May 3, 2023

Wednesday, May 3, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

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Breakin’. 💥💥💥 Democrats may soon have a majority in the Senate once again.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer holds sheets of paper with talking points on debt ceiling legislation during a press conference on Capitol Hill on May 2, 2023.

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Chuck Schumer spoke to Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Monday and the ailing California Democrat is “hopeful” she’ll return to Washington next week, according to notes the Senate majority leader held at a Tuesday press conference.

Feinstein, who is set to retire at the end of this Congress, has been absent from the Senate since early March after being hospitalized with shingles. The 89-year-old’s continued absence has left Democrats short of a crucial vote both in the chamber and on the Senate Judiciary Committee. The potential effect of her lost vote took on new urgency Monday, when Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced the country could breach the debt limit by June 1.

Schumer did not address Feinstein’s absence aloud during the press conference.

“It was in his notes, and he would have said if someone asked,” Schumer’s spokesperson told POLITICO.

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Joe is always busy.

Dark Brandon.

Good to have friends, who live near China.

The President turns his attention to the Debt Ceiling.

President Biden has made it clear that he won’t negotiate the budget and the debt ceiling at the same time.

Touch to watch the President speak on the debt ceiling.👇

Everything you need to know about the debt ceiling.

Washington is heading for another big fight over whether to raise or suspend the nation’s debt limit, which caps the amount of money the federal government can borrow to pay its bills.

This year is shaping up to be the messiest fight in at least a decade. Republicans are demanding that an increase in the borrowing limit be accompanied by spending cuts and other cost savings. President Biden has said he will oppose any attempt to tie spending cuts to raising the debt ceiling, increasing the likelihood of a protracted standoff.

The president is set to meet with Republican and Democratic leaders at the White House on May 9 to discuss a path forward. But it is still unclear how quickly lawmakers will act to raise the nation’s borrowing cap.

Here is what you need to know about the debt limit and what happens if no deal can be reached:

What is the debt limit?

The debt limit is a cap on the total amount of money that the United States is authorized to borrow to fund the government and meet its financial obligations [from past borrowing].

Is the Debt Limit Constitutional? Biden Aides Are Debating It.

A standoff between House Republicans and President Biden over raising the nation’s borrowing limit has administration officials debating what to do if the government runs out of cash to pay its bills, including one option that previous administrations had deemed unthinkable.

That option is effectively a constitutional challenge to the debt limit. Under the theory, the government would be required by the 14th Amendment to continue issuing new debt to pay bondholders, Social Security recipients, government employees and others, even if Congress fails to lift the limit before the so-called X-date.

That theory rests on the 14th Amendment clause stating that “the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

Some legal scholars contend that language overrides the statutory borrowing limit, which currently caps federal debt at $31.4 trillion and requires congressional approval to raise or lift. (New York Times).

One more thing. We Democrats are ready to fight to get the job done.

House Democrats Move to Force a Debt-Limit Increase as Default Date Looms.

House Democratic leaders who have been quietly planning a strategy to force a debt ceiling increase to avert default began taking steps on Tuesday to deploy their secret weapon.

The only clue to the gambit was in the title of the otherwise obscure hodgepodge of a bill: “The Breaking the Gridlock Act.”

But the 45-page legislation, introduced without fanfare in January by a little-known Democrat, Representative Mark DeSaulnier of California, is part of a confidential, previously unreported, strategy Democrats have been plotting for months to quietly smooth the way for action by Congress to avert a devastating federal default if debt ceiling talks remain deadlocked.

With a possible default now projected as soon as June 1, Democrats on Tuesday began taking steps to deploy the secret weapon they have been holding in reserve. They started the process of trying to force a debt-limit increase bill to the floor through a so-called discharge petition that could bypass Republican leaders who have refused to raise the ceiling unless President Biden agrees to spending cuts and policy changes.

“House Democrats are working to make sure we have all options at our disposal to avoid a default,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, wrote in a letter he sent to colleagues on Tuesday. “The filing of a debt ceiling measure to be brought up on the discharge calendar preserves an important option. It is now time for MAGA Republicans to act in a bipartisan manner to pay America’s bills without extreme conditions.”

An emergency rule Democrats introduced on Tuesday, during a pro forma session held while the House is in recess, would start the clock on a process that would allow them to begin collecting signatures as soon as May 16 on such a petition, which can force action on a bill if a majority of members sign on. The open-ended rule would provide a vehicle to bring Mr. DeSaulnier’s bill to the floor and amend it with a Democratic proposal — which has yet to be written — to resolve the debt limit crisis.

The strategy is no silver bullet, and Democrats concede it is a long shot. Gathering enough signatures to force a bill to the floor would take at least five Republicans willing to cross party lines if all Democrats signed on, a threshold that Democrats concede will be difficult to reach. They have yet to settle on the debt ceiling proposal itself, and for the strategy to succeed, Democrats would likely need to negotiate with a handful of mainstream Republicans to settle on a measure they could accept.

