Xers and millennials became adults; what we’re reminded of now is the sheer goofiness that was so prevalent back then, when romantic ballads were sung by guys with bad hair surrounded by unironic kitsch.

Kids born in the 21st century won’t get the joke. But Frozen 2 isn’t exclusively for them; it’s for 20th-century kids, too. In fact, though its action is set just three years after the end of Frozen, it is, like Toy Story, about the passage of time, and what it’s like to grow older. Olaf sings a song about how things don’t make sense to him now, but they will someday; Anna and Olaf reflect on how they hope everything will stay the same, even though — spoiler alert — of course, they won’t.

Walt Disney Pictures

So Frozen 2 provokes all kinds of nostalgia. For kids who’ve already spent years dressing up as Anna and Elsa and driving their parents to distraction with “Let It Go,” the new film is a return to the happy land of Arendelle, where they’ve had many adventures. For teenagers who saw the original Frozen when they were 8 or so, but are now in high school, it’s a reminder of how far they’ve come. And for adults, it tugs on decades-old heartstrings — not just the chuckling memory of’ 80s power ballads, which might be the madeleine that reminds some of dancing at prom, but also the Disney princess stories so many of us grew up watching.

Whereas the original Frozen is a bit of an odd film — its plot structure feels a little out-of-sync with Disney’s usual storytelling, and its “true love’s kiss” comes not from a prince but a sister — Frozen 2 is much more conventional. Frozen retained some of the eerie strangeness of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale it was (very) loosely based on; Frozen 2 goes back to the usual adventure-and-return structure that has made so many classic Disney movies a success. It’s familiar. It’s comfortable.

By my lights, Frozen 2 is still a plenty enjoyable film, even if it lacks its predecessor’s subversive spark. But for me, watching generative and derivative nostalgia spar within it prompted a different sense of the familiar: bleakness about the future of mouse-eared entertainment. Disney, whatever its faults, has often been a pioneer in storytelling; now it’s resting firmly on its laurels, too often electing to spin the wheel again rather than try to reinvent it.

Nostalgia has its place. Remembering the feeling of homesickness reminds us where we came from, that we come from somewhere. But too much yearning for the past without a concomitant attempt to live in the present and push toward the future is a dangerous trap for a culture to fall into, both because it risks becoming stagnant in its art and because it may begin to to worship the past as the only place worth living in. Too much yearning for the past makes us incurious about the world. And if, as Proust wrote, the past we remember is not necessarily the one that existed, remaining stubbornly beholden to it can render us altogether incapable of dealing with the present.

The bigger Disney gets, the more it controls what most Americans — and people around the world — will see at the movies and on their TV screens, and thus it bears enormous responsibility for seeing into the future. Looking backward too much, recycling old content and relying on old formulas endlessly, becomes a snake eating its own tail.

As the endless stream of reboots and remakes and sequels and revivals that currently dominates entertainment attests, nostalgia sells. But it is also the thing most easily packaged to sell. Recycling content is the low-hanging fruit. And when Disney leans into the least creative sort of recycled content, live-action remakes — something nobody’s really asking for — it’s signaling how little it’s interested in originality.

Even when those remakes take a risk — for instance, by casting black actress Halle Bailey as Ariel in The Little Mermaid — it’s worth noting how safe the “risk” really is. Being a creative leader who celebrates inclusivity means daring to build something new, and trusting the artists to draw audiences into a new story. It doesn’t mean casting new faces in old, well-trodden roles with guaranteed built-in audiences because you’re not sure audiences will turn up otherwise. It doesn’t mean defaulting to reviving your past.

Which, ironically, is something Walt Disney was determined to keep his company from doing. As quoted in the 2007 Disney animated film Meet the Robinsons, he pushed for just the opposite: “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious. And curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”

Frozen 2 opens in theaters on November 21.

