Sicily on Seventh Avenue: The Italian Cigar Workers Who Helped Build Ybor City
In the late 1800s, Sicilian immigrants joined Cubans and Spaniards in Tampa's cigar district. They rolled tobacco, organized unions and built a mutual aid society whose red-brick clubhouse still stands.
Long before Florida meant retirees and theme parks, one corner of Tampa sounded like a crossroads of the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. On the brick streets of Ybor City, you could hear Cuban Spanish, Castilian, and the dialects of a handful of hill towns in western Sicily, often in the same factory, on the same afternoon.
The neighborhood was the creation of Vicente Martinez Ybor, a Spanish-born cigar manufacturer who moved his operation from Key West to a patch of scrubland east of Tampa in 1886. Other manufacturers followed, and within a few years Ybor City was turning out millions of hand-rolled cigars and drawing workers from across the Spanish-speaking world.
The Italians came a little later, and mostly from one place. Historians have traced much of Tampa's Italian community to a cluster of small towns in Sicily's Agrigento province, among them Santo Stefano Quisquina, Alessandria della Rocca, Bivona and Cianciana. Many had first tried their luck elsewhere in the American South, cutting cane on sugar plantations, before word spread that the cigar factories in Tampa were hiring.
They arrived as outsiders in an industry dominated by Cuban and Spanish craftsmen. Many started at the bottom, stripping tobacco leaves or running small groceries, bakeries and boarding houses that fed the factories. Over time, they worked their way onto the rolling floor and into the life of the neighborhood.
A club of their own
Ybor City's immigrants did not wait for anyone to take care of them. Each community built its own mutual aid society, a combination of social club, insurance plan and safety net. The Spaniards had the Centro Español and the Centro Asturiano. The Cubans had the Círculo Cubano. In 1894, the Italians founded L'Unione Italiana, the Italian Club, with 107 members and Bartolomeo Filogamo as its first president.
For a small monthly due, members received sick and death benefits, and the club kept its own cemetery so that no member would be buried a stranger. By 1935, membership had grown to more than 3,000. The club's first permanent home, completed in 1911, burned in 1914. Its replacement, a three-story Renaissance Revival building designed by Tampa architect M. Leo Elliott, opened on Seventh Avenue in 1918 and is still there today, its Corinthian columns and red brick a landmark of the historic district.
The reader and the strike
Inside the factories, one tradition shaped the politics of everyone on the floor: the lector. Workers pooled their money to pay a reader who sat on a raised platform and read aloud for hours, newspapers in the morning, novels and political tracts in the afternoon. Italian workers absorbed the same radical ideas as their Cuban and Spanish neighbors, and Ybor City became one of the most union-minded places in the South.
That solidarity came at a cost. In 1910, as thousands of cigar workers walked out in a bitter strike for union recognition, two Italian immigrants, Castenge Ficarrotta and Angelo Albano, were arrested in connection with the shooting of a factory bookkeeper. In September, a mob seized them from police custody and hanged them from a tree in West Tampa. Their involvement in the shooting was never proven, and no one was ever charged with their killing. The strike collapsed in early 1911.
What remains
The hand-rolled cigar industry faded through the 20th century, undone by machines, the Depression and changing tastes, and many families moved out to the suburbs. But the Italian Club endures. More than 130 years after its founding, it still hosts weddings, dances and the annual Festa Italiana, with bocce tournaments and wine in the same rooms where cigar workers once gathered to pay their dues.
Ybor City is often remembered as a Cuban and Spanish story, and it is. But it is also an Italian American one: proof that the Sicilian diaspora reached not only Mulberry Street and North Beach, but a cigar town on the Gulf Coast of Florida, where it helped invent a new kind of American neighborhood.
Uber Eats Driver Shot Outside Dadeland Luxury Apartments; Deputies Say Suspect's Home Held a Drug Packaging Room
A delivery driver who came back hoping to get a woman's number was shot and pistol-whipped in Kendall early Monday, authorities say. The 33-year-old suspect now faces an attempted murder charge and a stack of drug trafficking counts.
A late-night delivery in Kendall ended with a driver shot, beaten and chased around a Corvette, and with the man accused of attacking him facing an attempted murder charge and multiple drug trafficking counts, according to the Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office.
Deputies were called to the Pearl Dadeland apartments at 7440 N. Kendall Drive just after 3:30 a.m. on Monday, October 12, after a report of gunfire. A bystander told them an argument had broken out minutes earlier.
According to an arrest report cited by WSVN 7News and Local 10 News, an Uber Eats driver had met a woman outside the building's lobby while dropping off an order. About 50 minutes later, he came back, hoping to see her again and possibly get her phone number.
That is when, investigators say, 33-year-old Khuslen Saruultuya pulled up in a gray Corvette, pointed a handgun at the driver and ordered him to the ground. Saruultuya allegedly fired one shot that grazed the driver, then struck him in the back of the head with the gun, leaving a two-inch wound, and threatened to kill him. The driver broke away and was chased around the car at gunpoint while the woman screamed at Saruultuya to stop, the report says. Saruultuya then drove off.
The driver took himself to Baptist Health South Miami Hospital, where South Miami police alerted the sheriff's office to a patient with a gunshot wound. Deputies identified Saruultuya through witnesses and arrested him without incident at his Southwest Miami-Dade apartment Monday evening.
What deputies found
A search of the apartment turned up suspected cocaine, MDMA, ketamine, marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms and hundreds of prescription pills, WSVN reported, along with roughly $11,394 in cash that investigators believe came from drug sales. Local 10 reported that deputies also found two bags of tusi, the drug sold on the street as "pink cocaine." Deputies said one room appeared to be set up for mixing, portioning, labeling and packaging narcotics.
Saruultuya was booked into the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center. Local 10 reported that he faces attempted murder, aggravated battery and nine felony drug trafficking charges; WSVN described the top count as attempted felony murder, along with aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and multiple drug offenses. Under Florida law, attempted felony murder is a first-degree felony punishable by up to life in prison. Bond had not been set as of Tuesday morning.
The driver, who has not been publicly identified, was treated for his injuries. Saruultuya has not been convicted of any crime, and it was not immediately clear whether he had an attorney.
Man in Fake ICE Gear Arrested at Miami Polling Site for Brazil's Election
Authorities say a Port St. Lucie man voted at Miami Dade College's Kendall Campus, then came back dressed as an immigration agent to film frightened Brazilian voters. He faces charges including voter intimidation.
A man who allegedly dressed as a federal immigration agent and walked among voters at a Miami polling site during Brazil's presidential election has been arrested and charged with voter intimidation, according to the Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office.
Danilo Alves Silva, 46, of Port St. Lucie, was taken into custody on Sunday, October 4, at Miami Dade College's Kendall Campus, one of two sites in Florida where Brazilian citizens living abroad could cast ballots in the first round of their country's presidential election. Silva, who was born in Brazil, was arrested by detectives from the sheriff's office Homeland Security Bureau.
According to reports by CBS News Miami and the Miami Herald, Silva voted first, then changed into an outfit styled after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement gear and returned to the polling site to record people's reactions. Authorities said the costume included a blue ICE cap, sunglasses, a camouflage face mask, an ICE-style raid jacket, tactical boots and a handheld radio. Voters, many of them immigrants, reportedly feared he was a real federal agent.
Silva told detectives he had bought the costume on Amazon, according to the reports. Investigators also allege that he threatened a detective and offered money in exchange for his release, telling the officer, "I will get you paid if you let me go."
