Therapy sessions are supposed to be sacred, private, a place to become totally vulnerable. Yet it’s been a constant subject in media — not only the fictionalized versions we all know from Woody Allen movies but real, live therapy sessions with real people.

There’s “Couples Therapy” on Showtime, in which Israeli therapist Orna Guralnik spends each season counseling a handful of pairs through a major dispute; there are currently three seasons. Esther Perel’s “Where Should We Begin?” podcast has been on for even longer, each episode exposing a one-off session with an anonymous couple.

Now Jonah Hill is entering the field of real-life therapy movies with “Stutz,” his new film on Netflix. But unlike the other major entries in the genre, “Stutz” isn’t giving a window into ongoing sessions; instead, it details the life and ideas of Phil Stutz, Hill’s longtime therapist.

At the beginning of the film, Hill tells Stutz that he’s making the movie because the therapist has helped him immeasurably, and he wants to bring his “tools” to a wider audience. It’s a noble goal, especially since the pandemic created a mental health crisis for countless people and exacerbated the mental health care shortage. But can it work?

Shot in black and white — except for one brief scene about 30 minutes into the 90-minute movie — the film consists nearly entirely of shots of Hill and Stutz, sitting across from each other in simple leather chairs, talking. Stutz, a 74-year-old man with Parkinson’s and a laid-back manner, curses a lot. Hill, meanwhile, sporting long, shaggy hair, is often self-serious, trying to redirect his therapist away from jokes toward the meat of the matter: Stutz’s therapeutic genius.

Stutz’s genius on a notecard. Courtesy of Netflix

“Stutz” takes a very different tack than its predecessors. Shows like “Couples Therapy” or “Where Should We Begin” are extremely consumable — they highlight couples with dramatic problems and big personalities. Perel’s sessions have featured, to name a few, a couple trying to balance polyamory with childrearing, one that has divorced and remarried multiple times and a pair whose immigration statuses are forcing them to marry sooner than they’re ready to. “Couples Therapy” has brought us into rooms with manipulative husbands and women with anger issues who scream and throw things which, for better or worse, makes for very good TV.

Of course, both shows feel ethically fraught to say the least. But they also offer actual insights. Sure, the clients may seem extreme on the surface, but the basic problems Guralnik and Perel deal with are universal: jealousy, power dynamics, past trauma. They teach clients — and, by proxy, viewers — how to take a step back from a conflict or how to communicate. 

Because Perel and Guralnik’s shows use a lot of storytelling, they draw you into each person’s issues. This allows you to witness the therapy in action and almost vicariously experience the moments of understanding or release that patients do. You see each patient struggle and grow, and how the therapist’s ideas apply to each situation.

But “Stutz” skips showing to focus on the telling, making it hard to truly grasp any of Stutz’s epiphanies. It isn’t entirely devoid of narrative; Stutz himself talks about the death of his younger brother at age 3 and his childhood in the Bronx. He talks about his Parkinson’s diagnosis, his parents, his relationship with his parents and an on-again, off-again girlfriend. Hill, too, talks a little bit about the death of his brother at age 40 as well as his insecurities about his body, though he’s initially resistant — understandably — to Stutz therapizing him on camera. 

But this still doesn’t give the viewer much to grasp onto. We don’t know Stutz, and have little attachment to his life story. There’s no framework through which to understand the mix of platitudes and strangely cult-like vocabulary that form Stutz’s therapeutic practice. 

Deep thinking. Courtesy of Netflix

Terms Stutz has made up, such as “Part X” — which he defines as the part of someone that is depressive, anxious and limited — are hard to understand without any application. Similarly, watching Hill meditate, demonstrating Stutz’s “tools,” feels farcical: Why am I staring at someone sitting with his eyes closed? 

“If I’m content with my true self, then other people’s opinions just affect me way, way less,” Hill says at one point. Duh? 

It doesn’t help that Stutz has a strange amount of bravado for a therapist, talking frequently about his natural talent for therapy and the way ideas spontaneously come to him. At times, especially with his invented vocabulary, he comes off more like a cult leader than a therapist.

