I have a confession to make: I just watched the season premiere of the third season of HBO’s “And Just Like That,” the hit sequel to the cult late ’90s-mid-’00s “Sex and the City.” Wait, there’s more. I watched every single episode of the first two seasons, too.

Although I was not a fan of Carrie Bradshaw and her coven’s original run from 1998 to 2004, I am low-key obsessed with the sequel series. “Sex and the City” was an iconic show that defined gender norms — for better or worse — for a generation. The women in my life in early aughts New York City were all ambitious and stylish. I was neither ambitious nor stylish. They had dating horror stories, and I spent many Saturday nights alone. During those years, women frequently asked each other which of the show’s four sexy, successful characters they resembled. Meanwhile, most dudes I knew wanted to be Neo from “The Matrix” or Adam Sandler in almost any of his movies. I liked to think of myself as a “The Wedding Singer” with a “Happy Gilmore” rising.

I watched the first AJLT season out of sheer boredom, and before I knew it, I was mumbling to myself, “Am I a Carrie?”

I don’t think I’ve ever even been able to finish an episode of “Sex and the City,” although I’ve tried. My wife, on the other hand, can quote entire episodes.

It’s not that I didn’t find Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis and sassy demi-goddess Kim Cattrall funny or attractive or charismatic. They remain one of television’s most fabulous foursomes. But turn-of-the-century me was more interested in the popular markers of masculinity at that time, like David Fincher’s grimy look at male impotence, “Fight Club,” or TV’s “24,” which was about Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer doing whatever he has to do to save America — or, God forgive, the intense but sensitive rock music of Creed.

In other words, I was too busy acting like a man, which meant reading men’s magazines filled with musky body spray ads and editor-vetted pick-up lines that I’d practice delivering directly to my bathroom mirror reflection.

And yet, when it comes to “And Just Like That,” I can’t get enough. I watched the first AJLT season out of sheer boredom, and before I knew it, I was mumbling to myself, “Am I a Carrie?” I literally just typed that sentence on my laptop in my New York apartment. This is a show about being in your 50s and living a messy life. That’s me.

One of the predictable facts of growing older in modern society is the speed at which culture zooms past you. But I wasn’t ready for how few stories there are about how much life happens between hitting the big 4-0 and, you know, departing this earthly plane of existence.

Teenagers? Twenty-somethings? Young parents? Mainstream culture has you covered. There are times I feel the entire entertainment industry falls over itself to tell young people how to live and who to be. Then you hit your mid-40s and stories about growing and loving, struggling and navigating life seem to disappear.

“And Just Like That” follows Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte, along with a few all-new characters, as they break up, come out of the closet and pursue careers in New York. There is sex, and there are incredible apartments. But this show isn’t just about money and glamour (although there is plenty of high fashion, which I don’t care about because I’m the sort of person who owns two hoodies); it’s also about how getting older doesn’t mean mellowing out. Life doesn’t end when you’re old enough for routine colonoscopies.

Which is exactly the message I need to hear these days because, friends, I am not in a mellow place. I am hustling for work and showing up for friends and family, and there are days when I feel more adrift and frustrated about where I am, and where I want to go, than when I was 25. In fact, things seemed simpler then, even if they didn’t feel that way.

I was expecting a show about white women eating lunch and talking about men and jobs and having it all. And it is that, but it’s also about middle age and disappointment and death, which was surprisingly goth.

In that first season, Carrie loses her husband, Mr. Big, a smooth-talking alpha dog who is unlike any man I’ve ever met. It was heavy stuff to just off him like that, and I was hooked.

The ladies in “And Just Like That” are full of life. They’re parenting and running businesses and getting it on. It is never too late to do what you want or love who you want. As cliché as that sounds, it’s a message not often offered to people past a certain age in this society.

I’ve not told any of my dude friends about my love for this show, so I’m coming out with my secret on the internet, a famous safe space for anyone sharing an opinion. Will the admission that I can name all the characters in “And Just Like That” enrage a few bros online? Probably.

It is an unavoidable fact of life that if you care about anything, deeply and passionately, you are cringe. So embrace it.

But when you get to my age, you realize that men who get angry at other men for not being manly enough are lonely, and if they’d only surrender to the charms of my imaginary girlfriends, their inner emptinesses would fill.

It is an unavoidable fact of life that if you care about anything, deeply and passionately, you are cringe. So embrace it. Miranda does (and, another confession, she’s my favorite).

I relate to the ladies of “And Just Like That” because I too am of a certain age, and I have a small circle of friends who I talk about important things with, like the series finale of Disney+’s Star Wars show “Andor.”

We are not rich in any way, but we’re healthy, give or take a Lipitor prescription. I’ve known these guys for years, decades. They have, each, been there for me during dark times and vice versa.

Sometimes, when we’re eating at a greasy diner together, I’ll order a side of coleslaw with my eggs and the dudes will all say, “That’s such a John thing to do.”

More recently, though, we are having deeper conversations about what we want out of life, and who we are as we gray and slow down just a little bit. We get into new dreams and old fears more than we once did. A few of us are in therapy for the first time. And just like that, things change.