The charges
Silva faces five charges. CBS News Miami listed them as felony voter intimidation, bribery, threatening a public servant, unlawful use of police insignia and disorderly conduct; the Miami Herald described the bribery count as conspiracy to commit bribery. Miami Dade College also issued him a trespass warning barring him from the Kendall Campus.
Accounts of his bond also differ. CBS News Miami reported that Silva posted a total bond of $5,650, while the Herald, citing jail records, reported that no bond had been set on the voter intimidation charge as of October 5. He appeared before a judge that day.
A hearing is scheduled for October 19, when prosecutors are expected to decide whether to formally file charges. Silva has not been convicted of any crime, and it was not immediately clear whether he had an attorney who could comment on his behalf.
A tense backdrop
South Florida is home to one of the largest Brazilian communities in the United States, and crowds of expatriates turned out to vote at the Kendall Campus on election day. For many immigrant families in Miami, the sight of an apparent ICE officer at a crowded public gathering is no joke. The case is a reminder that impersonating law enforcement, especially at a polling place, can carry serious legal consequences.
Pope Leo XIV Recovering After Lung Cancer Surgery, Vatican Says
Doctors at Rome's Gemelli Hospital removed the lower lobe of the pope's right lung on Tuesday and confirmed adenocarcinoma. A day later, the Vatican says he is walking, eating and recovering normally.
Pope Leo XIV is recovering at Rome's Gemelli Hospital after surgeons removed part of his right lung and confirmed that a growth found there was cancerous, the Vatican said this week.
The 71-year-old pontiff, the first American to lead the Catholic Church, underwent thoracic surgery on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 13. According to the Holy See Press Office, doctors removed the lower lobe of his right lung using a minimally invasive, video-assisted technique. He was in the operating room for about three hours; the procedure itself lasted roughly 90 minutes. The Vatican described the operation as successful and free of complications.
A tissue analysis performed during the surgery confirmed lung adenocarcinoma, the diagnosis doctors had suspected from tests before the operation. Adenocarcinoma is the most common form of lung cancer and tends to grow more slowly than other types, which often allows it to be caught earlier. The Vatican has not said what stage the cancer is or whether further treatment will be needed. Additional tests on the removed tissue are expected in the coming days.
The surgical team was led by Professor Stefano Margaritora, Gemelli's chief of thoracic surgery. After waking normally and a short period of observation, Leo was returned to his room on the hospital's 10th floor. Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said the pope asked for dinner that evening and spent time with his secretaries and Vatican staff.
A calm first night
On Wednesday morning, the Press Office said "the night passed calmly." In an afternoon update, doctors reported that his recovery was progressing normally. Blood tests and a chest X-ray came back within the expected range for the type of operation, according to the Vatican. The pope has started respiratory physiotherapy, has begun walking around his room and is eating normally again.
The health scare began on Sunday, October 11, when the Vatican announced that a nodular lesion had been found in the pope's lung. Speaking at his Sunday blessing, Leo told the faithful that he had chosen surgery on the advice of his doctors.
What comes next
The Vatican says the planned hospital stay of about one week has not changed. All of the pope's audiences have been canceled through October 20.
The bigger question is travel. Leo is scheduled to begin a trip to South America on November 6. Patients are generally advised to avoid flying for several weeks after this kind of lung surgery, which puts the trip close to the edge of a typical recovery window. The Vatican has not said whether the visit will go ahead as planned.
Messages of support have poured in from around the world, including from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said he and his wife were "united in prayer" for the pope. Amerigo will update this story as the Vatican releases more information.
The Mob at Parish Prison: How an 1891 Lynching Shaped Columbus Day
Eleven Italian Americans were killed by a New Orleans mob in March 1891. A year later, a presidential proclamation turned Christopher Columbus into a national symbol, and an olive branch.
On the night of October 15, 1890, New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy was ambushed by gunmen near his home on Girod Street. He died the next morning. Within hours, the city had settled on its suspects: the Sicilian immigrants who crowded the French Quarter and worked the docks along the Mississippi.
Hennessy, the story went, had whispered a slur for Italians before he died. Whether he said it or not, the accusation was enough. Police swept through the immigrant quarter and arrested scores of men. Nineteen were eventually indicted, and in February 1891 nine of them went on trial.
The prosecution's case was thin. On March 13, the jury acquitted six of the defendants and could not reach a verdict on the other three. None of the men were released. That evening, newspapers carried a call for citizens to gather the next morning at the statue of Henry Clay on Canal Street "to remedy the failure of justice."
Thousands came. Led by a lawyer named William Parkerson and other prominent men of the city, the crowd marched to the Parish Prison, battered through a side door and hunted the Italian prisoners through the corridors. Nine were shot inside. Two more were dragged outside and hanged, one from a lamppost and one from a tree, as onlookers cheered. Several of the dead had been acquitted the day before. Some had never been tried at all.
It remains one of the largest mass lynchings in American history. A grand jury later declined to indict anyone who took part.
A diplomatic crisis
The killings caused an international incident. Italy demanded that the killers be punished and that the families be compensated, and when Washington replied that justice was a matter for the State of Louisiana, Rome recalled its minister, Baron Saverio Fava. For a few tense weeks, American newspapers speculated openly about war with Italy.
The standoff ended in 1892, when the administration of President Benjamin Harrison agreed to pay an indemnity of $25,000 to the Italian government. That same year, Harrison made a more lasting gesture. With the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's landing approaching, he issued a proclamation calling on Americans to mark the occasion with a national celebration on October 21, 1892.
Historians have long read the proclamation as, in part, an olive branch to Italy and to Italian Americans, who had just been treated as a suspect class. For an immigrant community often caricatured as criminal and unassimilable, a Genoese navigator at the very start of the American story offered a claim to belonging. Italian American groups spent the next four decades campaigning for a permanent holiday, and Columbus Day became a federal observance in 1937.
The road to an apology
For generations, the lynching was a half-buried memory, kept alive mostly in Italian American families and in the occasional history book. The men who led the mob went on to respected careers. One of them, John M. Parker, later served as governor of Louisiana.
In April 2019, more than 128 years after the killings, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell formally apologized on behalf of the city. "What happened to those 11 Italians was wrong," she told an audience of Italian American leaders and descendants. The Italian consul general accepted the apology on behalf of Italy.
Today, as cities and states debate whether the second Monday of October should honor Columbus, Indigenous peoples, or both, the story of Parish Prison is often left out. It shouldn't be. For many Italian Americans, the holiday was never only about a 15th-century explorer. It was about a community that had been told, in the most violent terms possible, that it did not belong, and that spent the next century proving otherwise.
RJ Mitte, Walter White Jr. on Breaking Bad, Dies at 34
The actor turned his breakout role into years of disability advocacy and later put down roots in Brownsville, Texas. Police say the circumstances of his death are still under investigation.
RJ Mitte, who played Walter "Flynn" White Jr. on Breaking Bad and became one of Hollywood's best-known advocates for performers with disabilities, has died. He was 34.
His representatives announced the death on Monday, October 12, in a statement to TMZ. The statement described him as a "beloved actor, philanthropist, and passionate disability rights advocate." Brownsville police confirmed the death the same afternoon. They said the cause and manner of death are pending an official determination and that the investigation is ongoing.