I believe Stutz’s methods have been life-changing for Hill, who reportedly stopped doing publicity tours due to his panic attacks. But at the end of the film, he admits that he didn’t make “Stutz” only because of a desire to heal the world. “I made this movie because I love Phil,” Hill says. (So much for clinical distance.) But why should we, the viewer, care?

One of the unavoidable facts of therapy is that it is non-transferable — you need to actually go through it, get vulnerable and go deep, for it to work. There’s reams of writing in psychotherapy on ideas such as transference and how essential the specifics of the relationship with a therapist are. 

Therapy isn’t just being handed vacuous statements about self-acceptance or healthy habits. Otherwise, we would all just read a self-help book. Or, I guess, watch a self-help movie.

The post Jonah Hill loves his therapist so much he made a movie about it appeared first on The Forward.

(NewsNation) — Authorities have identified the six people who were killed when a gunman opened fire Tuesday night inside a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia.

The shooter is also dead, city officials said early Wednesday. Walmart said in a statement the shooter was an employee identified as Andre Bing, 31. He was an overnight team lead who was employed with Walmart since 2010.

“The City of Chesapeake has always been known as the “City That Cares” and now, more than ever, we know our City will show up and care for those who need it most,” the City of Chesapeake said in a release Wednesday.

This is what we know so far about those who died:

Randy Blevins of Chesapeake, 70

Lorenzo Gamble of Chesapeake, 43

Tyneka Johnson of Portsmouth, 38

Brian Pendleton of Chesapeake, 38

Kellie Pyle of Chesapeake, 52

A 16-year-old boy was the sixth victim, but his name and picture are being withheld due to him being a minor.

This story is developing. Refresh for updates.

The head of Brazil’s electoral court Alexandre de Moraes on Wednesday rejected a complaint from President Jair Bolsonaro’s party to challenge October’s run-off vote, which the incumbent lost my a narrow margin, according to a court document.

Moraes, who’s also a Supreme Court justice, also fined the parties in Bolsonaro’s coalition to the tune of 22.9 million reais for what the court described as bad faith litigation, the document showed.

On December 6, Georgia will have a runoff between the top two candidates in their Senate race – incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker, whose candidacy has been a headache for the GOP from day one – to the degree that the party has begged the former guy to stay away from Georgia in the hope that they can win the seat.

The problem is that Walker had an advantage in the first round as people came out in droves to support incumbent Republican Gov. Brian Kemp who was also on the ballot – and they don’t have anything like that this time. The other problem for Republicans aside from finding someone respectable who will stump for Walker is that Senate control has already been decided.

This might lead some people to be complacent – but there’s a major reason to do all you can for Rev. Warnock as the first round of voting begins – aside from giving Democrats a 51-49 majority in the Senate. While Warnock has President Obama coming to campaign for him, Walker is campaigning with notorious homophobe Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson.

Coming on the heels of the anti-LGBTQ massacre in Colorado Springs, it’s obvious Walker is sending a message – he’s a homophobic bigot who’s unfit to govern. We cannot look the other way while the GOP is actively engaging in dangerous rhetoric – we need to come out in droves to defeat it and send a message as clear as the one sent on Nov 8.

The post The Herschel Walker nightmare gets even uglier appeared first on Palmer Report.

We should soon be getting a ruling from the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals on the appointment of a special master in the classified documents fiasco. Trump once again experienced bad luck in this case, as two of the same justices who ruled against him before are hearing the case. Britt Grant and Andrew Brasher are both Trump appointees, and both overruled Judge Aileen Cannon on several of her rulings. The third justice hearing the case is a Bush (43) appointee named William Pryor Jr. Grant and Brasher ruled earlier that Cannon “abused her discretion” in granting the special master, so it seems that we may already know the outcome of this case.

According to AlterNet, the three-judge panel raked Trump’s lawyers over the proverbial coals during Tuesday’s hearing. The hearing was described as “tense” by Anna Bower of Lawfare Blog, who was in attendance. These justices are not idiots. They revealed that with their earlier ruling. The idea that these classified documents are “personal items” belonging to Trump is ridiculous, as is his claim that he waved a magic wand and declassified all of them.

