Five stories about people losing control of the lives they thought they understood: a stoner whose past has been weaponized, a rich New Yorker forced out of his bubble, a true-crime friendship that turns sinister, a politician swallowed by scandal, and a commuter-train flirtation that turns into blackmail.
Mike Howell thinks he is just a small-town stoner with panic attacks and a dead-end convenience-store job, until CIA assassins arrive and his buried training switches on. The fun is in the collision of pot comedy, spy paranoia, and a surprisingly loyal romance under government fire.
A forty-year-old heir gets cut off by his parents, moves in with an old friend, and immediately falls for that friend’s girlfriend. Under the polished Manhattan comedy is a sharper question about privilege, self-invention, and whether charm can survive contact with consequences.
When Heidi Broussard and her newborn daughter disappear, the search begins with fear and confusion before suspicion turns toward someone painfully close to her. Based on a real case, the movie plays as a true-crime thriller about trust, obsession, and the horror of betrayal hiding inside friendship.
In the aftermath of the BP oil spill, a Louisiana congressman tries to fight for Gulf Coast residents before a sex scandal wrecks his Senate ambitions. Nicolas Cage plays him as a politician caught between public service, private weakness, and the compromises that turn conviction into calculation.
Charles Schine’s routine commute turns dangerous when a chance meeting with Lucinda leads toward an affair, only for a violent stranger to turn their secret into leverage. The thriller keeps tightening around temptation, shame, and the cost of one bad decision becoming a trap.
I’m endorsing Yuh-Line Niou for New York State Senate District 27.
This is the Lower Manhattan seat — including Chinatown, the Lower East Side, the East Village, Greenwich Village, SoHo, Tribeca, and the Financial District.
Yuh-Line has already been a tenant fighter in Albany. She helped pass the 2019 tenant protections, stood up to Andrew Cuomo, and is running on universal child care, immigrant justice, labor, and taxing the ultra-rich.
The primary is June 23. If you are in SD‑27, please find your poll site, vote Yuh-Line Niou, and tell your neighbors. If you are not in the district, please donate, volunteer, and share the campaign.
I’m making a special endorsement for the NYC-DSA slate in the June 23 Democratic primary.
This is not just one race. It is a whole slate of candidates trying to build the kind of political power New York needs: housing, healthcare, labor power, immigrant justice, anti-war politics, public transit, and an affordability agenda that actually names the people making the city impossible to live in.
NYC-DSA is backing two congressional candidates, one State Senate candidate, and seven Assembly candidates. If one of these candidates is on your ballot, I think you should vote for them, donate, volunteer, and share the slate.
This slate is about building a bloc — not sending one lonely good person into a system designed to swallow them.
NYC-DSA has already shown what organized working-class politics can do in New York. The next step is sending more people into Congress and Albany who are tied to a real movement, not real estate money, consultant politics, or donor-class panic.
That matters because the fights ahead are not abstract. New Yorkers need lower rents, stronger tenant protections, fast and free buses, universal childcare, Medicare for All, labor rights, ICE out of our communities, and a government that will tax the rich instead of asking working people to accept less.
The June 23 primary is a chance to make that movement bigger.
If you live in one of these districts, check your ballot, find your poll site, and vote the NYC-DSA slate. If you do not, you can still donate, volunteer, and share this with someone who does.
Worth watching. More Perfect Union looks at surveillance pricing — the growing practice of companies using personal data to decide what different people should pay.
This is exactly the kind of hidden, tech-enabled corporate power that needs a real policy response: clear rules, consumer protection, and a ban on pricing systems that turn every person’s private data into a way to squeeze them harder.