A Role Drawn From Life
Roy Frank Mitte III was born on August 21, 1992, in Jackson, Mississippi. He was cast as a teenager in Vince Gilligan's AMC drama, which ran from 2008 to 2013. He played the son of Bryan Cranston's Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher turned drug manufacturer. Like his character, Mitte had cerebral palsy. He drew on that experience for a part that gave the show some of its most human scenes, as Walt Jr. slowly learned what his father had become.
After Breaking Bad, Mitte had a recurring role on ABC Family's Switched at Birth. His film work included Who's Driving Doug, Standing Up for Sunny, The Oak Room and Triumph, which he also executive produced. He was also the lead voice on the Netflix animated series The Guardians of Justice. He crossed into fashion too, appearing in a Gap campaign and walking for Vivienne Westwood.
An Advocate First
Mitte used his profile to push for disability inclusion on screen. He was a spokesman for SAG-AFTRA on behalf of actors with disabilities and received the union's Harold Russell Award in 2013. He served as an ambassador for United Cerebral Palsy and for Shriners Children's.
“RJ believed in Brownsville.” — Daniella Lopez Valdez, executive director, Mitte Cultural District
A Home in South Texas
After the series ended, Mitte moved to Brownsville, where he was president of the Mitte Foundation, the charity built on his family's philanthropy. He backed the Mitte Cultural District, which recently became a designated Texas Cultural District. He was on hand in 2025 when the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art was renamed The Mitte: Arts and Cultural Center.
Leaders of the district said his commitment to the city went far beyond writing checks. They said he saw the district as a way to connect people across generations, cultures and abilities.
Just weeks before his death, Mitte attended a screening in Beverly Hills. He had also talked on a podcast about how Breaking Bad changed his life and how close he stayed to the cast years after the finale.
Survivors were not immediately announced.
Before October 12, 1492, humanity lived as two worlds that didn't know the other existed. A weaver's son from Genoa sailed into the unknown and brought them together.
Before October 12, 1492, humanity lived as two worlds that didn't know the other existed.
On one side of the Atlantic were Europe, Africa and Asia, with their cathedrals, caravans and centuries of written history. On the other were the Americas, home to millions of people, great cities, stone temples and trade routes running thousands of miles. Across most of recorded history, neither side had any lasting knowledge of the other. Between them lay an ocean most sailors treated as the edge of the possible.
One man from Genoa thought otherwise.
The Dream of a Weaver's Son
Cristoforo Colombo was born around 1451 to a family of wool weavers. He wasn't a prince or a scholar with a royal pension. He was a sailor who taught himself, studying charts, reading everything he could find, and sailing the waters from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic coast of Africa.
He became convinced he could reach Asia by sailing west. Experts told him no. Royal commissions turned him down. For nearly a decade he carried his plan from court to court: Portugal, Spain, and appeals to England and France. People called him a dreamer, and some called him a fool.
He kept going. In 1492, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain finally said yes.
Into the Unknown
On August 3, 1492, three small ships left the port of Palos de la Frontera: the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa María. They carried about ninety men. After stopping in the Canary Islands, they sailed west on September 6 into open ocean that no European ship had crossed and returned to tell of.
Imagine those weeks. There were no maps of where they were going. Every sunrise showed the same empty horizon. Food spoiled, water went stale, and the men grew more frightened each day as they sailed farther from home than any of them had ever been. Talk of mutiny went through the decks.
Columbus held his course. He read the stars, watched the birds, and noted the branches and reeds drifting past the hull. His faith in the voyage was what kept it going.
"Tierra!"
Around two in the morning on October 12, a lookout on the Pinta named Rodrigo de Triana saw a pale line of land shining in the moonlight and shouted the word that changed history: Tierra!
At dawn, Columbus stepped onto the beach of an island its people called Guanahani. He named it San Salvador, meaning Holy Savior.
The Moment Humanity Met Itself
This is the part of the story that should still give us chills.
On that beach stood the Lucayan Taíno people, who had built their lives in the Caribbean over many generations. Facing them were men from across the sea in strange clothes, stepping out of ships bigger than anything the islanders had seen.
In that moment, two branches of the human family met for the first time in recorded memory. They had been separated for tens of thousands of years and had developed different languages, beliefs, foods and ways of seeing the world. Now they looked into each other's faces across a strip of sand.
They traded gifts and tried to talk with gestures and expressions. Everything about the meeting was new.
“From then on, the world was one world.”
What Followed
Nothing that came after was small. The voyage set off what historians call the Columbian Exchange, the largest transfer of plants, animals, foods and ideas in human history.
Tomatoes reached Italy. Potatoes reached Ireland and northern Europe and helped feed whole nations. Corn, cacao, vanilla and peppers spread around the planet, while wheat, horses, cattle and citrus crossed the other way. The cuisines we think of as timeless, like Italian sauce, Irish stew and Swiss chocolate, only exist because of what began in 1492.
Ships kept crossing, and new nations eventually grew in the lands Columbus reached. Among them was the United States, a country that would one day name its capital district, cities, rivers and universities after him.
Four Voyages
Columbus didn't cross the Atlantic just once. He did it four times. His second voyage in 1493 was a fleet of seventeen ships carrying more than a thousand men, along with horses, cattle, seeds and tools to build a permanent settlement. He charted Dominica, Guadeloupe and Puerto Rico, then explored the coasts of Cuba and Jamaica.
On his third voyage in 1498, he reached Trinidad and the coast of South America. Watching the Orinoco River pour so much fresh water into the sea, he concluded that a vast land must lie behind it. He was right: he was standing at the edge of a continent.
On his fourth and final voyage, from 1502 to 1504, he sailed along the coast of Central America, from Honduras down to Panama, still searching for a passage west.
Master of the Sea
On the way home in February 1493, a violent Atlantic storm nearly sank the Niña. Afraid that news of his discovery would die with him, Columbus wrote out an account, wrapped it in waxed cloth, sealed it in a barrel and threw it into the sea. Then he fought the storm and brought his ship home.
Years later, stranded on Jamaica for a year with ships eaten through by shipworm and food running short, Columbus checked his astronomical almanac and saw that a total lunar eclipse was coming on February 29, 1504. He warned the local caciques that heaven was displeased and would darken the moon. When the moon turned dark red that night, the food came back. It's one of the most famous stories in the history of exploration.
He navigated largely by dead reckoning, judging speed, heading and time with little more than a compass, an hourglass and his own instincts, and he found his way across the ocean and back again and again. Later sailors who retraced his routes, including the historian and naval officer Samuel Eliot Morison, marveled at how accurate he was.
Ferdinand and Isabella named him Admiral of the Ocean Sea. He died in Valladolid, Spain, in 1506, but the routes he opened stayed open for good.
The Americas Were Not Eden
A fashionable story has taken hold in recent years: that 1492 was the moment a peaceful paradise was invaded, and that the people of the Americas lived in perfect harmony with one another and with nature until Europeans arrived. It makes a tidy morality tale. It isn't history.
The peoples of the Americas were human beings, with all the greatness and all the cruelty that human beings everywhere have shown. They built cities, calendars, roads and art. They also waged war, took slaves and conquered their neighbors, just as the kingdoms of Europe, Africa and Asia did.
Columbus heard this from the Taíno themselves. On his first voyage, his hosts told him about the raiders they feared most: the people the Spanish would call Caribs, known today as the Kalinago. They struck Taíno villages from the sea in war canoes, carried off women and captives, and were described by the Taíno as eaters of men. Historians still debate how much of the cannibalism story is true, but the raids were real, and so was the fear.