A handful of hard-right Republicans explicitly warned their colleagues on Tuesday not to go down that path. “House Republicans: don’t defect!” Senator Mike Lee of Utah wrote on Twitter.

Still, Democrats argue that the prospect of a successful effort could force House Republicans into a more acceptable deal. And Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen’s announcement on Monday that a potential default was only weeks away spurred Democratic leaders to act. (New York Times).

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Kamala is always busy.

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Is this the country we want?

Private Security Guards Are Replacing Police Across America.

This may surprise you. 👇

Poverty is a middle class problem.

Poverty leads to homelessness. Poverty leads to crime.

Poverty deprives America of the use of all its people’s talents and opportunities.

Poverty causes fear - for the poor, but also for the middle class, afraid of homeless people, afraid of poor people, afraid their own lives may change.

The Republican solution is scare tactics.

The Democratic solution must be - End Poverty, End Homelessness.

There is big work to do in America.

Poverty is a middle class problem.

If we don’t end poverty and homelessness, they will create an unhappy, unproductive and violent America.

Andre Boyer, an agent for the Strategic Intervention Tactical Enforcement (S.I.T.E.), is seen patrolling the sidewalk outside of a Karco gas station in North Philadelphia, Pa. on April 24, 2023.

“We’re not here to beat people up,” says Boyer, who heads S.I.T.E, a private protection agency that is patrolling gas stations and hotels in Philadelphia at the behest of store owners. “We’re here to let the public know that they can feel safe.”

Boyer’s armed guard service has boomed over the last year as Philadelphia police staffing issues led to longer response times. Neil Patel, the owner of this Karco gas station, says he hired Boyer in December after thieves stole an ATM from his gas station and the police didn’t respond for six hours.

Patel is not the only business owner shelling out money for private security as police departments across the U.S. lose staff.

Already struggling to recruit new applicants in 2019, police departments saw a spike of retirements and a drop-off in new recruits after the 2020 murder of George Floyd and subsequent backlash against police, says Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. In Philadelphia alone, police staffing levels dropped nearly 10% from the end of 2019 to the end of 2022, a recent government audit found. Nationally, the number of sworn officers dropped 7% between 2019 and 2021, according to FBI data.

While police departments were losing officers, crime was rising in many parts of America. Murders, assaults, and car thefts rose nationally in 2020, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, and an increase in homelessness has heightened anxieties about safety. These factors bolstered the private security industry, which had already been growing steadily since the terrorist attacks of September 11 but has boomed since 2020. There are roughly twice as many security guards employed in the U.S. than there were 20 years ago, according to the Security Industry Association, though the nation’s population has only grown 16% over the same time period.

By 2021, there were about 2 police officers but 3.1 security guards for every 1,000 civilians.

Private security signals an unequal economy

The rise of private security is both driven by income inequality—wealthy people have more things to protect and money to spend to protect them—and exacerbates it. For every Neil Patel who decides to shell out $750 a day for round-the-clock armed guards, there are thousands of business owners and civilians who have to make do with what their taxes can buy.

The Los Angeles Police Department is not meeting its staffing goals, for instance, but its neighbor, tony Beverly Hills, Calif., has hired two security firms whose employees patrol the city in cars or on foot as “an extension of the police,” says Todd Johnson, CEO of the Beverly Hills Chamber of Commerce.

Residents and business associations in upper-middle class neighborhoods like Lincoln Park, Chicago, Neponsit, N.Y. and San Francisco’s Marina District have chipped in extra money to hire private security because residents report feeling unsafe. By contrast, in New Orleans, a city where the median income is about half that in Beverly Hills, police response times have tripled, from 51 minutes in 2019 to 146 minutes last year.

Wealthy cities can also attract more police officers because they have the tax base to offer high wages and benefits. Seattle, for instance, is offering an $80,000 salary and $30,000 signing bonus. But poorer police departments can’t come close to matching that kind of money, says Wexler, with the Police Executive Research Forum. “This is what keeps police chiefs and mayors up at night—who are going to be the future police officers in their city,” he says. (Time).

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What has the Constitution done for women lately.

Last week, the Senate held a vote on the Equal Rights Amendment — the latest development in a century-long effort to amend the Constitution to explicitly guarantee sex equality. The E.R.A. resolution received 51 (bipartisan) votes but fell short of the 60 votes necessary to advance under the Senate’s current rules.

The fight for the E.R.A. remains critical — with Roe v. Wade now toppled, it is in fact more critical than ever. Despite what a majority of Americans think, our Constitution has no explicit guarantee of equal rights for women and men — the only right that cannot be denied or abridged “on account of sex” is the right to vote. In the hands of the current Supreme Court, the existing Constitution’s equality guarantees do far too little to protect women.

