Even the stars people think of as immaculately crafted Hollywood products look wildly, irreducibly human in comparison.

By Jane Ackermann

Dec. 10, 2025 (NYTimes.com)

In February 1941, The Chicago Tribune announced the arrival of the year’s cinematic “Cinderella Girl”: another actress freshly plucked from the wholesome shadow of obscurity — in this case Lake Placid, N.Y. — by an enterprising producer who knew a star when he saw one. The game, the paper said, was to find someone striking, not just beautiful; an ability to act “couldn’t hurt.” This particular Cinderella had been scouted before, signed up for acting classes and taught to “enter a room with a book on her head, walk down steps with her chin up and talk in time with a metronome.” After she was officially “discovered,” she was run through the Hollywood gantlet, with tabloids speculating about her marriage and the odds of her signature vampish locks achieving the 1940s equivalent of virality. There was also the matter of her name. She needed something more glamorous than the one she was born with (Constance Ockelman) and less girl-detective than the one she’d been using (Constance Keane). The producer said her eyes were “calm and blue like a lake,” and just looking at her shiny, swooping hair gave you a “cool feeling” — so he rechristened her Veronica Lake.

Lake was just one of many stars to be reverse-engineered by Hollywood in this way. Actors had their hair dyed, their manners and accents retrained, their names and stories and even ethnicities rewritten. This wasn’t just a matter of Norma Jeane Mortensons becoming Marilyn Monroes. One studio head, hoping to transform the South Asian actress Merle Oberon into an Anglophile’s upper-crust dream, had her bleach her skin. Around the same time, a dancer named Margarita Cansino was undergoing painful electrolysis to alter her hairline; her dark curls were dyed a fiery auburn and her name Americanized to Rita Hayworth. Others were made more exotic — like the big-band singer Mary Slaton, who became Dorothy Lamour, wrapped in sarongs and starring in “Jungle Princess” and “Moon Over Burma.”

The entertainment industry’s irrepressible impulse is not just to produce movies or television or pop songs. It is also to produce people — especially women. The industry determines, through some combination of data and vibe-divination, which kinds of humans the public will most eagerly slap down cash to see. Then it finds a way to supply them.

Elsewhere she tends to be received as a kind of Wagnerian uber-babe.

It was probably inevitable, then, that our first artificial-intelligence performers would take the form of the ingénue. This fall, a Dutch producer named Eline van der Velden claimed that high-profile talent agencies were interested in her A.I. creation, an “actress” called Tilly Norwood. (She might have been better off with the kind of free-association naming process that produced “Veronica Lake.”) Norwood is far from the first artificial young woman built to entertain you; she is part of a lineage that includes digital pop stars like Hatsune Miku and “virtual” social media figures like Lil Miquela. Most of those projects have been treated as banal novelties, but A.I.’s encroachment on creative work is now less of a laughing matter, and real actors were quick to denounce Norwood. Emily Blunt called the idea “terrifying.” Whoopi Goldberg called it “scary.” The SAG-AFTRA union said Norwood wasn’t an actor at all: “It has no life experience to draw from.”

Learning to Live With A.I.

Read more from the New York Times Magazine’s special issue.

•  New Opportunities for People: It might take your job, but A.I. will create new (human) careers.
•  Widespread Use: The hosts of The Times’s “Hard Fork” podcast on how everyone seems to be using A.I. — for everything.
•  Scholarship Tool: The winners of the A.I. race might soon transform the stories that historians tell about the past.
•  Never Saying Goodbye: After a man’s terminal diagnosis, his family decides to make a virtual avatar that lives on after his death.

Still, A.I. does seem like one natural path for an industry that has long sought to mold young women — pinching and prodding, bleaching and teaching — into whatever make and model of femininity the public desires. Moviegoers may not want to watch digital faces imitate emotion and feign personality, but Hollywood’s history makes it easy enough to imagine a future in which we do it anyway. Look past the obvious cinematic time and money savers of A.I., like filling in crowd scenes or ginning up B-roll; just imagine the convenience of not needing to find and change real people! Why bother figuring out whom the glass slipper fits when you can build Cinderella from scratch?

Two months before Tilly Norwood’s debut at a conference in Zurich, the clothing retailer American Eagle released a fall denim campaign that memorably exploded internet discourse — the one featuring the “Euphoria” actress Sydney Sweeney, Veronica Lake’s successor in bombshelldom. Sweeney is fair-skinned, blond-haired and blue-eyed; she still plays a teenager on TV, but elsewhere she tends to be received as a sort of Wagnerian uber-babe. The ads showed her peering under the hood of a Mustang or pawing seductively at herself, but the endless online discourse was sparked by her monologue, which seemed written by a high school biology student: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color.” A male narrator helpfully informed the viewer that “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”

The culture-war hooks were obvious. Some people lamented that the ads had racist or eugenicist undertones; others cheered what they saw as the birth of an anti-woke pinup girl. (When a GQ interviewer asked Sweeney to discuss the implications of the ads, her answer did not sound entirely unlike A.I.: “I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear.”) Barrels of ink were spilled in trying to articulate what, exactly, Sweeney represented, and one common theory was that she signaled the return of a red-blooded American male gaze — a country remembering, both culturally and politically, that it likes old cars and young blondes, not fretting about chauvinism.