The Taíno knew conflict among themselves too. Their chiefdoms, each led by a cacique, competed and fought. When Columbus returned to Hispaniola in November 1493, he found La Navidad, the fort he had left behind, burned to the ground and all 39 of its men dead, killed by warriors of the cacique Caonabo. Accounts from the time say the settlers had stirred up trouble by seizing women and gold. Either way, it was clear these islands were no strangers to violence.
On the mainland, the scale was far greater. The Aztec Empire that ruled central Mexico was built on conquest and tribute, and it practiced human sacrifice on a massive scale. In the 2010s, archaeologists digging in the heart of Mexico City uncovered part of the Huey Tzompantli, a great rack and tower of human skulls that Spanish soldiers had described five centuries earlier, with hundreds of skulls recovered so far. It's no accident that tens of thousands of Native warriors, led by the Tlaxcalans, later joined the Spanish against the Aztecs. They had suffered under Aztec rule for generations.
Farther north, the nations of the Iroquois Confederacy waged what historians call "mourning wars," raiding their neighbors to take captives who would replace their own dead, either by adoption or by ritual execution. Across the continent, war between nations was a regular part of life long before any European ship appeared.
None of this makes the peoples of the Americas villains, any more than Europe's own wars make Europeans villains. It makes them people. Painting them as gentle innocents isn't respect; it's a cartoon that erases their real history, their real power and their real choices.
“The real meeting of 1492 was between two human civilizations, each capable of brilliance and brutality.”
Why We Celebrate
Columbus Day isn't really about one man. It celebrates the human drive to sail past the horizon, the courage to keep going when experts say no, and the instinct to see what is out there.
For millions of Italian-Americans, the day carries extra meaning. When Italian immigrants faced prejudice in their new country, Columbus was the son of Genoa who had started the American story itself. President Benjamin Harrison called for a national celebration on the voyage's 400th anniversary in 1892, and in 1937 Columbus Day became a federal holiday.
Every great leap since then has the same spirit, from Lewis and Clark to Lindbergh to the footprints on the Moon. Someone looked at the edge of the map and decided it wasn't the end of the world.
Christopher Columbus sailed into the unknown, came back, and showed the world what was out there.
Happy Columbus Day.
The Beatles' expanded reissue went back into the U.S. Top 10 for the first time since 1966. In Britain it came close to No. 1.
The Beatles released a new edition of Rubber Soul on October 2. Within a week, the 1965 album was competing with this year's biggest new records.
On the latest Billboard 200, Rubber Soul re-entered at No. 4 with 58,000 equivalent album units. It's the album's first week in the American Top 10 since April 1966. The last time it appeared anywhere on the chart was January 2016. Only Taylor Swift's The Life of a Showgirl, Drake's HABIBTI and Olivia Rodrigo's you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love sold more that week. Rubber Soul finished ahead of Morgan Wallen's I'm The Problem.
A Near Miss at Home
In the U.K., the Beatles looked set to win outright. Early in the week, the Official Charts Company's first midweek count had Rubber Soul at 19,348 sales, more than 2,000 ahead of the nearest new release. A win would have been the group's first No. 1 album since Abbey Road returned to the top in October 2019.
The Manchester-area band Blossoms caught up by the end of the week. Their Songs From The Wedding Cake took No. 1, the band's fifth chart-topping album, and Rubber Soul settled at No. 2. The Beatles still had a consolation: Rubber Soul sold more vinyl than any other album that week and topped the Official Vinyl Albums Chart.
“A record that spent eight weeks at No. 1 in 1965 lost the top spot by a few thousand copies in 2026.”
What's in the Box
The reissue is more than a new pressing. Producer Giles Martin and engineer Sam Okell made a new stereo mix from the original four-track tapes. They used the "de-mixing" technology first developed for Peter Jackson's Get Back, which can separate instruments that were recorded together on one track. There are also new Dolby Atmos mixes.
The full box comes as 4 CDs or 5 LPs with an 88-page book, including an introduction by Paul McCartney. Alongside the new mix, it has the original mono mix and a rebuilt version of the 12-track Capitol LP that Americans bought in 1966. A disc of session outtakes and home demos includes John Lennon's unfinished demo "Little Girl," which had never been heard before. Two preview singles, the first take of "Michelle" and a songwriting work tape of "Day Tripper," came out over the summer.
Keeping Company With Swift
The timing is neat. In the same week Rubber Soul went back into the Top 10, Swift reached her 100th week at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. That makes her the only act besides the Beatles to reach that number. The Beatles still hold the record with 132 weeks at No. 1, and that total includes the six weeks the American Rubber Soul spent on top in early 1966.
Rubber Soul was the album where the Beatles stopped being just a singles band and started making albums meant to be heard as a whole. Sixty years later, a lot of people are still buying it.
Madonna Louise Ciccone: The Abruzzese Roots of the Queen of Pop
Her grandparents left a mountain village in Abruzzo for a Pennsylvania steel town. Their granddaughter turned Catholic imagery and Italian swagger into the biggest career in pop, and picked a fight with the pope along the way.
In the 1986 video for “Papa Don’t Preach,” Madonna wore a simple white T-shirt with three words across the chest: “Italians Do It Better.” It became one of the defining images of the decade, and one of the cheekiest statements of ethnic pride pop music has ever produced.
The woman wearing it was born Madonna Louise Ciccone on Aug. 16, 1958, in Bay City, Michigan. She would go on to become the best-selling female recording artist of all time. But the story of that T-shirt starts more than 4,000 miles away, in a stone village in the mountains of central Italy.
From Pacentro to Pennsylvania
Pacentro sits high in the Apennines in the province of L’Aquila, in Abruzzo, inside what is now Majella National Park. Its population peaked at more than 4,000 in 1911. Today, after generations of emigration, it’s just under 1,100.
Madonna’s grandfather, Gaetano Ciccone, was born there in 1901. In 1920 he left for Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, a steel town outside Pittsburgh. His wife, Michelina Di Iulio, followed in 1922. Even Gaetano’s parents eventually made the trip, emigrating in 1930 when they were 63 and 54.
Gaetano and Michelina’s son, Silvio “Tony” Ciccone, became an engineer who worked for Chrysler’s defense division and later General Dynamics. He married Madonna Louise Fortin, an X-ray technician of French-Canadian descent. She died of breast cancer on Dec. 1, 1963, when her daughter and namesake was 5.
A Catholic girl
Madonna grew up in a Catholic household and attended St. Frederick’s and St. Andrew’s Catholic schools. In 1966 she took Veronica as her confirmation name. That upbringing became the richest material of her career: the rosaries, the crucifixes, the guilt and the theater of the church.
It peaked with “Like a Prayer” in 1989. The video, with its stigmata, burning crosses and a dream sequence involving a saint, drew condemnation from the Vatican. Religious groups called for a boycott, and Pepsi pulled a commercial built around the song and dropped her as a sponsor.
Madonna vs. the pope
Italy had first embraced her in 1987, when her Who’s That Girl tour played Turin’s Stadio Comunale, broadcast live on RAI, and Florence’s Stadio Artemio Franchi. Footage from those shows became the concert film “Ciao Italia.” During the Turin stop, she met some of her Italian cousins.