The E.R.A. would protect the fundamental rights necessary for women to live as equal citizens in America. Properly applied, it would guard against pregnancy and motherhood discrimination; it would also protect women’s control over their reproductive lives. It would authorize laws remedying gender violence, like domestic violence and sexual assault. It might even require government to reduce the gender pay gap.

The fight for the E.R.A. also has broader significance for American politics: It should serve as a reminder that constitutional amendment is possible — and necessary, especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — and that it is one area in which Congress, not courts, gets the final say.

Our Constitution is one of the most difficult in the world to amend. The last truly significant amendment — the 26th, which lowered the voting age to 18 — belonged to another era, in 1971, when Richard Nixon was president. But the remoteness of the possibility of formal constitutional change today may be as much a product of constitutional culture as constitutional structure: Several generations of Americans have lost the habit and muscle memory of seeking formal constitutional change, and the push to get Congress to declare the E.R.A. part of the Constitution could lead the way out of this inertia.

The E.R.A. was first introduced in 1923, and in 1972 Congress adopted it by well over the constitutionally required two-thirds supermajorities. It looked to be sailing to ratification, for which the Constitution requires approval by three-quarters of the states. But progress ground to a halt in the late 1970s, just three states short, after a conservative movement led by Phyllis Schlafly ignited fear of an America without patriarchy.

Congress has taken renewed interest in the E.R.A., especially since the Supreme Court ended women’s constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs — though it wasn’t Dobbs alone. Donald Trump’s misogyny helped galvanize a renewed push for the E.R.A., with Nevada ratifying in 2017, Illinois in 2018 and Virginia in 2020, which brought the total to 38 — the number necessary to ratify an amendment.

But there’s a catch. When Congress passed the E.R.A. in 1972, it included a ratification deadline, providing that the amendment would be part of the Constitution “when ratified within seven years” — that is, 1979. Congress later extended the time frame, but only until 1982 — and some states also voted to rescind their ratifications. So skeptics raise a serious question: How can the recent ratifications be valid when they came decades after even the second deadline? And do the rescissions deprive the E.R.A. of the constitutionally required 38 states?

The debate today is over who decides how to treat both deadlines and rescissions. The Constitution’s provisions on amendment are silent on these questions. What Article V of the Constitution does say is that Congress is in charge of proposing amendments that it deems necessary. It also empowers Congress to choose the “mode of ratification,” a power that is understood, even by the Supreme Court, to include control over time frames. If the deadline power belongs to Congress, shouldn’t the power to change any deadlines it imposes — as well as the power to refuse to recognize rescissions — also lie with Congress?

That’s the position taken by the bipartisan resolution that fell short in the Senate last week: It would remove the E.R.A. deadline and recognize it as ratified, period.

The amendment process was designed to give the people’s representatives in Congress the lead role in shaping constitutional meaning, especially at times when the unelected Supreme Court’s interpretations of the Constitution neglect the needs and desires of the American people.

In 1924, for example, after the Supreme Court struck down federal laws that restricted child labor, Congress proposed the Child Labor Amendment. After 28 states ratified it, the Supreme Court changed course. Not only did the court begin upholding federal child labor laws; it also conceded that the question of a constitutional amendment’s timeliness was a political question that the Constitution left to Congress rather than the courts.

The 14th Amendment was itself a direct response to a Supreme Court decision, Dred Scott v. Sanford, which in 1857 held that Black people could never be U.S. citizens. The 14th Amendment overruled that holding, conferring citizenship on all persons born or naturalized in the United States. When two states sought to rescind their ratifications of the 14th Amendment, Congress asserted its control over the amendment process, ignoring those efforts and recognizing the 14th Amendment — the foundation of inclusive democracy — as part of the Constitution.

Skeptics say that the E.R.A. is no longer needed because Supreme Court decisions have enforced sex equality under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. But many senators — many people, period — now point to the rising threats to women’s lives and health after the Dobbs decision greenlighted near-total abortion bans. This reality suggests that the existing Constitution inadequately protects women’s fundamental rights.

Indeed, in all three states that recently ratified the E.R.A., ratification debates emphasized the continuing need for law and public policy to address remaining manifestations of gender inequality — even before Dobbs. These include pay inequity, often attributable to workplace disadvantages women face because of pregnancy, motherhood and caregiving obligations, and the persistence of sexual assault and harassment.

The Dobbs decision effectively exposes millions of American women to laws that force them to bear children, even those conceived through sexual assault, in states that do nothing to alleviate the burdens, disadvantages and risks stemming from both pregnancy and motherhood. It demonstrates the Supreme Court’s pinched view of the 14th Amendment’s commitments — essentially freezing the amendment’s meaning at the moment of ratification in 1868, before women could vote. Dobbs has further emboldened some judges to revive enforcement of 19th-century laws including the Comstock Act, which were intended to control women’s bodies before the law regarded women as equal citizens.