AlterNet reported that mere minutes into the hearing, it was clear that Judge Pryor wasn’t buying what Trump’s attorneys were selling. Unlike Cannon, Judge Pryor wanted case law supporting Trump’s arguments. Specifically, according to Andrew Feinberg, who was reporting on the hearing, Judge Pryor as Trump’s attorney to “cite any case law in which a court has used equitable jurisdiction in a pre-indictment scenario.” Jim Trusty, Trump’s attorney, called the taking of documents that didn’t belong to Trump “a raid,” but Judge Grant admonished him, asking him if “raid” is the correct term. Trusty wants to call the document retrieval “unlawful,” but it was anything but that. Trump taking the documents was unlawful, yet his attorneys want to characterize the government retrieving them and returning them to where they belong as unlawful. These judges are not going to fall for Trusty’s nonsense. One of them called Trust’s argument a “secret” because it makes no sense. They further let Trump’s team know that they were on to them, pointing out that they seemed to be making “different arguments in different venues.”

Trump needs to give it up. These judges didn’t buy Cannon’s ridiculous ruling, and they are not buying Team Trump’s ridiculous arguments. Trump’s team has no basis in law for their arguments. They didn’t from the beginning. They lucked up and got Aileen Cannon, who went along with whatever they wanted, the law be damned. The three-judge panel at the Court of Appeals want a legal argument, and they are not going to get one from these clowns. As a result, they will likely rule against Trump’s team and, once again, overrule Aileen Cannon.

The post Donald Trump takes the loss appeared first on Palmer Report.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged the United Nations Security Council to act against Russia over air strikes on civilian infrastructure that have again plunged Ukrainian cities into darkness and cold as winter sets in.

Russia unleashed a missile barrage across Ukraine on Wednesday, killing 10 people, forcing shutdowns of nuclear power plants and cutting water and electricity supply in many places.

“Today is just one day, but we have received 70 missiles. That’s the Russian formula of terror. This is all against our energy infrastructure… Hospitals, schools, transport, residential districts all suffered,” Zelenskiy said via video link to the council chamber.

Ukraine was waiting to see “a very firm reaction” to Wednesday’s air strikes from the world, he added.

The council is unlikely to take any action in response to the appeal since Russia is a member with veto power.

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Russian President Vladimir Putin was “clearly weaponizing winter to inflict immense suffering on the Ukrainian people.”

The Russian president “will try to freeze the country into submission,” she added.

Russia’s U.N. ambassador Vasily Nebenzya responded by complaining that it was against council rules for Zelenskiy to appear via video, and rejected what he called “reckless threats and ultimatums” by Ukraine and its supporters in the West.

Nebenzya said damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure was caused by missiles fired by Ukrainian air defence systems that crashed into civilian areas after being fired at Russia’s missiles, and called on the West to stop providing Ukraine with air defence missiles.

The capital city of Kyiv was one of the main targets on Wednesday of the missile strikes. “Today we had three hits on high-rise apartment buildings. Unfortunately 10 people died,” said Interior Minister Denys Monastyrsky. Reuters was unable to independently verify the reports.

Explosions reverberated throughout Kyiv as Russian missiles bore down and Ukrainian air defence rockets were fired in efforts to intercept them. Air raid sirens also blared across the country in a nationwide alert.

“Our little one was sleeping. Two years old. She was sleeping, she got covered. She is alive, thanks be to God,” said a man who gave his name as Fyodr, walking away from a smouldering apartment building that was hit in Kyiv, dragging a suitcase.

All of the Kyiv region, where over 3 million people live, lost electricity and running water, Kyiv’s governor said. Much of Ukraine suffered similar problems and some regions implemented emergency blackouts to help conserve energy and carry out repairs.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko, speaking late on Wednesday, said 80% of people in the capital were still without power and water. But Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said repair crews were working hard and “electricity will begin to appear in the coming hours.”

By 6 p.m., electricity in half of the western city of Lviv had been restored following repairs, its mayor said.