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Fiona Hill, former deputy assistant to the President and Senior Director for Europe and Russia on the National Security Council staff, arrives to review transcripts of her deposition with the House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees at the US Capitol on November 4, 2019. | Alex Wong/Getty Images

Fiona Hill reminds Republicans that Russia — not Ukraine — meddled in 2016.

In her opening statement to impeachment investigators, former National Security Council official Fiona Hill excoriates Republicans for indulging in unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 presidential election — the same ones President Donald Trump tried to leverage the Ukrainian government into investigating.

“Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did,” Hill says in her Thursday statement. “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”

She adds, “I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternative narrative that the Ukrainian government is a US adversary, and that Ukraine—not Russia—attacked us in 2016.”

The US intelligence community’s consensus conclusion is that Russia interfered in the 2016 on Trump’s behalf. That conclusion was further bolstered by the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. But Trump, in an apparent effort to undercut the notion that he received help from a foreign adversary, has repeatedly tried to draw Russia’s role into question, and recently has embraced a conspiracy theory that the hacks of Democratic targets during the campaign were not the work of Russia, but were an “inside job.”

Hill, however, is having none of that.

As my colleague Andrew Prokop detailed following Hill’s closed-door testimony earlier this month, she provided impeachment investigators with a detailed account of a key July 10 meeting in which she claimed US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland “blurted out” that there was a quid pro quo — that new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s desired White House visit was conditional on his government agreeing to conduct investigations of a company Joe Biden’s son sat on the board of, and purported Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election. That July 10 episode memorably ended with then-National Security Advisor John Bolton alluding to the quid pro quo and telling Hill, “You go and tell [NSC lawyer John] Eisenberg that I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and [acting chief of staff Mick] Mulvaney are cooking up on this.”

In her opening statement, Hill — who officially retired in September — emphasizes just how absurd the Ukrainian election interference narrative pushed by Trump and Rudy Giuliani is.

“In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests,” she says. “If the President, or anyone else, impedes or subverts the national security of the United States in order to further domestic political or personal interests, that is more than worthy of your attention.”

Hill also highlights that Russian election interference is an ongoing concern — something US security officials have pointed out as well.

“The impact of the successful 2016 Russian campaign remains evident today. Our nation is being torn apart. Truth is questioned. Our highly professional and expert career foreign service is being undermined. US support for Ukraine … has been politicized,” she says.

You can read Hill’s full opening statement below.

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The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) chat before a memorial ceremony for Congressman Elijah Cummings (D-MD). The two leaders and their respective Appropriations Committees need to hammer out a spending deal before the end of the year. | Matt McClain-Pool/Getty Images

It’s the same issue that led to a government shutdown last year.

Congress is once again facing an imminent deadline when it comes to approving funding to keep the government open. And the hang-up (once again) is President Donald Trump’s desire for a border wall.

Because of this impasse, lawmakers are (once again) punting the problem further down the line.

The House and Senate have a deadline of Thursday, November 21, at midnight to approve 12 spending bills. At this point, they aren’t close to meeting it. Because of this, lawmakers are expected to pass yet another short-term bill — known as a continuing resolution, or CR — that’s intended to fund the government through late December, right before the Christmas break. The House already passed the CR on Tuesday, and now it heads to the Senate where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has expressed his support.

Congress had already approved a stop-gap spending bill in September to get to the latest November deadline. The new CR will keep funding levels across different agencies including the Department of Homeland Security predominately at the same levels as they have been this past fiscal year, although it includes additional funds for the Commerce Department to carry out the 2020 US Census and money for a 3.1 percent pay raise for members of the military. Still, the bill will essentially postpone the border wall fight until December 20.

This standoff is already frustrating appropriators in the House, who are complaining that the Republican-controlled Senate is being too deferential to Trump and procrastinating on solving thorny funding issues.

“We need to get our work done by December 20,” an exasperated House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) told reporters Tuesday. “Will we be able to? The wall, I think, is a major impediment. But that’s only one bill. It ought not to adversely the other 11 bills being held hostage, essentially.”

Hoyer reminded reporters the House started its appropriations work in January and passed most of its funding bills by this summer.