Congress has already begun to carve a path in response to Dobbs in the context of ordinary legislation. In December 2022 it passed the Respect for Marriage Act to protect same-sex and interracial marriage following Justice Clarence Thomas’s ominous Dobbs concurrence suggesting that some constitutional protections for marriage equality should be re-examined. Congress also enacted the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, requiring employers to provide reasonable accommodations to pregnant workers.

A forceful push for the E.R.A. is critical not just for the values it would confirm in our Constitution. It could also give Americans a taste for the constitutional amendment process, which has come to feel much too out of reach and would enable the people through their elected representatives to challenge the constitutional direction taken by the Supreme Court.

Congress should activate its full powers as the director of the amendment process and, in the name of both sex equality and the possibility of making “a more perfect union,” reacquaint Americans with the possibility of changing the Constitution.

(This is a Guest Essay in the New York Times by Julie Suk and Kate Shaw). Julie C. Suk, a law professor at Fordham, is the author of “After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do About It” and “We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment.” Kate Shaw is a contributing Opinion writer, a professor of law at Cardozo Law School and a host of the Supreme Court podcast “Strict Scrutiny.” She served as a law clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens and Judge Richard Posner.).

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Happening around the states.

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What is wrong with CNN?

Touch 👇 to watch Keith Obermann denounce CNN. CNN will broadcast Trump’s town hall on May 9 and allow questions only from GOP voters. Warning - Obermann’s language is not genteel.

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The Writers’ Strike. Why?

LOS ANGELES (AP) — [The Writers Guild], the union representing 11,500 writers of film, television and other entertainment forms, are now on strike. It’s the first writers’ strike — and the first Hollywood strike of any kind — in 15 years. Here’s a look at the storylines the fight has spawned.

Why Hollywood Writers are striking and the immediate impact.

WHY ARE THE WRITERS STRIKING?

Streaming and its ripple effects are at the center of the dispute. The guild says that even as series budgets have increased, writers’ share of that money has consistently shrunk.

Streaming services’ use of smaller staffs — known in the industry as “mini rooms” — for shorter stints has made sustained income harder to come by, the guild says. And the number of writers working at guild minimums has gone from about a third to about half in the past decade. Writers of comedy-variety shows for streaming have no minimum protections at all, the guild says.

“On TV staffs, more writers are working at minimum regardless of experience, often for fewer weeks,” the guild said in a March report.

The lack of a regular seasonal calendar in streaming has depressed pay further, the report says. And scheduled annual pay bumps under the current contract have fallen well short of increases in inflation.

The weekly minimum for a staff writer on a television series in the 2019-2020 season was $4,546, according to industry trade outlet Variety. They work an average of 29 weeks on a network show for $131,834 annually, or an average of 20 weeks on a streaming show for $90,920. For a writer-producer, the figure is $6,967 per week.

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents Hollywood’s studios, streamers and production companies, say their priority is “the long-term health and stability of the industry” and they are dedicated to reaching “a fair and reasonable agreement.” (Associated Press).

One more thing. Tony Kushner, the acclaimed playwright and a screenwriter of movies like “Lincoln” and “The Fabelmans,” said from the picket line, referring to Hollywood studios.

“They’re making it impossible for younger writers to make a living,” Mr. Kushner . . . said. “Our wages have declined since the last strike.” (Source-New York Times).

Why Are TV Writers So Miserable?

On the cusp of a potential strike, writers explain why no one is having much fun making television anymore.

Possibly the most famous telegram in Hollywood history was sent in 1925, when Herman J. Mankiewicz, the future co-writer of “Citizen Kane,” urged his newsman friend Ben Hecht to move West and collect three hundred dollars a week from Paramount. “The three hundred is peanuts,” Mankiewicz assured him. “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots.” The rise of the talkies, for which Hecht became a prolific scenarist, soon brought a wave of non-idiot writers to Los Angeles, to supply the snappy movie dialogue of the thirties—a decade that, not incidentally, saw the rise of the Screen Writers Guild.