John DeVore

John DeVore is a culture writer and author of “Theatre Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off Broadway.”His writing has been published in Esquire, Vanity Fair, Marvel Comics, and many other publications.

Elon Musk’s government service has supposedly come to an endwith the billionaire decamping to his company town of Starbase, Texas. Except there he was in the Oval Office on Friday, in a press availability alongside President Donald Trump. Sporting a black eye — given to him by his 5-year-old, he said — Musk grumbled about his time in the nation’s capital. “We became essentially the DOGE bogeyman,” Musk said. “It just became a bit ridiculous.”

That complaint echoed similar comments in his media tour preceding that appearance, as Musk whined about his DOGE stint not turning out quite as triumphantly as he had hoped. “The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” he told The Washington Post. “DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything.” Not only that, “People were burning Teslas. Why would you do that? That’s really uncool.”

Musk didn’t know how things worked, wasn’t interested in learning and didn’t care how many people he would hurt.

In other words, his noble effort at reform was undone by the deep state, and all he got for it was a heap of criticism and slumping sales for his car company. Won’t somebody pity the billionaire?

Musk has teams of acolytes around him who will no doubt be eager to reassure him that if some people in Washington don’t adore him, that just means they didn’t deserve him in the first place. But in truth, Musk’s feelings are irrelevant; what matters is the chaos he brought to the federal government that serves all of us, and the deaths he is at least partly responsible for around the world. The malignancy that is his Department of Government Efficiency project lives on, not only in the cadre of incompetents he has left behind in Washington, but in the spirit of gleeful destruction ever more firmly incorporated into Republican ideology.

Musk’s time in Washington was characterized by a toxic combination of ignorance, arrogance and malevolence. He didn’t know how things worked, wasn’t interested in learning and didn’t care how many people he would hurt. All of it stemmed from his belief that not only is government incapable of doing anything right, almost everything it tries to do isn’t worth doing anyway. So if he had an impression that an agency was bad — say, the U.S. Agency for International Development — what would be the point of learning its goals and methods? Just shut the whole thing down.

The demise of USAID is one of the most horrific legacies of Musk’s time in Washington. The abrupt cutoff of food aid to vulnerable people around the world “has destabilized some of the most fragile locations in the world and thrown refugee camps further into unrest,” according to internal State Department documents obtained by ProPublica. The withdrawal of medical assistance — especially through PEPFAR, the spectacularly successful U.S. program that fights the spread of HIV in Africa — is already leading directly to people’s deaths, almost certainly by the thousands. Some studies have concluded that hundreds of thousands of people either have died or will die because the U.S. government, at Musk’s urging, has all but shut down its foreign humanitarian efforts.

The experience of USAID was repeated in agency after agency, often at Musk’s whims or to serve Musk’s interest. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which used to protect Americans from financial scams, could cause problems for Musk’s plans to add payment services to his social media platform X. But now CFPB staff have been sent home, and the agency has essentially ceased to function.

Even if Musk and some his top lieutenants are gone, their underlings are still in the federal government.

We saw a pattern repeated over and over: Musk’s DOGE staffers would descend on a government office, demand access to critical systems and start destroying programs they didn’t bother to understand. Officials who stood up to them were fired. Contracts were canceledoffices were closed, and people who relied on services were abandoned.

That damage can’t easily be undone, and even if Musk and some his top lieutenants are gone, their underlings are still in the federal government. And while the shock of what DOGE was doing may have been appalling to most of us, to Republicans in both the executive branch and Congress, it was thrilling (though Republicans on Capitol Hill have been less thrilled about formalizing DOGE’s cuts into law). They’ve now assimilated Musk’s ethos as their own: break everything you can see, fire as many committed employees as possible, don’t worry about consequences to people’s lives, and if what you’re doing is illegal, well, maybe the courts will sort that out later.

And no, Musk was never going to cut $2 trillion from the budget; the fact that he thought he could just showed how clueless he was. But his contempt for the government and the public servants who work in it was obvious from the outset. He wanted indiscriminate destruction, and he got it.

Now he claims to be peeved that the Republican megabill doesn’t reduce the deficitas though that was ever something the GOP cared about. If he’s really concerned, perhaps he should use some of his billions to lobby for tax increases on the wealthy.

For all his complaints, Musk is getting most of what he really wanted. His time in the government coincided with the Trump administration shutting down many investigations Musk faced over his labor and environmental practices. The administration is also moving to direct billions of dollars in funding meant for rural broadband to his satellite company, and Trump’s new idea for a “Golden Dome” missile defense system looks like a contracting gravy train with Musk’s companies in the front car.

So why isn’t Musk happy? The answer isn’t that he didn’t succeed, because in most ways he did. What upsets him is this: He didn’t just want to lay waste to the government and enrich himself. He wanted to do that and then have us thank him for it.

Tell that to a mother watching her child die from malnourishment, or a skilled park ranger who got fired from their dream job, or someone in tornado alley who can’t get updated weather forecasts, or AIDS patients who no longer have lifesaving medication. I’m sure they’ll be very sympathetic.