Ukraine’s top military commander, General Valeriy Zaluzhniy, said air defences had shot down 51 of 67 Russian cruise missiles launched, including 20 of the 30 that targeted Kyiv.

Since October, Russia has acknowledged targeting Ukraine’s civilian energy grid far from front lines as a Ukrainian counter-offensive has recaptured territory from Russian occupiers in the east and south.

Moscow says the aim of its missile strikes is to weaken Ukraine’s ability to fight and push it to negotiate. Kyiv says the attacks on infrastructure amount to war crimes, deliberately intended to harm civilians and to break the national will.

That will not happen, Zelenskiy vowed in an earlier video address posted on the Telegram messaging app.

“We’ll renew everything and get through all of this because we are an unbreakable people,” he said.

With the first snow of Ukraine’s generally frigid winter falling, authorities worry about the impact of power cuts on millions of people.

Zelenskiy on Tuesday announced special “invincibility centres” would provide citizens with electricity, heat, water, internet, mobile phone links and a pharmacy, free of charge and around the clock. Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the presidential administration, said on the Telegram messaging app that 2,750 of the centres were in operation on Wednesday night.

In addition, Europe’s biggest cities will donate power generators and transformers.

A series of Russian battlefield setbacks in the east and south included a Russian retreat earlier this month from the key southern city of Kherson.

Ground battles continue to rage in the east, where Russia is pressing an offensive along a stretch of front line west of the city of Donetsk, which has been held by its proxies since 2014.

Moscow says it is carrying out a “special military operation” to protect Russian speakers in what Putin calls an artificial state carved from Russia. Ukraine and the West call the invasion an unprovoked land grab.

Western responses have included billions of dollars worth of financial aid and state-of-the-art military hardware for Kyiv and waves of punitive sanctions on Russia.

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(JTA) — Four and a half feet of snow had just fallen on East Aurora, New York, but Kim Kaiser and her fellow volunteers through Jewish Family Services of Western New York weren’t willing to compromise on their Thanksgiving plans.

Those plans involved joining a community Thanksgiving feast on Tuesday night, two days before the holiday, at the Ukrainian American Civic Center in nearby Buffalo, along with the Ukrainian family of six that the volunteers had been supporting since their arrival to the United States at the end of the summer.

The event, which was sponsored by the Buffalo branch of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, was open to all new Ukrainian arrivals, their sponsors and their supporters. A buffet of traditional Thanksgiving foods was on offer, along with musical accompaniment by a Ukrainian singer and pianist.

For Kaiser, the evening was a can’t-miss milestone in her journey supporting recent immigrants who have come to the United States under duress. Last year, she began volunteering through Jewish Family Services to set up housing for Afghan, Congolese and Burmese refugees new to Buffalo, which has a very large refugee population.

“And then I heard of a family in our town that was going to be sponsoring a family from Ukraine,” Kaiser told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “My husband and I knew that we needed, that we wanted to do this.”

In joining the efforts to support refugees, Kaiser participated in an age-old Jewish tradition. The importance of welcoming strangers is so deeply rooted in Jewish tradition and experience that immigration issues have long enjoyed a bipartisan consensus in American Jewish communities even amid deep polarization on other topics. Many cities have social services agencies that began to support Jewish immigrants and now work with new arrivals of all backgrounds, often conscripting Jewish volunteers as the backbone of their work.

Over the last year, those networks have kicked into high gear as not just one but two significant waves of people unable to remain safely in their homes made their way to American shores: first Afghans last year after the U.S. military withdrawal from their country and then Ukrainians this year amid the war instigated by Russia there.

Now, as millions of Americans prepare for their Thanksgiving meals, Jewish volunteers are introducing Ukrainian and Afghan evacuees to Thanksgiving for the first time. Some are even setting aside their own reservations about the holiday to do so. (Thanksgiving’s cheery origin myth is seen by many as whitewashing the genocide of Native Americans that followed the arrival of Europeans in North America.)

In California, Gail Dratch and her husband Elliot have been volunteering through the Orange County Jewish Coalition for Refugees. They will celebrate the holiday on Thursday by inviting a family from Afghanistan into their home, where they’ll serve a halal turkey — in keeping with their Muslim guests’ religious requirements.