Writers have always endured indignities in Hollywood. But, as long as there are millions to be grabbed, the trade-off has been bearable—except when it isn’t. The past month has brought the discontent of television writers to a boiling point. In mid-April, the Writers Guild of America (the modern successor to the Screen Writers Guild) voted to authorize a strike, with a decisive 97.85 per cent in favor. The guild’s current contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers expires on May 1st; if the negotiations break down, it will be the W.G.A.’s first strike since late 2007 and early 2008. At issue are minimum fees, royalties, staffing requirements, and even the use of artificial intelligence in script production—but the over-all stakes, from the perspective of TV writers, feel seismic. “This is an existential fight for the future of the business of writing,” Laura Jacqmin, whose credits include Epix’s “Get Shorty” and Peacock’s “Joe vs. Carole,” told me; like the other writers I spoke to, she had voted for the strike authorization. “If we do not dig in now, there will be nothing to fight for in three years.” TV writers seem, on the whole, miserable. “The word I would use,” Jacqmin said, “is ‘desperation.’ ”

How did it come to this? About a decade ago, in the era of “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad,” and “Veep,” TV writing seemed like one of the coolest, best-paying jobs a writer could have. As with the talkie boom of the nineteen-thirties, playwrights and journalists were flocking to Hollywood to partake in the heyday of prestige TV. It was fun. “We were all just trying to figure out, like, where to live. How do we sublet? Do we buy a car? Do we rent a car?” Liz Flahive recalled. In 2008, Flahive had just had a play produced Off Broadway when she got hired to write for “Untitled Edie Falco Project,” which became Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie.” TV, unlike big-budget movies, was a writers’ medium, and it was undergoing a creative explosion. “The old-timey mentality was: you go work in TV, and it breaks your brain, and you learn all these terrible habits,” Flahive said. “But you didn’t. You were writing great scenes, and for really good actors.”

The “Nurse Jackie” writers’ room, Flahive recalled, “was half queer, majority female. It was half people who had done TV for a long time, and half people who had never done TV before.” But it was possible to learn. “I turned in my first script, and the co-E.P.s sat me down and said, ‘This is really great. But this is the most expensive episode of television ever written. It’s a half-hour show, and you have forty-one setups.’ I was, like, ‘What’s a setup?’ And they explained, ‘If you set this scene here, and you write this scene here, this is a whole company move, and this is a whole new set we have to build.’ And then I got to take that script and go sit on set and actually see what it meant when you write ‘EXT. SUBWAY PLATFORM,’ and why that’s complicated.”

Flahive rose through the ranks of “Nurse Jackie” and went on to co-create the Netflix comedy “glow” and the Apple TV+ anthology “Roar,” both with the playwright and producer Carly Mensch. But, in the intervening years, the profession has devolved. Streamers are ordering shorter seasons, and the residuals model that used to give network writers a reliable income is out the window. The ladder from junior writer to showrunner has become murkier, with some people repeating steps like repeating grades, and others being flung to the top without the requisite experience, in order to meet demand for new content. Studios are cutting writing budgets to the bone by hiring fewer people for shorter time periods, often without paying for lower-level writers to be on set during production, which makes it all but impossible to learn the skills necessary to run a show. On “Roar,” Flahive said, “we had to fight to budget for writers to prep and produce their episodes,” and some of her writers had never been to the set of shows they’d worked on, “which is astonishing to me.”

One point of contention in the W.G.A. negotiations has been “mini rooms”—condensed writers’ rooms that often take place before a show is green-lighted. Mini rooms give studios proof of concept while saving money, but they force writers to spread paltrier fees over longer gaps, working for shows that may or may not get made. “What you start to realize is that there is no advancing forward, because you’re constantly in these rooms where you’re being paid at a minimum,” the writer Janine Nabers told me. “If your contract ends, and that show’s not going to be made for another year, all of your work could just be erased.”

Like Flahive, Nabers began in theatre. After graduating from Juilliard, in 2013, she got staffed on Bravo’s “Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce.” The writers met at Sunset Gower Studios, in Hollywood. “It was more money than I’ve ever been paid in my life,” she recalled. “Even the stipends to go to set—I remember they would give you cash, and I would just make it rain on my bed and take videos and send them to my friends.” Most jobs she’s had since have been in mini rooms. Nabers wrote for two seasons of Donald Glover’s “Atlanta,” got an over-all deal with Amazon Studios, and co-created, with Glover, this year’s hit “Swarm.” That show had a fourteen-week mini room, all over Zoom, ending in early 2021. But it wasn’t green-lighted until the second episode was shooting, a year later. Nabers was pregnant during the interim, and she was left to finish the season alone. “So that’s a year of me by myself, writing scripts and begging the people that I was working for to allow me to bring in more help,” she said.