Both sides of the debate seemed to take for granted that the actress was being deployed mostly as an idea, the epitome of a product viewers desired. But American Eagle’s gag only worked because Sweeney is in fact a human, with actual genes and personality — not just her Aryan sheen, but also any number of mannerisms that an A.I. would be unlikely to assign to a digital ingénue, like her apathetic smirk, dark eye-rolling and air of smug ennui. Such idiosyncrasies are entirely absent from Norwood’s toolbox, as made clear when her creators released their own take on the American Eagle ads. In that version, Norwood has exactly the bright, bland, eager-to-please affect you’d expect. “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring,” she repeats — but “not mine. I’m built on everything that came before me.” She mimics the way Sweeney fingers the fly of her jeans; her top is unbuttoned to show a poreless midriff; there’s a robotic attempt at a come-hither look. The buttons are convincing, and the jeans look like jeans — but the character, the Sweeney, is gone.

It turns out that even when we think of an actress as the product of libidinous market forces — a product crafted, with great effort, by an industry scrambling to provide what we want — she still exerts her human life force on each role. More than in almost any other art, A.I. acting reminds us of its own shortcomings. If anything, it makes you crave more of the grit and quirk found even in the beefcakes and the bombshells we see as pure Hollywood constructs.

It could be that a future awash in A.I. slop leads us to seek out and defend flashes of humanity, thrilling at all the unlikely quirks that make stars themselves: Emily Blunt’s eloquent eyebrows, Whoopi’s rasp, all the things a machine can imitate but would almost certainly not invent. It could also be that an A.I. future just lowers our standards until we’re pleased with even the most meager scraps of soul. For now, though, it can make you wonder how much Hollywood’s star-molding ever mattered in the first place — how much Constance Ockelman was always the crucial thing beneath the surface of Veronica Lake.

---

Jane Ackermann is a research editor at the magazine and a former actor.

Source photographs for illustration above: Gilbert FloreVariety, via Getty Images; Valiantsin Suprunovich/istock, via Getty Images; screenshot from Instagram.

(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

– Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein^[a] (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist best known for developing the theory of relativity. Einstein also made important contributions to quantum theory.^[1][5] His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc², which arises from special relativity, has been called “the world’s most famous equation”.^[6] He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for “his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect“.^[7] (Wikipedia.org)

(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chartism^[1] was a working-class movement for political reform in the United Kingdom that lasted from 1838 to 1857 and was strongest in 1839, 1842 and 1848. It took its name from the People’s Charter of 1838^[2] and was a national protest movement, with particular strongholds of support in Northern England, the East Midlands, the Staffordshire Potteries, the Black Country and the South Wales Valleys, where working people depended on single industries and were subject to wild swings in economic activity. Chartism was less strong in places such as Bristol, that had more diversified economies.^[3] The movement was fiercely opposed by government authorities, who finally suppressed it.

Support for the movement was at its highest when petitions signed by millions of working people were presented to the House of Commons. The strategy employed was to use the scale of support which these petitions and the accompanying mass meetings demonstrated to put pressure on politicians to concede universal manhood suffrage. Chartism thus relied on constitutional methods to secure its aims, though some became involved in insurrectionary activities, notably in South Wales and in Yorkshire.^{[citation needed]}

The People’s Charter called for six reforms^[4] to make the political system more democratic:

• A vote for every man aged twenty-one years and above, of sound mind, and not undergoing punishment for a crime.
• The secret ballot to protect the elector in the exercise of his vote.
• No property qualification for Members of Parliament (MPs), to allow the constituencies to return the man of their choice.
• Payment of Members, enabling tradesmen, working men, or other persons of modest means to leave or interrupt their livelihood to attend to the interests of the nation.
• Equal constituencies, securing the same amount of representation for the same number of electors, instead of allowing less populous constituencies to have as much or more weight than larger ones.
• Annual parliamentary elections, thus presenting the most effectual check to bribery and intimidation, since no purse could buy a constituency under a system of universal manhood suffrage in every twelve months.

Eventually, after Chartism died out, Britain adopted all but the last of these six reforms. Chartists saw themselves fighting against political corruption and for democracy in an industrial society, but attracted support beyond the radical political groups for economic reasons, such as opposing wage cuts and unemployment.^[5][6]

Origin

After the passing of the Reform Act 1832, which failed to extend the vote beyond those owning property, the political leaders of the working class made speeches claiming that there had been a great act of betrayal. This sense that the working class had been betrayed by the middle class was strengthened by the actions of the Whig governments of the 1830s. Notably, the hated new Poor Law Amendment was passed in 1834, depriving working people of outdoor relief and driving the poor into workhouses, where families were separated.^[7]: 1

The massive wave of opposition to this measure in the north of England in the late 1830s made Chartism a mass movement. It seemed that only securing the vote for working men would change things. Dorothy Thompson, the preeminent historian of Chartism, defines the movement as the time when “thousands of working people considered that their problems could be solved by the political organization of the country.”^[7]: 1 In 1836, the London Working Men’s Association was founded by William Lovett and Henry Hetherington,^[8] providing a platform for Chartists in the southeast. The origins of Chartism in Wales can be traced to the foundation in the autumn of 1836 of Carmarthen Working Men’s Association.^[9]

The English Industrial Revolution is one of the most important processes in contemporary history, resulting in a gradual but profound series of changes at all levels. Technological innovations enabled the introduction of machinery—which replaced human labor— and gave rise to the factory system, as well as the consolidation of industrial capitalism.