“Time is not the issue here, will is the issue here,” Hoyer said last week. “The willingness to come to a compromise, the willingness of the Senate to pass bills, whatever they are. They could have done that, they didn’t do it because the White House said ‘don’t do it.’”

Republican leaders on the Senate Appropriations Committee acknowledged the big hold-up on progress is still funding for the border wall, which Democrats still don’t want to budge on and the White House doesn’t want to give up.

“We’re trading offers back and forth, still,” Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Richard Shelby (R-AL) told reporters Tuesday. “We have deadlines, then they come, and we create more deadlines.”

The Senate has lagged the House in its approval of appropriations bills thus far, passing just four of the 12 spending bills. McConnell on Tuesday said he backed a bill that would keep the government funded and open through December 20 as lawmakers continued to sort through their differences on appropriations.

“What is needed in the near term is to keep the government open for the next several weeks while this work goes on,” McConnell said in a floor speech.

This timing sets up a deadline that leaves the door open to an end-of-year shutdown — setting up another budget fight that could coincide with a potential vote on articles of impeachment if Democrats move on that.

Where things stand in the House and Senate

Currently, the House and Senate don’t seem particularly close to an agreement about what these final spending bills could look like.

Following the Senate’s passage of a four-bill minibus in October, House Appropriations Chair Nita Lowey (D-NY) called on lawmakers to begin the conference process that allows the two chambers to negotiate on a final version of the bill. These negotiations — along with talks on the other eight bills — are stalling, particularly over border wall funding. President Donald Trump is maintaining his demands for $5 billion in wall money; Democrats are equally obstinate against funding it, while Senate Republicans are seemingly ready to give him the funds.

“To reach agreement on allocations, Senate Republicans must drop their insistence on funding a wasteful wall at the expense of critical domestic programs,” Lowey said in a statement.

House Democrats, meanwhile, badly want to be the party of appropriations stability. Democrats swept into power during the country’s longest-ever government shutdown — one that went into effect under Republican leadership and was caused by the border wall standoff last year.

“This wall has been holding up government for a long period of time now,” Hoyer said last week.

Democrats started the year with the hope of passing a long-term spending deal to give federal agencies some peace of mind after months and months of CRs. And Democratic leaders a few months ago sounded hopeful that Shelby and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell also wanted to reach a long-term deal. But if the last few months have shown anything, it’s that getting to “yes” is easier said than done when the president’s border wall is hanging over negotiations.

“Sadly, essentially what Senator McConnell is saying is he will not act unless the president tells him to sign a bill. That’s not the role of the Congress of the United States,” Hoyer told reporters Tuesday.

In addition to a hold-up over the wall, the Senate has been embroiled in a fight over the levels of funding bills would provide to agencies governing Education and Labor, departments that Democrats see as being shortchanged in the allocations they’re receiving.

What this means for another potential shutdown

The decision to use yet another CR puts Congress in a position that’s very similar to the one it found itself in last year. The latest CR is slated to expire on December 20, shortly before the Christmas holiday, forcing lawmakers to approve at the very least a third stopgap measure in order to prevent a shutdown.

At this same point in 2018, lawmakers were poised to pass another CR only to have President Trump decide that he’d be willing to shut down the government in order to obtain wall funding. Trump’s move wound up leading to the longest partial government shutdown in US history, though it did not result in Congress approving wall money.

The president ultimately signed a funding package that reopened the government while simultaneously declaring a national emergency that has enabled him to shift funds from other military construction projects to the border wall.

This year, the ongoing impasse between the president and congressional Democrats is further complicated by the impeachment inquiry, which could move into a Senate trial right around the new year.

Earlier this fall, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer suggested that the president might leverage a shutdown as a distraction during the impeachment proceedings. “I’m increasingly worried that President Trump may want to shut down the government again because of impeachment,” he told reporters during a press briefing.

This possibility adds to the pressure on lawmakers as they seek to finalize spending bills alongside the ongoing inquiry.

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