For people outside the industry, the woes of TV writers can elicit a boo-hoo response: it is, after all, a more lucrative form of writing than most, right? But the economics of streaming have chipped away at what was previously a route to a middle-class life, as the cost of living in Los Angeles has crept upward. “It feels like the studios have gone through our contracts and figured out how to Frankenstein every loophole into every deal, which means that, at the very best, you can keep your head above water,” Jacqmin said. “You can maybe maintain the amount of money you made the year before, but more than likely you will be asked to cut your quote. It just feels really grim.” She added, “I’m on Twitter every other day, and I’m seeing writers who are, like, ‘Please Venmo me some grocery money. I am desperate, and I have not worked in three months. Help!’ ”

Aly Monroe, a thirty-year-old writer who’d worked up from production assistant to story editor on Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” told me that she makes about ten thousand dollars a year in residuals, “and that’s certainly not reflective of what the studio is making.” In the long breaks between seasons, she relies on her wife’s more regular income while stretching out the money from “Handmaid.” Some of her friends are getting copywriting jobs or moving back in with their parents. “Before the strike demands came out, a lot of my friends were feeling really hopeless and essentially ready to give up, because it had just been such a hard road,” she said. “And they think that what the W.G.A. is asking for makes us all feel really good and like we’re working toward something that can make it back into a livable career for all of us. That’s certainly how I feel.”

At the same time that the money has tightened, original ideas have become harder to sell. The prestige-cable days of “Mad Men” and “Nurse Jackie” became the prestige-streaming era of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Stranger Things,” which has given way to the algorithm-and-I.P.-fuelled hellscape of superheroes, mergers, and HBO Max becoming plain old Max. More shows are headlined by movie stars, who come with large salaries and constricted schedules. Nabers doubts that “Swarm” would get green-lighted now, even though it just got through a year ago. “Right now, especially with the strike looming, people are afraid of weird stuff,” she said. “They want ‘Yellowstone.’ They want ‘This Is Us.’ Those shows are great, but not everyone wants to write that show.” Lila Byock, who has written for the HBO series “The Leftovers” and “Watchmen” (and had previously been a New Yorker fact checker), lamented, “What the streamers want most right now is ‘second-screen content,’ where you can be on your phone while it’s on. Or you can write an original script everyone loves, and then it’s, like, ‘Ooh, we can’t make this, but please take your pick of our upcoming Batman projects!’ ”

Wrapped up in the economic issues and creative stasis is a sense that TV writing just isn’t that fun anymore. “It’s become a grind at every level,” Jacqmin said. Most writers’ rooms have gone virtual—a pandemic necessity that has become a cost-saving norm—draining the camaraderie that used to help writers learn from one another, feel vulnerable enough to pitch personal story ideas, or just vent. “We always had a Ping-Pong table near the writers’ room, and on every break we would have these completely bare-knuckle tournaments,” Byock said, of her previous jobs. “That was part of what made it feel fun to go to work. It felt like we were really building something together. It wasn’t just a punch-the-clock job. And, when you’re on Zoom, working on a show that you don’t even know whether or not is going to be greenlit—it’s just a completely contingent situation—it’s very hard to get to that place.”

For newer writers, there’s a sense of having shown up at the party too late. Alex O’Keefe, who is twenty-eight, grew up poor in Florida and worked as a speechwriter for the senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey and as Green New Deal campaign director before getting staffed on FX’s “The Bear.” “It should be this beautiful rags-to-riches story, right?” he told me. “Unfortunately, I realized not all that glitters is gold.” During his nine weeks working in the writers’ room for “The Bear,” over Zoom, he was living in a tiny Brooklyn apartment with no heat; sometimes his space heater would blow the power out, and he’d bring his laptop to a public library. (He was never flown to set.) He thought that he was making a lot of money, but, after reps’ fees and taxes, it didn’t add up to much. “It’s a very regular-degular, working-class existence,” he said. “And the only future I’m seeking financially is to enter that middle class, which has always been rarified for someone who comes from poverty.”

Last month, “The Bear” won the W.G.A. Award for Comedy Series. O’Keefe went to the ceremony with a negative bank account and a bow tie that he’d bought on credit. He’s now applying for jobs at movie theatres to prepare for the potential strike. “A lot of people assume that, when you’re in a TV writers’ room, you sit around a table, and you just dream together,” he said. “With ‘The Bear,’ I learned from these masters that, if you are given a shit sandwich, you can dress that up and make it a Michelin-star-level dish. And they were consistently given shit sandwich after shit sandwich.” He recalled one of the executive producers apologizing to him. “She said, ‘I’m so sorry this is your first writers’-room experience, because it’s not usually like this. It shouldn’t be like this.’ I don’t even know the alternative. I thought we would be treated more like collaborators on a product. It’s like an assembly line now.” (The New Yorker).

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Tony Award Nominations 2023: 'Some Like It Hot' Dominates, Followed by '& Juliet,' 'Shucked,' 'New York, New York'

Here's the complete list of Tony nominations.

“Some Like It Hot,” a jazzy re-imagining of the classic comedy film about two musicians on the run, dominated the nominations for the 2023 Tony Awards, which were announced on Tuesday, with 13 nods.