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartism

Rights of Man

Thomas Paine

This book is in English. This book contains 229 pages.

About the author

Thomas Paine

1,464 books1,821 followersFollow

Thomas Paine was an English-American political activist, author, political theorist and revolutionary. As the author of two highly influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, he inspired the Patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Britain. His ideas reflected Enlightenment-era rhetoric of transnational human rights. He has been called “a corset maker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination”.

Born in Thetford, England, in the county of Norfolk, Paine emigrated to the British American colonies in 1774 with the help of Benjamin Franklin, arriving just in time to participate in the American Revolution. His principal contributions were the powerful, widely read pamphlet Common Sense (1776), the all-time best-selling American book that advocated colonial America’s independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, and The American Crisis (1776–83), a pro-revolutionary pamphlet series. Common Sense was so influential that John Adams said, “Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”

Paine lived in France for most of the 1790s, becoming deeply involved in the French Revolution. He wrote the Rights of Man (1791), in part a defence of the French Revolution against its critics. His attacks on British writer Edmund Burke led to a trial and conviction in absentia in 1792 for the crime of seditious libel. In 1792, despite not being able to speak French, he was elected to the French National Convention. The Girondists regarded him as an ally. Consequently, the Montagnards, especially Robespierre, regarded him as an enemy.

In December 1793, he was arrested and imprisoned in Paris, then released in 1794. He became notorious because of his pamphlet The Age of Reason (1793–94), in which he advocated deism, promoted reason and freethinking, and argued against institutionalized religion in general and Christian doctrine in particular. He also wrote the pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1795), discussing the origins of property, and introduced the concept of a guaranteed minimum income. In 1802, he returned to America where he died on June 8, 1809. Only six people attended his funeral as he had been ostracized for his ridicule of Christianity.

Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more

dis·ap·point

/ˌdisəˈpoint/

Origin

Late Middle English (in the sense ‘deprive of a position’): from Old French desappointer .

New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Dec 14, 2025 Jason Gregory is a student of the world’s spiritual traditions. He is the author of The Science and Practice of Humility. Jason Gregory is an author, philosopher, and teacher whose work draws from Eastern philosophy, comparative religion, psychology, cognitive science, metaphysics, and ancient cultures, bridging timeless wisdom with contemporary understanding. Jason Gregory explores the essence of Taoism, emphasizing its critique of social conditioning and its guidance toward naturalness, spontaneity, and effortless being. He explains how Taoist ideas intersect with Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and wider metaphysical traditions, revealing a shared vision of an undivided reality beneath cultural structures. Gregory also discusses practices such as wu wei, aimless wandering, and inner alchemy as pathways for aligning with the Dao in modern life. 00:01 Introduction: understanding Daoism 06:00 Eastern thought and cultural evolution 12:03 Laozi, the Dao De Jing, and socialization 18:00 Analogies across traditions and ultimate reality 24:05 Confucianism, critique, and social conditioning 30:02 Fundamental goodness and the Ox Mountain metaphor 36:05 Education, nature, and innate character (li) 42:00 Aimless wandering and the ease of mind 48:00 Wu wei, spontaneity, and being in the zone 54:10 Conclusion New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on **** 00, 2025)

Tolstoy in 1908

“He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others.” 

~ Leo Tolstoy 

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy (September 9, 1928 – November 20, 1920), was a Russian writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time. Source: Wikipedia

By Nanette Asimov, Staff Writer Dec 12, 2025 (SFChronicle.com)

Gift Article

Theo Baker, the Stanford freshman whose investigative reporting led to the ouster of the university’s president in 2023, has not yet graduated. His forthcoming book, an exposé about Stanford mixed with a bit of memoir, is due out this spring, a month before he graduates.Provided by Penguin Press, Courtesy of Theo Baker

It’s a hard act to follow. But Theo Baker, who managed to oust the president of Stanford University while a freshman reporter on his student newspaper, is now poised to explain “How to Rule the World,” the title of his forthcoming book about Stanford’s role in cultivating billionaires and other potentates.

Baker’s book, subtitled “An Education in Power at Stanford University,” is due out May 19, about a month before the author earns his college diploma — on time — in June. 

Baker was 17 in fall 2022 when he began working for the Stanford Daily and got a tip that scholarly papers co-authored by the university’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, contained errors, including manipulated imagery.

Baker transformed into a dogged reporter not unlike his father, Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, and his mother, Susan Glasser, a staff writer on the New Yorker. 

The freshman’s dozen or so investigative stories — tracked and followed by journalists across the country — prompted a Stanford investigation that found “serious flaws” among papers co-authored over 20 years by Tessier-Lavigne, a neuroscientist. He ultimately retracted three studies. The probe found no evidence that he knowingly falsified data. 

By summer 2023, Tessier-Lavigne resigned and Baker became the youngest recipient of the George Polk Award, one of journalism’s most prestigious prizes. 