“For us, Thanksgiving has become just such a part of what we do,” Dratch told JTA. “And I know my family at least, we don’t think about the beginnings of Thanksgiving, which are really troubling. My daughters especially are very troubled by the original story. But clearly, this family is so thankful for having this opportunity to be in the United States.”

Both Kaiser and Dratch got support for their volunteer circles from their local Jewish federations, in Buffalo and Orange County. They were two of 15 local federations to get support from Jewish Federations of North America, an umbrella group, to resettle nearly 2,000 Afghans through refugee welcome circles, according to Darcy Hirch, a spokesperson.

Gail and Elliot Dratch stand with their partners from the volunteer circle and their evacuee family from Afghanistan, whose faces have been blurred for their safety. (Courtesy of Jewish Federations of North America.) Image by

The Dratches have done far more than cook a special dinner. The Afghan family they are working with arrived on a Special Immigrant Visa, so the father was able to obtain a driver’s license quickly and found work almost immediately. But the mother had to learn to drive from scratch.

“She cried the first time I took her to a big parking lot just to drive around Angel Stadium,” Dratch said, referring to the stadium in Anaheim where the Los Angeles Angels play. “And when she got behind the wheel, she cried because she said it’s been a dream of hers to drive but she never thought she’d be able to, living in Afghanistan.”

The couple’s son, who is in preschool, is learning English very quickly, Dratch said.

“They’re just charming, lovely people,” she said. “It was their dream to come to the United States and raise their son here because they knew he would have far more opportunities here than in Afghanistan. And so we are thankful that this family has come into our lives because they’ve been such a gift to us.”

Dratch’s experience working with displaced people began in 2016 when she went to Greece to work with Syrian refugees.

“I think in the future people are going to look back and say, ‘Why wasn’t more done?’” she said. “And I don’t want to look back and think, ‘Why didn’t I do something?’”

In Buffalo, Kaiser’s volunteer circle takes turns running errands and sharing the duties of a host family for the parents and with four children with whom they have been working since September. Though the family has only been in the United States for a few months, Kaiser said she has noticed a big difference in the children, who she says were initially downcast and shy but are now “smiles all around.”

At the meal on Tuesday, which was set up for 200 people, Kaiser says she saw evacuees mingling with each other, delighting in speaking Ukrainian without relying on Google translate to communicate with each other, and exchanging addresses and telephone numbers with where they can be reached in the Buffalo area. The kids went back to the buffet table multiple times for dessert.

Said Kaiser, “You can tell that every time you do something for them that they are thankful that there’s somebody there to help them and that they can start feeling, finally, a little bit at ease.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Jewish community groups host Afghan, Ukrainian evacuees for Thanksgiving meals appeared first on The Forward.

Editor’s note: This piece was originally published in 2016.

The first Thanksgiving I spent in America, the banking system foreclosed on me. On my third Thanksgiving, my girlfriend of a year dumped me. On the fourth, I nearly died of an asthma attack in a Nashville basement.

Since those disasters, I’ve avoided relying on banks, my health or loved ones, but that didn’t stop me from spending 20 hours of Thanksgiving 2007 in transit to or from the airport, or just in plain residence at La Guardia waiting for a plane to arrive from some putative storm in Chicago.

So that’s why I’m not disposed to give thanks, personally. But why, apart from our shared grumpiness, should you care?

Well, I think you should care about the crass hypocrisy of contemporary America in its embrace of the secular myth of Thanksgiving. Apart from its noble job of acting as a tentpole supporting consumer demand between Halloween and Chrismukkah, what is its purpose?

Image by Addams Family Thanksgiving

My source text for understanding this peculiar American holiday is the authoritative documentary “Addams Family Thanksgiving” (1993). Here’s how it goes: Some white Christian folk arrived on the East Coast, refugees from religious persecution. They weren’t great farmers so the local indigenous people reached out to help. In a triumph of ahistorical blindness, America munches its turkey and candied yams to echo that legendary dinner of venison and corn while forgetting about the campaigns of biological warfare carried out by Lord Jeffrey Amherst and others against those indigenous tribes, as well as the many broken treaties with other Native Americans.