It was followed closely behind by “& Juliet,” “Shucked” and “New York, New York,” which scored nine nominations apiece. All of these productions will vie for best musical honors, facing off against one of the year’s most acclaimed shows, “Kimberly Akimbo,” the story of a teenager who has a medical condition that causes her to age rapidly. “Kimberly Akimbo” is up for eight prizes, including for supporting performers Bonnie Milligan and Justin Cooley, as well as for Victoria Clark’s turn in the title role.

See the full nominations list, supplied by the Tonys, below:

Best Play

Ain’t No Mo’

Between Riverside and Crazy

Cost of Living

Fat Ham

Leopoldstadt

Best Musical

& Juliet

Kimberly Akimbo

New York, New York

Shucked

Some Like It Hot

Best Revival of a Play

August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson

A Doll’s House

The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window

Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog

Best Revival of a Musical

Into the Woods

Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot

Parade

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Best Book of a Musical

& Juliet
David West Read

Kimberly Akimbo
David Lindsay-Abaire

New York, New York
David Thompson & Sharon Washington

Shucked
Robert Horn

Some Like It Hot
Matthew López & Amber Ruffin

Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre

Almost Famous
Music: Tom Kitt
Lyrics: Cameron Crowe & Tom Kitt

Kimberly Akimbo
Music: Jeanine Tesori Lyrics: David Lindsay-Abaire

KPOP
Music & Lyrics: Helen Park & Max Vernon

Shucked
Music and Lyrics: Brandy Clark & Shane McAnally

Some Like It Hot
Music: Marc Shaiman
Lyrics: Scott Wittman & Marc Shaiman

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog

Corey Hawkins, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog

Sean Hayes, Good Night, Oscar

Stephen McKinley Henderson, Between Riverside and Crazy

Wendell Pierce, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play

Jessica Chastain, A Doll’s House

Jodie Comer, Prima Facie

Jessica Hecht, Summer, 1976

Audra McDonald, Ohio State Murders

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical

Christian Borle, Some Like It Hot

J. Harrison Ghee, Some Like It Hot

Josh Groban, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Brian d’Arcy James, Into the Woods

Ben Platt, Parade

Colton Ryan, New York, New York

Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical

Annaleigh Ashford, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Sara Bareilles, Into the Woods

Victoria Clark, Kimberly Akimbo

Lorna Courtney, & Juliet

Micaela Diamond, Parade

Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play

Jordan E. Cooper, Ain’t No Mo’

Samuel L. Jackson, August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson

Arian Moayed, A Doll’s House

Brandon Uranowitz, Leopoldstadt

David Zayas, Cost of Living

Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play

Nikki Crawford, Fat Ham

Crystal Lucas-Perry, Ain’t No Mo’

Miriam Silverman, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window

Katy Sullivan, Cost of Living

Kara Young, Cost of Living

Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical

Kevin Cahoon, Shucked

Justin Cooley, Kimberly Akimbo

Kevin Del Aguila, Some Like It Hot

Jordan Donica, Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot

Alex Newell, Shucked

Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical

Julia Lester, Into the Woods

Ruthie Ann Miles, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Bonnie Milligan, Kimberly Akimbo

NaTasha Yvette Williams, Some Like It Hot

Betsy Wolfe, & Juliet

Best Scenic Design of a Play

Miriam Buether, Prima Facie

Tim Hatley & Andrzej Goulding, Life of Pi

Rachel Hauck, Good Night, Oscar

Richard Hudson, Leopoldstadt

Dane Laffrey & Lucy Mackinnon, A Christmas Carol

Best Scenic Design of a Musical

Beowulf Boritt, New York, New York

Mimi Lien, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Michael Yeargan & 59 Productions, Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot

Scott Pask, Shucked

Scott Pask, Some Like It Hot

Best Costume Design of a Play

Tim Hatley, Nick Barnes & Finn Caldwell, Life of Pi

Dominique Fawn Hill, Fat Ham

Brigitte Reiffenstuel, Leopoldstadt

Emilio Sosa, Ain’t No Mo’

Emilio Sosa, Good Night, Oscar

Best Costume Design of a Musical

Gregg Barnes, Some Like It Hot

Susan Hilferty, Parade

Jennifer Moeller, Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot

Clint Ramos & Sophia Choi, KPOP

Paloma Young, & Juliet

Donna Zakowska, New York, New York

Best Lighting Design of a Play

Neil Austin, Leopoldstadt

Natasha Chivers, Prima Facie

Jon Clark, A Doll’s House Bradley King, Fat Ham

Tim Lutkin, Life of Pi

Jen Schriever, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

Ben Stanton, A Christmas Carol

Best Lighting Design of a Musical

Ken Billington, New York, New York

Lap Chi Chu, Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot

Heather Gilbert, Parade

Howard Hudson, & Juliet

Natasha Katz, Some Like It Hot

Natasha Katz, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Best Sound Design of a Play