With more than five months left before Baker’s book is out, neither he nor his publisher are talking about it yet or sharing early copies. A book description from Penguin Press sheds  light about its focus.

“Theo Baker showed up for freshman year at Stanford University as a tech-obsessed coder. It seemed like paradise. There were Rodin sculptures next to nuclear laboratories and inventors lounging with Olympians. But Baker soon discovered a culture that embraced corner-cutting, that vested infinite excess and access in the hands of kids with few safeguards to catch bad behavior.”

“How to Rule the World” is  part exposé of Stanford — “less a school than a business” where certain wealthy, brainy students are cultivated as future members of the “ruling elite” — and part memoir of the wunderkind who peeled back the curtain and revealed what he saw. 

Baker, now 20 and majoring in history, spoke with more than 250 people for his book: not only professors, students and campus administrators, but also former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, director of Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution, and Stanford dropout Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI.

To write the book, Baker took off the fall and winter terms of his junior year — and no, no professor offered academic credit for his extracurricular efforts. 

Baker took high-unit courses to graduate on time. He also received course credit for helping teach “Coding for Social Good,” and relied on college-level credits he earned in high school.

Between writing “How to Rule the World” and toppling the leader of the nation’s third wealthiest university, Baker, as a sophomore, also gave the nation an in-depth account of campus tensions following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel, and Israel’s counterinvasion. 

On March 26, 2024, the Atlantic Magazine published “The War at Stanford: I didn’t know that college could be a factory of unreason,” which begins with an account of a 23-year-old student in Baker’s computer science class telling student protesters that he supported killing then-President Joe Biden for being “guilty of mass murder” and that Hamas should instead govern the U.S.

While Baker acknowledged that this student’s views were atypical, “few students would call for Biden’s head — I think,” his article introduced readers to a historic period of rising student hysteria on the private, elite campus while mirroring the tensions on university campuses across the country at the time.  

Generations of students have protested Wall Street excesses, South African apartheid, the Vietnam War, and for civil rights — and been injured or even died for those causes. But until the current Middle East conflict, they rarely turned on each other. 

Stanford became “fractured” as the Middle East war escalated, Baker wrote. “Extremism has swept through classrooms and dorms, and it is becoming normal for students to be harassed and intimidated for their faith, heritage, or appearance — they have been called perpetrators of genocide for wearing kippahs, and accused of supporting terrorism for wearing keffiyehs.” 

As for where Baker stood in all of this, he wrote, “I grew up secularly, with no strong affiliation to Jewish culture.” He learned as a teenager that dozens of his relatives had died in the Holocaust, but said he did not feel a stronger emotional connection to having Jewish roots  until “I saw so many people I know cheering after Oct. 7.”

But his frustration about the conflicts on campus had “little to do with my own identity.” Instead, at one of the world’s greatest academic institutions, he discovered “a persistent anti-intellectual streak.”

He offered the example of complaints made to the university about parties where, in order for students to get in, they had to say “f— Israel” or “free Palestine.” 

“A place that was supposed to be a sanctuary from such unreason has become a factory for it,” he said, quoting a friend’s email. 

Baker’s book isn’t out yet. But some of his observations in the Atlantic piece nevertheless shed light on the university, historically an incubator of American leaders.  

“Readers may be tempted to discount the conduct displayed at Stanford,” he wrote. “After all, the thinking goes, these are privileged kids doing what they always do: embracing faux-radicalism in college before taking jobs in fintech or consulting. These students, some might say, aren’t representative of America.

“And yet they are representative of something: of the conduct many of the most accomplished students in my generation have accepted as tolerable, and what that means for the future of our country.” 

Dec 12, 2025

Nanette Asimov

Higher Education Reporter

Nanette covers California’s public universities – the University of California and California State University – as well as community colleges and private universities. She’s written about sexual misconduct at UC and Stanford, the precarious state of accreditation at City College of San Francisco, and what happens when the UC Berkeley student government discovers a gay rights opponent in its midst. She has exposed a private art college where students rack up massive levels of debt (one student’s topped $400k), and covered audits peering into UC finances, education lawsuits and countless student protests.

But writing about higher education also means getting a look at the brainy creations of students and faculty: Robotic suits that help paralyzed people walk. Online collections of folk songs going back hundreds of years. And innovations touching on everything from virtual reality to baseball.

Nanette is also covering the COVID-19 pandemic and served as health editor during the first six months of the crisis, which quickly ended her brief tenure as interim investigations editor.

Previously, Nanette covered K-12 education. Her stories led to changes in charter school laws, prompted a ban on Scientology in California public schools, and exposed cheating and censorship in testing.

A past president of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Northern California chapter, Nanette has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and a B.A. in sociology from Queens College. She speaks English and Spanish.

San Francisco-born Demarcus James decided to skate across America just 6 months after attempting to take his own life.Olivia Cruz Mayeda/S.F. Chronicle

By Olivia Cruz Mayeda, Staff Writer

Dec 13, 2025 (SFChronicle.com)

Gift Article

Demarcus James awoke in a blind hunger, not knowing where he was.

His body hurt. He was alone in the shapeless dark. 