Three years later, the relationship turned stormy. Ahead of her Blond Ambition shows in Italy in 1990, Pope John Paul II urged fans to stay away, and the show was reportedly condemned as one of the most satanic in history. Madonna answered with a press conference at the Rome airport. The moment ended up in her documentary “Truth or Dare.”
“I talk with my hands, I cry a lot, I’m passionate, I have a bad temper and I love beautiful shoes.” — Madonna, to Le Figaro, on being Italian
The village that waits
Madonna has never visited Pacentro, though her father has. Her relatives there, and the town’s mayor, have said she’s always welcome. When a powerful earthquake devastated L’Aquila and nearby towns in April 2009, killing hundreds, she pledged money toward relief, reportedly £500,000. She said she was “happy to lend a helping hand to the town that my ancestors are from.”
She has kept coming back to Italy on tour, most recently with her Celebration tour in Milan in 2023. And she has never stopped playing with the identity she inherited, the passion and the pageantry and the Catholic imagery she turned into pop.
Asked once by the French newspaper Le Figaro what was Italian about her, she rattled off a list: she talks with her hands, cries a lot, has a temper and loves beautiful shoes. It was a joke, mostly. But the girl from Bay City with the grandparents from Pacentro never needed a T-shirt to prove the point.
Miami’s Ghost Trail: A Decade After Approval, the Ludlam Trail Is Still Mostly Fences
Miami-Dade has spent tens of millions on a nearly six-mile path through the west side of the county, and finally hired a designer this summer. Neighbors are still waiting for a single continuous mile they can walk.
Drive along Southwest 69th Avenue in west Miami-Dade and you’ll see it: a long, narrow strip of land running behind backyards and strip malls, mostly hidden behind chain-link fence. It’s the old Florida East Coast Railway corridor, and for years it has been the future site of the Ludlam Trail, a 5.6-mile path for walkers, runners and cyclists.
It was supposed to be one of the county’s signature green projects, a cousin to the Underline in Brickell. Instead, it has become a case study in how slowly big public projects move in South Florida.
Years of promises
Miami-Dade approved the Ludlam Trail plan in 2015. In 2018, county commissioners approved buying the rail property for about $24.6 million. A groundbreaking ceremony followed in 2021. Advocates say the county has spent roughly $42 million on the project so far.
Yet most of the corridor remains closed. In 2024, the county’s parks department said construction was expected to start in fall 2026. That hasn’t happened. A nearly two-year search for a design firm dragged on without a signed contract until July, when county commissioners unanimously approved a $9.5 million contract to design the trail. Mayor Daniella Levine Cava called the vote a “significant milestone.”
“A significant milestone.” — Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, on the trail’s design contract
What’s slowing it down
Part of the problem is what’s in the ground. The corridor carried freight trains for decades, and sections are fenced off because of soil contamination. Several brownfield sites have to be cleaned up or capped before anyone can build a path on top of them, adding time and cost.
The trail also has to cross some of the busiest roads in the county. The Florida Department of Transportation has agreed to design and build pedestrian bridges over Flagler Street, Southwest Eighth Street and Bird Road. A fourth bridge, over Coral Way, is being built by a private developer under an agreement with the county, connected to a new senior housing project next to the corridor.
And money remains an open question. The county’s current budget sets aside about $11.7 million for construction and land acquisition and $750,000 for planning and design, but officials have not announced a total cost or a full plan to pay for it. The city of Miami is now considering whether to fund its share of the project, Miami Today reported this week.
Neighbors want a date
A small section south of Bird Road is already open, built as part of private development along the corridor. For everyone else, the trail is still a promise. Advocates have revived a group called Friends of the Ludlam Trail and are pressing county staff for firm dates and dollar figures. Critics also worry about developer “nodes” that replace pieces of the public trail with private construction.
The stakes go beyond recreation. West Miami-Dade is one of the most car-dependent parts of the county, with few safe places to walk or bike. A finished Ludlam Trail would create a continuous green spine from near Northwest Seventh Street down to Southwest 80th Street, connecting neighborhoods, schools and parks.
What comes next
With a designer finally hired, the next steps are finishing the design, lining up construction money and setting a schedule, none of which has been announced. Until then, the Ludlam Trail remains what one local outlet called a “ghost trail”: a ribbon of fenced-off land with a lot of history and not much path.
Dino From Steubenville: How Dean Martin Made Being Italian Look Effortless
The barber’s son from an Ohio steel town boxed as “Kid Crochet,” dealt cards in a back-room casino and sang as “Dino Martini” before becoming the coolest man in America. Unlike Sinatra, he never stopped singing in Italian.
In the summer of 1964, the Beatles owned America. “A Hard Day’s Night” sat at the top of the charts, and nothing seemed able to move it. Then a 47-year-old crooner from Steubenville, Ohio, did. Dean Martin’s “Everybody Loves Somebody” knocked the Beatles out of the No. 1 spot, a small, sweet revenge for every grown-up who wasn’t ready to give pop music to the kids just yet.
It was a typical Dean Martin move: unhurried, a little amused, and impossible to argue with. For decades he made everything look easy, from the songs to the jokes to the drink in his hand. But the ease was hard-won, and it started with a barber’s son from a mill town.
Dino Crocetti
He was born Dino Paul Crocetti on June 7, 1917, in Steubenville, a steel town on the Ohio River. His father, Gaetano Crocetti, was a barber from Montesilvano, a town on the Adriatic coast in the province of Pescara, in Abruzzo. His mother, Angela Barra, was born in Ohio to a family with roots near Bergamo, in northern Italy. Dino grew up in a town full of immigrant mill workers.
He didn’t follow a straight path. At 15 he boxed as a welterweight under the name “Kid Crochet,” and later joked that he “won all but 11” of his 12 fights. He worked as a stock boy in a tobacco shop that hid an illegal casino in the back, and soon he was working the tables as a croupier. All the while, he was singing with local bands.
His first stage name was “Dino Martini,” a nod to the Italian opera tenor Nino Martini. In late 1940, Cleveland bandleader Sammy Watkins suggested something simpler: Dean Martin.
Martin and Lewis
In 1944, at a hotel in New York, Martin met a manic young comic named Jerry Lewis. On July 24, 1946, they debuted as a team at Atlantic City’s 500 Club. The pairing, Martin the smooth straight man and Lewis the human cartoon, became one of the biggest acts in show business, with hit movies, a radio show and early television. The partnership ended in 1956, 10 years to the day after it began.
Many people assumed Martin would fade without Lewis. Instead, he got bigger. He became a serious film actor in movies like “Rio Bravo,” a pillar of the Rat Pack alongside Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr., and the host of “The Dean Martin Show,” which ran on NBC from 1965 to 1974.
“Martin made being Italian American look like the most natural, most enviable thing in the world.”
That’s amore
What set Martin apart from many of his peers was how openly he wore his heritage. While Sinatra mostly scrubbed the old country out of his singing, Martin leaned in. “That’s Amore” became one of the most famous songs of the 1950s, and his recording of “Volare” reached No. 15 in the United States and No. 2 in Britain. Italian phrases slipped into his performances, and on his variety show he was known to toss in a few off-color Italian jokes that only some of the audience understood. Italian-speaking viewers did not always find them as funny as he did.
In a mid-century America where Italian Americans were often typecast as gangsters or laborers, Martin offered another image entirely: relaxed, funny, elegant and in on the joke. He made being Italian American look like the most natural, most enviable thing in the world.