Jonathan Deans & Taylor Williams, Ain’t No Mo’

Carolyn Downing, Life of Pi

Joshua D. Reid, A Christmas Carol

Ben & Max Ringham, A Doll’s House

Ben & Max Ringham, Prima Facie

Best Sound Design of a Musical

Kai Harada, New York, New York

John Shivers, Shucked

Scott Lehrer & Alex Neumann, Into the Woods

Gareth Owen, & Juliet

Nevin Steinberg, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Best Direction of a Play

Saheem Ali, Fat Ham

Jo Bonney, Cost of Living

Jamie Lloyd, A Doll’s House

Patrick Marber, Leopoldstadt

Stevie Walker-Webb, Ain’t No Mo’ Max Webster, Life of Pi

Best Direction of a Musical

Michael Arden, Parade

Lear deBessonet, Into the Woods

Casey Nicholaw, Some Like It Hot

Jack O’Brien, Shucked

Jessica Stone, Kimberly Akimbo

Best Choreography

Steven Hoggett, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Casey Nicholaw, Some Like It Hot

Susan Stroman, New York, New York

Jennifer Weber, & Juliet

Jennifer Weber, KPOP

Best Orchestrations

Bill Sherman and Dominic Fallacaro, & Juliet

John Clancy, Kimberly Akimbo

Jason Howland, Shucked

Charlie Rosen & Bryan Carter, Some Like It Hot

Daryl Waters & Sam Davis, New York, New York (Variety).

Tony Nominations 2023: The 5 Biggest Snubs and Surprises — and One Huge Question Mark.

The nominations for the 2023 Tony Awards are out — and for every pleasant surprise on the list, there were a few disappointments. Here are the biggest snubs and surprises from this morning’s Tony nominations announcement, plus the one great big question that could cast a real shadow over the ceremony.

SURPRISE: Big Love for “Ain’t No Mo'”
Jordan E. Cooper’s “Ain’t No Mo’,” a blistering comedy about racial injustice in America, was certainly one of the buzziest plays of the season, and many critics raved when it opened in December. But the show proved unable to find a foothold at the box office and closed just a few weeks later — a brief lifespan that could have put the play in danger of getting forgotten come awards season, especially in a crowded field of contenders. But nominators remembered “Ain’t No Mo'” so well they gave it six noms (including one for play and an acting nod for writer-performer Cooper), making it one of the most-nominated plays of the season.

SNUB: Olivier-Winning West End Faves
“Life of Pi” and “Prima Facie” were hardly forgotten on the nominations list, with five for “Pi” and four for “Prima Facie” (including one for star Jodie Comer). But after winning the Olivier for best play in 2021 (for “Pi”) and 2022 (for “Prima Facie”), both shows came up empty-handed in the top Tony category for play. Also left out of the Tony nominations were “Pi” star Hiran Abeysekera, who took home an Olivier for lead actor, and the show’s puppeteers, who collectively won a supporting actor Olivier for bringing to life the story’s ferocious tiger (among other animals). On the other hand, another Olivier winner, “Leopoldstadt,” which won the award for play in 2020, has become one of the long-running successes of the Broadway season, and came away with six nominations including one for play.

SURPRISE: A Strong Showing for “& Juliet”
A lot of critics dismissed “& Juliet,” the cheerfully anachronistic musical that draws on the many, many pop hits of megaproducer Max Martin to imagine what would happen if Juliet opted not to die at the end of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Going into the nominations, nods for book (by David West Read) and featured actress (Betsy Wolfe as Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway) seemed likely, and a nomination for the top musical award was a possibility. “& Juliet” walked away with all those and more, including noms for lead actress Lorna Courtney and one for choreographer Jennifer Weber (also nominated for “KPOP”). The musical earned nine nominations overall, putting it behind the 13 landed by “Some Like It Hot” and tying it with “Shucked” and “New York, New York.”

SNUB: Some of the Season’s Biggest Stars
Looking for Oscar Isaac, Laura Linney and Rachel Brosnahan on the nominations list? You won’t find them. All three — Isaac and Brosnahan of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” and Linney of “Summer, 1976” — were left out of the running. The race for lead play actress, for which both Linney and Brosnahan were contenders, was particularly tight given the stacked lineup of talent vying for just four spots. (Linney’s co-star in “Summer, 1976,” two-time Tony winner Jessica Hecht, made the cut for that one.) But it’s not as if the nominations are entirely celebrity-free: Samuel L. Jackson (“The Piano Lesson”), Jessica Chastain (“A Doll’s House”), Jodie Comer (“Prima Facie”), Sara Bareilles (“Into the Woods”) and Sean Hayes (“Good Night, Oscar”), not to mention Tony fave Audra McDonald (“Ohio State Murders”), are all among the bold-face names lending star power to the list. (Variety, Gordon Cox).