Most of the last 188 nights have passed this way. After he forged through mountain ranges and high deserts, isolated prairies and on highways in the shadows of semitrucks. Just him on his skateboard, taking refuge by night in motels or in a tent, sometimes in the rain. With little beyond his aching hunger and his will, he continued eastward.

“I want to skate every inch,” he said.

Demarcus James reached Rainbow Beach in Chicago on his 74th day of skating across the United States. His odyssey began in Oakland in June.Taylor Glascock/For to the S.F. Chronicle

A year ago, James tried to take his own life while houseless and living on the streets of East Oakland. He walked in the rain, bleeding, to a hospital in Berkeley. Doctors sent electric currents through his brain three times a week for the next three months — a last-resort treatment for his severe depression. But the ketamine used to anesthetize him had an unexpected consequence.

“It didn’t just knock me out,” James said. “It put me on this crazy f—ing trip.”

In his anesthetized stupor James said he cycled through the events of his life — the traumatic, the beautiful, the mundane — over and over and over like a wheel rolling until his ego died. When the effects of the drugs wore off, he decided to skate as far as he could. 

“I can’t go back to the way things were before,” he said.

So James left Oakland from Macarthur Skate Shop on the morning of June 8 with little else besides his black skateboard, a pair of Osiris shoes — the first of five pairs he’d tread through during this journey — and a tin of Tiger Balm. He told only a few people about his plan to skate to New York City. He uploaded videos of himself to Instagram rolling over the pavement as his tens of thousands of online followers cheered him on, with some donating money to his mission. The Chronicle stayed in touch with James throughout his trek, spending time with him in Chicago and Indiana.

The route he chose was vague, unmapped — he would have to navigate himself one day at a time and sometimes even one mile at a time. He had no idea when, or if, he’d return.

---

Demarcus James has been skating across America since June. He’s expect to reach his destination of New York City later this month.Olivia Cruz Mayeda S F Chronicle, Wendi Jonassen S F Chronicle

Skateboarding is a lesson in falling. One that James and his body had learned throughout his youth and then as a professional skateboarder who had nursed countless broken bones.

On the second day, a skateboard wheel sank between two railroad tracks on the way to Sacramento. He launched through the air and landed on his shoulder, just missing a metal bolt sprouting from the ground. He got back up, as he’d done so many times, and continued onward.

On the sixth day, James approached Donner Pass from Tahoe National Forest.

He caught his breath by a stream of clear, cold water. His board lay in the grass. Ever since an older cousin taught him how to ride, skateboarding had always been there for him when nothing and no one else was. When he was a kid in San Francisco with an unpredictable home life. When he was tossed from house to house in foster care. Through uncertainty and silence. Loneliness and friendship.

“Skating is breathing,” he said.

James turned toward the incline with his board. He pushed off his right foot for the first of 25 or so miles through the mountains. His legs grew heavy. He had to stop every three pushes. He ran out of water. At one point, he was worried a bear was trailing him. 

What concerned James’ skateboarding buddy Tom Scott about the journey was “every dang thing,” but especially James getting over the imposing Sierra. James called Scott before the mountains and said he was anxious.

On the roadside, James came across two kids selling iced lemonade in a tall jug. He drank two cups, thanked them and continued into the mountains. At the 7,000 foot-summit, clothes steeped in sweat, James saw peaks in all directions, swathes of pine trees and a pool of blue water. 

Scott wasn’t surprised that James overcame the elevation, just like he wasn’t surprised when James announced his odyssey. Since they met more than 15 years ago in San Francisco skate circles, James had been “doing stuff that normal people just don’t do,” like climbing to the top of a 6-foot fence and dropping down on his board and “skating faster than anybody else bombing the hills of San Francisco.”

“It just flows — that spirit of skating — in him,” Scott said. “I don’t know if he knows that, but that’s what it is.”

---

When James reached the desert he was struck by the silence.

As a professional skateboarder competing in international competitions for the last decade, James had plunged down concrete bowls, contorting and inverting his body midair and swooping back down the curve again as crowds cheered.

In the open and silent desert there was only the path forward.

On a stretch of scorched land between two cities in northern Nevada, a couple prayed over James and offered him water. “God bless this man on his journey,” they said with eyes closed. “We hope he gets there safely.

James thought of his 11-year-old daughter who lives in Santa Cruz with her mother, whom James met at the Berkeley Vert Ramp in the 2010s. His daughter was another one of skateboarding’s many gifts, he said. She called him periodically, sitting on her bed with a big smile. Her bedroom wall painted ocean blue and a photo on her dresser of James on his skateboard and leaping over her mother at a skatepark in Fremont in 2013.

Happy tears dampened his cheeks. Then he thought of his foster mom.

---

James was 17 when he convinced Toni Fish to become his foster mom.

“I was in different homes all the time,” James said, not wanting to elaborate on his youth. “It’s really hard for a teenager to get a home.”

Fish changed his life, he said.

Kids like James flocked to Fish’s home in American Canyon. She gave her kids a $10 weekly allowance, three meals a day and a cellphone so they could reach her any time. She bought James his first car, a used Mitsubishi Mirage, during his senior year of high school. She let him bring home a kitten. But she knew when to draw the line. When a group of her foster kids was leaving the house one night to start a fight, Fish stopped them with one move. She charged out the door in her nightgown, sat down on the hood and perched there until they gave up and went to bed.