The quiet sadness
Behind the easy grin there was real grief. On March 21, 1987, his son Dean Paul Martin, a pilot with the California Air National Guard, was killed when his F-4 Phantom jet crashed. The loss was devastating for the family.
He was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1993 and declined surgery. He died at his Beverly Hills home on Dec. 25, 1995, at 78.
Still swinging
Martin’s voice never really went away. His Christmas records return every December, “That’s Amore” is still the soundtrack to a thousand pizzerias, and a whole generation discovered him through movies and TV that borrowed his cool. He received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009, and he has three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for film, recording and television.
His hometowns remember him, too. Steubenville renamed a stretch of Ohio Route 7 Dean Martin Boulevard and painted his face on a downtown mural. And in Montesilvano, the Abruzzo town his father left behind, the convention center bears his name: the Pala Dean Martin. Not bad for a barber’s kid who once sang as Dino Martini.
Pope Leo XIV to Have Lung Surgery After Doctors Find Early-Stage Nodule
The 71-year-old pope announced the news himself from St. Peter’s Square, saying the nodule was caught early and that he had decided to have it removed. The Vatican expects about a week of recovery.
Pope Leo XIV told the faithful on Sunday that he will undergo surgery this week to remove a small nodule from his lung, delivering the news himself during his weekly noon blessing in St. Peter’s Square.
Speaking in Italian, the pope said doctors had found “a small, localized nodule in my lung” during routine medical checks. “It was detected at a very early stage and is circumscribed,” he said. “I’ve decided to have surgery to remove it. The surgery is already scheduled for the coming days.” He closed by asking for prayers: “I entrust myself to your prayers.”
Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said the operation would take place in the first days of the week, with recovery expected to take about a week. The Vatican did not give an exact date, and it has not said whether the nodule is cancerous.
“It was detected at a very early stage and is circumscribed. I’ve decided to have surgery to remove it.” — Pope Leo XIV
A healthy pope, until now
Leo, 71, has had no previously known health problems. The first pope born in the United States, the Chicago native formerly known as Robert Prevost is known as one of the more physically active pontiffs in memory. He plays tennis weekly and swims at the papal summer retreat at Castel Gandolfo.
He is expected to be treated at Rome’s Gemelli hospital, which keeps a dedicated apartment for popes and has treated several of his predecessors.
A lung nodule is a small abnormal spot in the lung, generally less than an inch across, according to the American Cancer Society. Nodules often turn up on CT scans done for other reasons, and many are not cancerous. Leo said his doctors advised acting quickly, and he followed their advice.
Reassurance from Rome
Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni offered her government’s support and said the pope’s “serenity and calm” in describing his condition were reassuring. The pope’s decision to make the announcement himself, in plain language and before the surgery, stood out in a church long known for keeping papal health private.
The news inevitably recalls the final months of Pope Francis, who died on April 21, 2025, after a long hospitalization for a respiratory crisis that developed into double pneumonia. Francis had chronic lung disease and had part of one lung removed as a young man. Leo’s situation, by every account so far, is very different: an early finding, a planned operation and a short expected recovery.
The trip to South America
The bigger question is the calendar. Leo is scheduled to visit Uruguay, Argentina and Peru in November. The Vatican didn’t say whether the surgery or recovery would affect the trip, but the pope said he plans to go and asked for prayers for the Peru leg in particular.
Peru is close to his heart. Before his election in May 2025, Leo spent much of his life there as a missionary and later as bishop of Chiclayo, and he became a Peruvian citizen. A return visit as pope is one of the most anticipated moments of his papacy so far.
For now, the Vatican is asking for patience and prayers. Updates on the pope’s condition are expected after the surgery.
Born in a Hoboken tenement to a Sicilian boxer and a Ligurian political boss, Sinatra turned down the chance to become “Frankie Satin” and became the most famous Italian American of the century, with all the pride and baggage that came with it.
Early in Frank Sinatra’s career, the bandleader Harry James had a suggestion for his skinny new singer: change the name. Something smoother, something that would play better on a marquee. Something like Frankie Satin.
Sinatra said no. It was a small decision that turned out to be a big one. For the next six decades, every time the most famous singer in the world stepped onto a stage, an Italian name went up in lights with him.
Marty and Dolly
Francis Albert Sinatra was born on Dec. 12, 1915, in a tenement at 415 Monroe Street in Hoboken, New Jersey, the only child of Italian immigrants. It was a brutal birth. He weighed 13 and a half pounds and was pulled out with forceps, which left scars on his left cheek and neck and damaged his left eardrum for life. His baptism had to wait until the following April.
His father, Antonino Martino “Marty” Sinatra, came from Sicily. Marty couldn’t read or write. He boxed as a bantamweight and later joined the Hoboken Fire Department, eventually rising to captain. His mother, Natalina “Dolly” Garaventa, came from the area around Genoa, in Liguria. In Italy, a Sicilian and a Genoese might as well have come from different countries. In Hoboken, they were simply Italian.
Dolly was the force in the family. Energetic, ambitious and politically shrewd, she became a power broker in Hoboken’s Democratic wards, and biographers see her as the dominant influence on her son’s personality. In 1935 she helped get him into a local singing group that became the Hoboken Four. They won the Major Bowes Amateur Hour, the “America’s Got Talent” of its day.
The Voice
In 1939 Sinatra joined Harry James’s band, and that November he moved to Tommy Dorsey’s, one of the biggest bands in the country. Within a few years he was a solo phenomenon. In October 1944, during a return engagement at New York’s Paramount Theatre, some 35,000 fans who couldn’t get in nearly rioted in Times Square. It was Columbus Day.
The next year, at the height of that fame, Sinatra made a 10-minute film called “The House I Live In.” In it, he steps outside a recording session for a cigarette and finds a gang of boys chasing a Jewish kid. He stops them and tells them, in effect, that they are all Americans and that one American’s blood is as good as another’s. The son of Italian immigrants, in a country that had only recently treated Italians as enemy aliens, was using his fame to argue against prejudice. The film won an honorary Academy Award and a special Golden Globe, and in 2007 the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry.
“Every time the most famous singer in the world stepped onto a stage, an Italian name went up in lights with him.”
Pride and baggage
Sinatra’s relationship with his heritage was never simple. Unlike Dean Martin, he rarely sang in Italian, and he scrubbed the Hoboken and Italian accents out of his singing voice. Scholars at a Hofstra University conference on Sinatra and Italy described a classic double bind: the pressure on immigrants’ children to keep the old culture while being told to become fully American. He was proud, and he was careful.
He also carried the heaviest stereotype of all. His godfather, Willie Moretti, was a known mobster, and rumors and press reports about Mafia ties followed Sinatra for most of his life. His tough-guy image in bars and casinos didn’t help. As one scholar put it, Sinatra both confirmed and contradicted the stereotypes Americans held about Italian Americans.
Italy, for its part, claimed him. In 1958 Italy’s ambassador presented him with an Italian American Man of the Year award. Over the decades he also traveled the same political road as many Italian Americans of his generation, from his mother’s Democratic Party toward the Republicans.
The chairman’s legacy
The honors piled up: an Academy Award for “From Here to Eternity,” the Capitol recordings of the 1950s that many consider the peak of American popular singing, his own label, Reprise, in 1960, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1983, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1997. He died in Los Angeles on May 14, 1998, at 82.
Frankie Satin might have had a perfectly nice career. But he wouldn’t have been Sinatra. The kid from Monroe Street kept his father’s name, and in doing so he made it impossible for America to love its greatest singer without loving an Italian American, too.