As Wednesday Addams puts it on behalf of the local sovereign peoples:

We will sell our bracelets by the roadside; you will play golf and enjoy hot hors d’oeuvres. My people will have pain and degradation; your people will have stick-shifts.

Then, despite the history of persecution that the settlers were fleeing, they or their descendants founded a nation that has an undistinguished history of slavery, racism and religious intolerance. Thanksgiving is less a celebration of unity than a reflection of historical revisionism and an inflection point from which the religiously persecuted could become the ethnic, religious persecutors. This is not an amnesiac point that I, as a Jew, identifying ethnically and religiously, want to celebrate.

Plus, if this is the American Sukkot — a post-harvest festival of thanks — we can celebrate in 2017 the election of a president who thinks that climate change is a hoax and that we should register all the Muslims who live in America. So if there are thanks to be given, perhaps we can fit in a moment or two among the smug carbohydrates and concussive college football to celebrate the final days of our fragile natural and social ecosystems.

That first year, I was a student short of cash but, after asking my dad to wire me some money from my U.K. account, I went to Washington, D.C., to see a friend. I knew that, before the English money arrived, I had $100. So I went to an ATM to take out $60. It didn’t dispense the first time so I went to another machine. But a broke Thanksgiving week and many anxious phone calls later (of course the bank was closed the whole long weekend), it transpired that the ATM had told the bank that I had taken all my money out. So the bank decided to close my account. And to close it before the money from England, sent days before on very slow wires, arrived. And to do so without telling me.

That bank, by the way, had been named for a Native American tribe in what is now known as New England. But it was swallowed up by Bank of America — one of the major villains of the subprime mortgage scandal. The impersonal incompetence of the Bank of America nearly ruined my experience of Washington, D.C. — an experience that was saved only by the generosity of my friend lending me money and providing me with hospitality. Yes, that’s right, the only bright spot of my Thanksgiving experience came from a swarthy foreigner from the Middle East and a prospective immigrant.

I’m sure there’s a metaphor there, but I’ll leave it for you as a puzzle to accompany the cranberry sauce (which, despite its profound environmental cost, I love).

The post Why I detest Thanksgiving — and you should, too appeared first on The Forward.

Can the media stop portraying Kevin McCarthy as if he were the incoming Speaker of the House? He doesn’t have the votes. He could end up getting the votes, but he doesn’t have them, and over the past days he’s been very publicly losing votes from within his own caucus.

It’s maybe 50-50 as to whether McCarthy ends up being Speaker of the House. The media has no business pretending those odds are 99% or 100%. But the media knows that if it portrays McCarthy as the de facto Speaker-elect when it reports on the hideous things he’s threatening to do as Speaker, the media will be able to get more hate-clicks and outrage-clicks out of those headlines.

If the media factually acknowledges that McCarthy is a long way away from being able to get himself elected Speaker, then the general public will be less interested in whatever threats McCarthy is making, because those will be seen as potentially hollow threats.

So even though the media could get some ratings and page views out of covering the difficulty that McCarthy is having in trying to find the votes to become Speaker, the media has already decided that there are more ratings and page views to be had by framing McCarthy’s current words and threats as if they were coming from the next Speaker. And the media knows it has to be one or the other. It can’t report on McCarthy having trouble getting the votes to become Speaker in one breath, and then turn around and hype McCarthy as the de facto next Speaker in the next breath. Except some major news outlets are doing precisely that, because if you’re basing your media narratives on bullshit to begin with, why would consistency matter?

Of course none of this should play into the media’s decision making at all. The honest facts are that he’s facing a possible but difficult road to becoming Speaker, and that the threats he’s making will be contingent upon his difficult odds of becoming Speaker. But that’s a nuanced narrative, and major media outlets don’t seem particularly interested in nuance these days.

The post The media is blowing Kevin McCarthy’s difficult path to becoming Speaker appeared first on Palmer Report.