But James posed a greater challenge.

“It usually took me about three months before I could really connect with these kids,” she said. “But with Demarcus, it took me a full year.”

He didn’t fight, he didn’t yell, he didn’t talk. He went off on his own most days to skate.

“The more abused these kids are, the more psychological and behavioral problems they have,” Fish said. “Nearly all of the kids, by the time they get into foster care, have post traumatic stress or attachment disorders.”

Fish likes to say that “you have to deal with people where they are.” So she took James to the skatepark to practice his tricks, watching him slam against the cement, get up and try it again.

Her kindness felt too good to be true, he said, “She became my mom.”

---

James hadn’t fallen in weeks. The desert stretched on, and he let his mind go quiet.

But at night, sleep eluded him.

On a typical day, James skated roughly 40 miles — sometimes as many as 60, took four 25-minute breaks and burned roughly 6,000 calories. He fasted until dinner, when he’d eat veggie-rich baby food, fast food, beef jerky and packaged tuna. Sleep should have come easily.

Being overly cautious while skateboarding is dangerous, James said. Thinking too much invites mistakes. His electroshock therapy had put distance between James and his pain by tampering with his memory. But now his fears were more immediate. “What would tomorrow bring?” James wondered as he lay in motel beds.

---

The midday late June sun drove the desert temperature to 90 degrees. James hung his head over his toes and let the blood pool in his skull. Through his legs he saw the landscape upside down. Earth hung over perfect blue.

At a gas station 15 miles outside Elko, Nev., a man in overalls stared James down.

“Are you afraid of white people?” he said.

The man told James what his friends, family and followers had also expressed. That as a Black man, he should beware. That there were sundown towns in these parts of northern Nevada’s high desert.

But James was unmoved. He told the man the same thing he told his concerned loved ones, that if someone wanted to hurt him, they would. That it wasn’t within his control.

“People forget that I’ve been Black my entire life,” he said, chuckling. “Racism is everywhere.”

Instead, James’ appreciation for other humans deepened during the adventure.

“It’s nice to have so much anticipation for conversation,” he said. “I’m like, ‘What’s up, I haven’t seen a person in four weeks! How are you doing? ’”

The summer heat peaked. James, beaded with sweat, tore down an old mining road in Nevada. He was running out of water. His phone told him he was headed toward the next town.

But there would be no town. He plowed toward nothing.

Then he heard the sound of a truck in the distance. The driver had seen James on the horizon and feared for the skater’s fate. James accepted water from the man and shared a cigarette with him, but refused a ride. Before leaving, the man pointed James in the right direction.

“He saved me,” James said.

---

The days ahead brought wild horses, miles of petroleum pipelines and fiber optic cables, masses of swirling sparrows, yellow fields of sunflowers and a town where lines of demonstrators held signs on the roadside that read “I am an immigrant.”

In Utah a friend of a friend volunteered to tail the skater in his car and then take him to a nearby town to rest.

They shot AR-15s at cans of paint and James got a tattoo of skulls on his arm. “It’s so weird that anyone can get guns here,” James said. A week or so later, while James was moving on through Wyoming, right-wing media personality Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in Utah. 

In Nebraska, a woman who had just lost her brother to suicide cried as James told her his story. “I wanted to cry with her,” he said. After taking a break from uploading his daily vlogs, a person on Instagram messaged James to tell him they were worried about him, that they wanted to make sure he was OK. One night, while skating in the dark, he realized he wasn’t alone.

Dozens of green eyes glowed around him. Primal fear surged through James before the realization that he was skating through a herd of cows.

---

James didn’t know what day it was until the highway patrol officer outside Chicago looked up from the skateboarder’s passport and said, “Happy birthday.”

Throughout his journey James was stopped by the police many times, as his friends and followers feared.

“One cop could just be like, ‘You’re done,’ and take my skateboard,” he said.

More often than not, though, cops wanted to know what James was doing. Some asked if he was OK, if he needed a ride somewhere. Others took selfies with him.

It was October and James was now 37. The only sign of age that befell him were short white hairs at the base of his deep brown locs.

But  James was weary. And there were still five states between him and the Atlantic Ocean.

---

By the time James made it to the shore of Lake Michigan, the leaves of Chicago’s sugar maples burned autumnal red. Winter was on the horizon. So was an intensifying fear. The Trump administration was deploying the National Guard to Chicago as part of its campaign to deport immigrants.

At a restaurant his waiter told James that he was doing a good thing. That as anger stirred the city, the country needed people like him. Dessert — a big bowl of ice cream — was on the house.

At night, James laid out the contents of his backpack on a motel bed. He pulled out chia seeds, ibuprofen, Moleskin for his blisters, a small stun gun that had warded off angry dogs, a fire starter, his passport and a worn photograph of a hummingbird.

“Dude, no way,” James said, suddenly panicking. He rifled through his cache. His spare set of wheel bearings was missing. He spotted a pack of them in the pile, relieved. 

“Sweet!” he said. “Stoked.”

The next morning James crouched on the sidewalk with a lit cigarette and a black coffee in the same hand, his feet in a pile of rusty leaves. His hair was pulled back with the same band he’d been using for the past 2,000 miles. This was how he began every day of his journey.