Nicolas Cage Lets It Slip: He’s Headed to ‘True Detective’ Season 5
At New York Comic Con, the actor all but confirmed he’ll lead the next season of HBO’s crime anthology, playing a New York detective in a Jamaica Bay mystery from “Night Country” showrunner Issa López.
Nicolas Cage has never been great at keeping secrets, and on Saturday he didn’t try very hard. Speaking at a spotlight panel at New York Comic Con at the Javits Center, he told the crowd, “I think I might do a season of ‘True Detective.’” As fans cheered, he added, “That’s okay that I’m the first to announce that, right?”
HBO declined to comment. But the remark all but confirms what has been reported since August: Cage is set to lead the fifth season of HBO’s crime anthology. He reportedly plays Henry Logan, a New York detective working the case at the center of the new season.
Cage also explained the move. He told the crowd he can only make so many movies back to back, and that he would probably do another season of television.
“I think I might do a season of ‘True Detective.’ That’s okay that I’m the first to announce that, right?” — Nicolas Cage, at New York Comic Con
Jamaica Bay
The new season is set around Jamaica Bay, the sprawl of marshland, islands and open water on the edge of Queens and Brooklyn, in the shadow of JFK Airport. It’s a corner of New York that rarely shows up on screen, which may be exactly the point.
Issa López, who created and ran the fourth season, “True Detective: Night Country,” is back as writer and showrunner under her overall deal with HBO. She has said the new season lives in the same world as her last one, with more references back to it. “It’s the same universe, and the magical realism is my brand, so it will be there,” López said.
That’s a promising sign for HBO. “Night Country,” which starred Jodie Foster and Kali Reis as investigators working a cold case in the fictional town of Ennis, Alaska, drew 12.7 million cross-platform viewers, the most-watched season in the show’s history, according to Variety.
A lineage of leads
Cage joins a heavy list. Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson defined the show in its 2014 debut. Colin Farrell and Rachel McAdams led season 2, Mahershala Ali anchored season 3, and Jodie Foster led season 4. Each season has a new story, a new setting and new detectives, which has made casting the lead one of the bigger events on TV.
Why Cage fits
The casting lands in the middle of one of the great late-career runs in Hollywood. After years of direct-to-video work, Cage has reminded audiences what he can do with films like “Pig,” in which he played a grieving chef searching for his stolen truffle pig, the self-mocking “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,” the dark comedy “Dream Scenario” and the horror hit “Longlegs,” in which he played a serial killer opposite a young FBI agent.
That last one feels especially relevant. “True Detective” at its best is part police procedural and part fever dream, and López’s season leaned hard into the supernatural. Few actors can move between quiet grief and full-volume strangeness the way Cage can. Put him in a fog-soaked New York marsh with a case that may not be entirely of this world, and it’s easy to imagine something memorable.
It also continues his move into television. Cage has been slated to lead a live-action Spider-Man Noir series, his first starring TV role, making “True Detective” his second.
What we don’t know
Plenty. HBO hasn’t officially confirmed Cage’s casting, and there’s no word yet on the rest of the cast, when production starts or when the season will premiere. The plot is under tight wraps, too.
But after Saturday, the biggest piece is out in the open. And it came straight from Cage himself, who seemed perfectly happy to be the one to spill it.
The Most Famous Italian American Nobody Thinks of as Italian: Joe Rogan
America’s biggest podcaster got his Irish surname from one grandfather. The other three were Italian. Here’s the heritage behind the name, and why it so rarely comes up.
Ask most people to guess Joe Rogan’s background and they’ll probably say Irish. The name gives that away. It’s also only a quarter of the story.
“I’m 3/4 Italian 1/4 Irish,” Rogan wrote on Twitter years ago, explaining that his father’s father, “Pappy Rogan,” came “straight off the boat from Ireland.” His other three grandparents were of Italian descent. That makes the host of America’s most popular podcast, the No. 1 show in Edison Research’s rankings every quarter since 2019, one of the most widely heard Italian Americans alive. He is also one of the least recognized as one.
“I’m 3/4 Italian 1/4 Irish.” — Joe Rogan, on Twitter
A Newark kid
Joseph James Rogan Jr. was born on Aug. 11, 1967, in Newark, New Jersey, a city whose Italian neighborhoods were once among the largest in the Northeast. His mother was Susan Lembo. His parents divorced when he was 5, and he has said he hasn’t had contact with his father since he was 7.
Rogan’s childhood kept moving: to San Francisco at 7, to Gainesville, Florida, at 11, and finally to Newton Upper Falls, Massachusetts, where he graduated from Newton South High School in 1985. He found his footing in martial arts. He started karate at 14 and taekwondo a year later, won the U.S. Open taekwondo championship as a lightweight at 19 and was a Massachusetts full-contact state champion four years running. On Aug. 27, 1988, friends from the gym talked him into an open-mic night at a Boston comedy club. He never really stopped.
The grandfather
Rogan rarely talks about his family on the air. One exception came in 2024, during a conversation with the author Sebastian Junger about death and near-death experiences. Rogan recalled moving to New York at 23 to chase a comedy career and living with his grandfather, a man he said he “loved very, very much.”
He described his grandmother’s aneurysm: doctors gave her 72 hours, and she lived 12 more years, bedridden. He described his grandfather’s last years, lonely and depressed in a neighborhood that had changed around him. “It was agony, it was depression,” he said. Seeing his grandfather’s body at the funeral, he said, was what first made him think seriously about the soul. It was an unusually tender moment from a host better known for elk hunting and UFC commentary, and it drew coverage well beyond his usual audience.
Heritage behind an Irish name
Rogan is far from the only Italian American whose heritage hides behind a name. In the 20th century, the pressure often ran the other way: Dino Crocetti became Dean Martin, and Anthony Benedetto became Tony Bennett, to sound more American to record buyers. In families like Rogan’s, the Italian side often comes down through mothers and grandmothers, shaping kitchens, holidays and family lore without ever showing up on a marquee. Bruce Springsteen, whose mother was born Adele Zerilli, is another famous example.
Rogan never had to make that choice. The name made it for him. But the family behind it was mostly Italian, and the story of a Newark boy raised largely by his mother, close to his grandparents and restless to make something of himself, is a familiar one to a lot of Italian American families.
Part of the story
You don’t have to like what Joe Rogan says to see that he belongs in the larger Italian American story. That story isn’t only about names that end in vowels. It also includes a Newark baby with a Lembo mother and three Italian grandparents who grew up to become, for better or worse, one of the most listened-to voices in American media.
Mike Ditka, 1939–2026: The Steel-Town Tough Guy Who Became Chicago
He reinvented the tight end, won championships as a player, assistant and head coach, and turned the 1985 Bears into a national obsession. Mike Ditka has died at 86.
Mike Ditka, the Hall of Fame tight end who coached the 1985 Chicago Bears to the franchise’s only Super Bowl title and became one of the most recognizable figures in American sports, has died at 86. His family announced his death on Friday morning.
“It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved husband, father, grandfather, and friend, Mike Ditka,” the family said in a statement to NBC Chicago, adding that “we knew him as the heart of our family.” A cause of death was not disclosed.
For more than six decades, Ditka was football’s most unmistakable presence: the mustache, the sunglasses, the scowl on the sideline and a voice that sounded like gravel in a cement mixer. But beneath the caricature was a record few people in the sport’s history can match.