President Donald Trump has a well-deserved reputation for gaslightingand several members of his Cabinet have taken great efforts to continue his willful duplicity. Over the course of the past week alone — in the name of academic, scientific and online “freedom” — Trump and his administration’s bigwigs have explicitly threatened free speech in at least a half-dozen different ways.

Over the course of the past week alone, Trump and his administration’s bigwigs have explicitly threatened free speech in at least a half-dozen different ways.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — who during the 2024 campaign frequently cosplayed as a free speech activist and a victim of censorship — said on a podcast Tuesday that he might bar government scientists from publishing in some of the most venerable and respected, peer-reviewed medical journals. “They’re all corrupt,” Kennedy claimed, citing the fact that they sometimes publish studies that are funded by pharmaceutical companies. Kennedy also said he’d like to create an in-house publication, a nifty way of controlling what government-employed scientists publish. Already, Dr. Kevin Halla nutrition scientist at the National Institutes of Health, resigned last month, citing censorship of his work “because of agency concerns that it did not appear to fully support preconceived narratives of my agency’s leadership about ultra-processed food addiction.”

In an interview with CNBC on WednesdayEducation Secretary Linda McMahon was asked about the administration’s intent to cancel all federal grants to Harvard University — upwards of $9 billion in research funding. The secretary’s reply was telling: “Universities should continue to be able to do research as long as they’re abiding by the laws and in sync, I think, with the administration and what the administration is trying to accomplish.”

The free speech tourists of the Trump administration probably know this already — which is why it’s fair to call it gaslighting — but it is not the mission of academic institutions to be “in sync” with any presidential administration. They’re supposed to be bastions of free thought and inquiry, and though many (especially Harvard) haven’t kept to those principles in recent decades, it’s hard to fathom how blackmailing colleges into ideological submission could possibly further anyone’s rights to freedom of expression.

Moreover, McMahon’s justification for sanctions on Harvard — that the university violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by insufficiently policing antisemitism on its campus — is remarkable insincerity.

For starters, just this week the administration promoted Kingsley Wilson — who posted multiple antisemitic conspiracy theories online last year — to Defense Department press secretary. On Thursday, Trump announced his nomination of former far-right podcast host Paul Ingrassia to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. Ingrassia, in 2023advocated for conservatives to welcome “dissident voices” like antisemitic white nationalist Nick Fuentes into the larger MAGA movement.

And then there’s the matter of President Trump’s executive order earlier this month directing the federal government to stop using a key enforcement mechanism of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Trump has threatened another lawsuit against CBS in his brazen attempt to shake down Paramount Global for millions of dollars to settle a bogus lawsuit over what he erroneously claims was a deceptively edited “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris. The president’s harassment — and Paramount controlling shareholder Shari Redstone’s apparent prioritization of getting federal approval for a business merger over journalistic integrity — have already led to the departures of “60 Minutes” long-time executive producer Bill Owens and CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon. Let’s be very clear: Trump is threatening both costly litigation and government retaliation against a news organization over its interview with a political rival. That’s censorship, plain and simple, because the threats themselves have widespread speech-chilling effects.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday offered a particularly bold stroke of free speech gaslighting, announcing in a post on X “a new visa restriction policy that will apply to foreign officials and persons who are complicit in censoring Americans.”

Rhapsodizing about the glories of free speech out of one side of his mouth while threatening draconian censorship out of the other is a long-standing Trumpian tactic.

Basically, Secretary Rubio is threatening to ban anyone who enforces online content moderation laws and policies abroad that affect U.S. citizens. One former State Department official put a rhetorical question to Politico“If there’s an American Nazi posting stuff in France and France is like, banning pro-Nazi stuff, is Rubio going to say that the owners of that French platform doing content moderation are barred from entry to the United States?” If that weren’t enough free speech gaslighting, this is all happening as the U.S. detains and attempts to expel from the country foreign students for such offenses as writing op-eds critical of Israel for their college newspapers. “Every time I find one of these lunatics I take away their visa,” Rubio said in March.

On Wednesday the State Department issued a cable to embassies and consulates advising them to halt student visa interviews “in preparation for an expansion of required social media screening and vetting.” And on Friday, the department announced it would be starting this program with Harvard. Even the lack of a public-facing social media presence would be used by the government as evidence against student applicants, as it “may be reflective of evasiveness and call into question the applicant’s credibility.”

Put plainly, the Trump administration is going to scour international students’ social media posts for potential thought crimes against America — or even a lack thereof — in the name of protecting American values.

“Free speech is essential to the American way of life — a birthright over which foreign governments have no authority,” Rubio posted Wednesday. Rhapsodizing about the glories of free speech out of one side of his mouth while threatening draconian censorship out of the other is a long-standing Trumpian tactic. And some of Trump’s most senior deputies this week proved adept at matching their boss’s deception and hypocrisy.

Anthony L. Fisher

Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and writer for BLN Daily. He was previously the senior opinion editor for The Daily Beast and a politics columnist for Business Insider.