“I’m so comfortable in my mind, I just sit in there sometimes,” he said.

James popped up his skateboard and disappeared down a suburban road lined with yellow trees.

Hours passed as he skated through suburban Chicago, down the curve of Lake Michigan. Then, after 10 miles, on the southern lakeshore, he rested and reflected while crouching, elbows propped against his knees. A tall field of grass was on his right, a ghostly smear of clouds overhead.

James skated along miles of strip malls. The sun, which had been hidden all day, cast a sherbet beam of orange, yellow, red and purple onto the cover of gray clouds to the east, where an open lot of dry grass below became a momentary field of gold.

“It’s kind of an addiction to work out this much,” he said. “My body craves being used the way it’s supposed to — to sweat every day, to be out in the sun, smell fresh air.”

James gulped from his water bottle and took off again.

---

Winter came. James pushed along the Appalachian ridge in Central Pennsylvania as snow clotted on the ground and red cardinals sang in the pine trees. Behind him, storms hit the Midwest.

“I feel like I’m being chased by nature,” he said, snow melting down his back.

He took shelter for a few days and added hand warmers to his pack, calculating that he was days away from New York City, expecting to skate into the city by Dec. 18.

He was worried about the weather and about money, and life after this odyssey. Back in Oakland, he’ll rent a room and find another skateboarding competition. He began thinking about another cross-country skate, this time from the east to the west and through the Southern states.

It all felt distant, though.

“I can really only see 30 miles ahead of me,” James said. “Everything beyond that is just theory.”

Dec 13, 2025

Olivia Cruz Mayeda

California Local News Fellow

Olivia Cruz Mayeda is a fellow writing features for the Chronicle’s Transformation team. Before joining the Chronicle, Cruz Mayeda was an arts and culture reporter at KQED, where she wrote, directed and produced the six-episode docuseries “Deep Down.” She has a bachelor’s degree in history from Brown University and is a fifth-generation resident of the Bay Area.

Critics from Hungary, El Salvador and Turkey offer advice to the US about what they’ve learned about authoritarians

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Danielle Renwick Tue 9 Dec 2025

Donald Trump makes no secret of his admiration for strongmen like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Last month, he praised Orbán’s hardline stance on immigration and urged European leaders to show more “respect” for the president; earlier this year his administration struck a deal with Bukele to send more than 200 detained migrants to a notorious, maximum-security prison in El Salvador.

Many international organizations, experts and historians have sounded the alarm about the United States heading in a similar direction as these authoritarian regimes.

Nearly a year into Trump’s second term, the Guardian asked activists and opposition leaders from Hungary, El Salvador and Turkey what their experiences have taught them about authoritarianism – and what they wish they’d understood sooner.

Americans “should look to other countries, especially in the global south for solutions and for what not to do,” said Ece Temelkuran, a Turkish writer and author of How to Lose a Country. “Drop the arrogance, drop the exceptionalism.”

Stefania Kapronczay (Hungary), former head of the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union

Trump’s consolidation of power in the US echoes prime minister Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian power grabs in Hungary, says Kapronczay. But with one important difference.

“It’s happening much faster, and it’s surprising for me that so many private companies and institutions just complied with the perceived or expressed will of President Trump,” she said. “I didn’t expect so many people would be so risk-averse.”

Orbán first rose to power in 1998 amid widespread disillusionment with the country’s political establishment during the post-cold war era. “Democracy promised economic prosperity and more equality, and it just didn’t deliver that,” said Kapronczay, now a senior fellow at Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute.

Even though his party lost control of parliament in 2002, Orbán returned as prime minister in 2010, and has since tightened his grip on power, changing voting rules to favor his party; stacking the judicial system with loyalists; and cracking down on universities, NGOs and the press. In 2022, the European parliament declared Hungary a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy”.

In the period after his 2010 re-election, Orbán’s government pushed reforms that created some stability for the poorest of the society, Kapronczay said. “Authoritarians are responding to clear needs and frustration and anger in society.”

Kapronczay says she’s learned that opposition leaders need to pay closer attention to pocketbook issues. “Standing up for democracy, resisting and all this very abstract language will not reach the majority of society,” she said. “It’s only a very small progressive circle that resonates with that kind of messaging.”

But the authoritarian turn also “posed an opportunity for self-reflection”, she said. “If our previous tools are no longer working, how can we serve our mission in a more impactful way?”

For example, between 2010 and 2012, Orbán’s party restructured Hungary’s constitutional court, stacking the bench with political appointees and restricting its jurisdiction. “We [in civil society] were very concerned – and I think rightly so – but for a lot of people, the court was something really far away,” Kapronczay said. Many civil society groups failed to address everyday issues, like household incomes, schools and healthcare – “Even though these are the very issues [that affect whether people] feel a political system is working for them and whether they can make their voice heard,” she said.

Kapronczay says protests are important – particularly if the political opposition builds on them – but so are small, local gatherings that bring together people from a range of backgrounds and ideologies to solve shared concerns. “Autocrats really want to polarize the society, so any kind of initiative that goes against it is really important,” she said.

Hungary’s opposition has renewed energy in recent months. In June, tens of thousands of people, including Budapest’s mayor, showed up for a LGBTQ+ Pride parade that Orbán had banned. And polling shows that the opposition Tisza party, led by Péter Magyar, is leading Fidesz, Orbán’s party, ahead of next year’s elections.

“A lot of people believe that they can actually win the elections next year,” Kapronczay said. “Finally, there is a real competition, and that has enabled a lot of people to come out from self-censorship. My friends who are journalists say they have more sources coming forward. People are not so afraid to speak. Civil society and public life is much more vibrant than it has been in the past few years.”

Ece Temelkuran (Turkey), author of How to Lose a Country

Temelkuran says that while Recep Tayyip Erdoğan started to consolidate power during his first term as prime minister, it was his re-election, in 2007, that marked a “real shift” in Turkish politics.

“When they come to power for the second time, they feel more ruthless, and they behave as if there are no boundaries any more,” said Temelkuran. “I think especially in the leader’s head, that association of ‘me and the country’ [being] the same thing becomes very prominent when they seize power for the second time.”

Temelkuran had been reporting throughout Turkey as a columnist for the newspaper ​​Milliyet during Erdoğan’s rise in 2002. Early on, she saw his authoritarian tendencies: he regularly disparaged journalists and seemed to have little interest in politics as usual.

“[Autocrats] declare themselves as beyond politics,” said Temelkuran. “[They say:] ‘Politics is corrupt. Parties are corrupt. We’re clean.’ They create a movement, not a party.

“When you despise politics, that means that you are probably going to do something to democracy itself,” she added.

In the years since he became president in 2014, Erdoğan has jailed political opponents and critics, cracked down on protests and concentrated power in the executive branch.

After writing about Erdoğan and other autocrats for more than two decades, Temelkuran says Americans need to gear up for a “long game” of fighting to rebuild democracy. “It took Erdoğan 15 years to do what Trump did in 100 days,” she said. “If [Americans] do not accept the fact that this is a long game, and it will be brutal, I think you won’t have the patience and stamina to bear it.”

But Temelkuran says she sees a glimmer of hope in recent protests in Turkey, which were sparked by the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, on corruption charges. The charges are widely seen as an attempt to sideline a key rival of Erdoğan ahead of the 2028 presidential elections.

“This is the first time a conventional political party is accommodating or hosting the street protests,” she said. “It was always either the street protests or elections and party politics.”

The combination of the two – something Temelkuran says should have happened years ago – is breathing new life into Turkey’s main opposition party, she said. “These political parties, they’re like shipwrecks: metal structures, they’re dead. Street protests, youth politics come into them like shoaling fish, to turn them into living reefs.”

She said a successful opposition movement in the US would need to bring this same level of energy to the fight. “Many people, especially in America and in Europe, are organizing these fancy panels that normal people never go to. They’re building these NGOs that people are not interested in,” she said. “The only option is to propose a real change … and be absolutely courageous about it.”

Claudia Ortiz (El Salvador), federal deputy with the opposition Vamos party

Ortiz says that one important lesson she’s learned since the 2019 election of Nayib Bukele, the Salvadoran president, is that she and her party, which had been formed two years prior, need to do more than simply oppose him.

“You cannot make authoritarian leaders the center of your narrative,” said Ortiz. “You have to make the people the center of your narrative, and you have to be passionate about it.”

She said that means doing more to engage with citizens – and being prepared to be surprised by what they say. “A part of the cure for this is listening to people,” she said. “Don’t be so certain about what they want, what they need. You have to ask.”

The election of Bukele and his New Ideas party upended decades of two-party rule between the leftist and conservative parties.

“The parties that ruled the country in the past decades weren’t capable of building a solid democracy that delivered results in the daily life of people,” she said. “But we think that the road to overcoming that is not to destroy institutions, but to make them actually work.”

In the last six years, Bukele, who has famously called himself the “world’s coolest dictator”, has enacted emergency powers, suspending due process, and has appointed loyalists to the judiciary, allowing him to skirt a constitutional amendment against serving a second term.

His mano dura approach to crime has resulted in widespread rights abuses, including forced disappearances and torture; today the country has the world’s highest incarceration rate, according to rights groups.

Many journalists, opposition leaders and rights groups have fled the country.

Despite this, Bukele enjoys consistently high approval ratings, something Ortiz and other analysts attribute to real drops in crime and propaganda. But Ortiz said she believes cracks are starting to show.

Under Bukele, she said, basic services like health and education have gotten worse and costs of living have gone up. “When reality knocks through your door and you don’t have enough food to eat, or you have a relative that’s been a victim of an arbitrary detention … that’s the moment where you say: ‘OK, this is reality, and it’s quite different from the propaganda’,” she said. “I think the honeymoon is passing.”

“Authoritarian systems give the appearance of performing, but their solutions are not thorough, they are not sustainable, and they are not fair,” she went on. “They will decay because the way they function is to exclude, abuse, and allow massive corruption.”

But she says she’s also learned to never underestimate the autocrat.

Whether it’s undermining the judiciary or intimidating local governments, “In many cases, you think, ‘No, they won’t do it,’” she says. “But we have seen how [centralization of power] has advanced very quickly. So it’s important that democracy is defended at every turn,” she said.