From Aliquippa
Michael Keller Ditka was born on Oct. 18, 1939, in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Aliquippa, a steel town on the Ohio River outside Pittsburgh. His father was a welder from a Polish and Ukrainian family whose surname, Dyczko, had been changed to Ditka because neighbors found it too hard to pronounce. It was a place that made its kids tough, and Ditka never stopped carrying it with him.
He starred at the University of Pittsburgh, and in 1961 the Bears took him fifth overall in the NFL draft. Playing for the team’s founder and coach, George Halas, he changed what a tight end could be. In his rookie season he caught 56 passes for 1,076 yards and 12 touchdowns, becoming the first tight end in league history to top 1,000 receiving yards. He was named Rookie of the Year and went to the Pro Bowl in each of his first five seasons.
Ditka won an NFL championship with the Bears in 1963, then played for the Philadelphia Eagles and the Dallas Cowboys. In Super Bowl VI, he caught a touchdown pass in Dallas’ 24-3 win over the Miami Dolphins. He finished his 12-season career with 427 catches, 5,812 yards and 43 touchdowns, and in 1988 he became the first tight end inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Da Coach
After his playing days, Ditka joined Tom Landry’s staff in Dallas as an assistant, and in 1982 Halas brought him home to coach the Bears. It took him three years to build a monster.
The 1985 Bears went 15-1, with a ferocious defense, a swaggering quarterback in Jim McMahon, the great Walter Payton and a 300-pound defensive tackle, William “The Refrigerator” Perry, who sometimes lined up at fullback. They recorded a hit rap single, “The Super Bowl Shuffle,” before they’d even won the title. Then they crushed the New England Patriots 46-10 in Super Bowl XX, still one of the most lopsided wins in Super Bowl history.
Ditka went 106-62 in the regular season in 11 years with the Bears and was named the Associated Press Coach of the Year in 1985 and 1988. He is one of only a handful of people to win a Super Bowl as a player, an assistant coach and a head coach. He suffered a heart attack during the 1988 season and returned to the sideline that same year, which only added to the legend.
“We knew him as the heart of our family.” — The Ditka family, in a statement
Beyond the sideline
The Bears fired Ditka after the 1992 season. He returned to coaching with the New Orleans Saints from 1997 to 1999, a stint best remembered for his trade of an entire draft class, plus a future first-round pick, for Heisman Trophy winner Ricky Williams. The Saints went 15-33 in his three seasons.
By then, Ditka had become something bigger than a coach. He was a fixture as a TV analyst for NBC, CBS and ESPN. He opened restaurants in Chicago and Pittsburgh. He was immortalized by “Saturday Night Live,” where a group of sausage-loving superfans toasted “Da Bears” and “Da Coach” in a running sketch, and where he made guest appearances himself. Chicago named a stretch of street after him, and the Bears retired his No. 89 in 2013.
He also spoke up for the players who came before the modern NFL’s riches, many of them battered by injuries and living on small pensions, and he started a fund to help retired players in need.
The legacy
Ditka’s legacy isn’t only the trophies. It’s an attitude. He embodied a certain idea of Chicago and of the industrial Midwest: blue-collar, unpretentious, loud, proud and allergic to excuses. He famously described his Bears as a team of “Grabowskis,” working-class grinders rather than polished stars, and a whole city saw itself in that description.
He could be stubborn and combative, and he never apologized for it. But players who loved him and players who clashed with him tended to agree on one thing: he cared, fiercely, about the game and the people in it.
The kid from Aliquippa caught passes from Hall of Famers, won titles in three different roles and taught a generation of fans that football could be joyful, ferocious and a little bit ridiculous all at once. Chicago has had plenty of great coaches. It’s only had one Da Coach.
Looksmaxxing Is Selling Young Men a Lie. Character Is What Actually Gets You Loved.
Hammers to the cheekbones, AI face scores and steroid regimens are promising lonely young men a shortcut to love. The research points somewhere far less dramatic: kindness, curiosity and the way you treat people.
Somewhere right now, a teenage boy is pressing his tongue to the roof of his mouth, convinced it will rebuild his jaw. Another is uploading a selfie to an app that will score his cheekbones, his “masculinity” and his skin out of 10. A few, egged on by strangers online, are tapping their own faces with hammers in the hope of cracking the bone into something sharper.
This is looksmaxxing, the online subculture that treats a young man’s face as a problem to be optimized. It has its own vocabulary: “softmaxxing” for haircuts and skin care, “hardmaxxing” for surgery, steroids and worse. It has its own heroes and its own grim math, in which a few millimeters of jawline decide whether you’ll ever be loved.
It is also, at its core, a sad response to a real problem, and it’s pointed in the wrong direction.
The damage
Doctors are sounding the alarm. Dr. Jasmine Reese, who directs the adolescent and young adult clinic at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, has described a “huge uptick” in teens, including pre-teens, with eating disorders and body dysmorphia. She warns that AI rating apps can make vulnerable kids feel worse and push them toward dangerous experiments. Influencers in the space push anabolic steroids, experimental peptides bought online and stimulants for weight loss.
Bone smashing, the practice of repeatedly striking the cheeks and jaw to cause tiny fractures, is “one of the most concerning practices in the looksmaxxing subculture,” according to UT Southwestern Medical Center. It can cause fat necrosis and permanent bone damage, leaving a disfigured face instead of a chiseled one, and kick off years of corrective procedures. Mewing, the tongue trick, has no solid scientific evidence behind it.
Underneath all of it is real pain. In 2023, 28% of male high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, up from 21% a decade earlier, according to CDC data. Up to 80% of adolescent boys report being unhappy with their bodies. Looksmaxxing didn’t create that loneliness. It just found a way to sell to it.
What people actually want
Here’s the cruel irony. The movement promises that looks are destiny in dating, and the research keeps saying otherwise.
In one of the largest studies of mate preferences ever done, psychologist David Buss surveyed more than 10,000 people across 37 cultures in the late 1980s. Men and women alike ranked being kind and understanding, and being intelligent, at or near the top of what they wanted in a partner, ahead of good looks.
Newer work points the same way. A recent study of 778 Brazilian adults published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior asked people to spend a limited “budget” on the traits they wanted most in a partner: intelligence, kindness, physical attractiveness, health and money. Across genders and sexual orientations, intelligence and kindness came out on top. The more points people had to spend, the more they put into kindness and intelligence, and the less looks and money mattered. “Intelligence and kindness are the most desired traits of a partner, even in comparison to beauty, money or health,” the lead author, João Takayanagi, said.
“Intelligence and kindness are the most desired traits of a partner, even in comparison to beauty, money or health.” — João Takayanagi, University of São Paulo
Looks aren’t irrelevant. The same study found heterosexual men placed more weight on physical attractiveness than other groups, and anyone who has used a dating app knows a photo opens the door. But a photo is a first impression. A relationship is everything that happens after it.
Character changes what people see
Personality doesn’t just compete with looks. It changes how looks are perceived. In a study published in the journal Personal Relationships, psychologist Gary Lewandowski Jr. had people rate the attractiveness of strangers from photos, then rate them again after learning about their personalities. People described as honest and helpful were suddenly rated as better looking. People described as rude or unfair were rated as less attractive, no matter how good their photos were. “Personality goes a long way toward determining your attractiveness,” Lewandowski said.
A British study led by Daniel Farrelly of the University of Worcester found something similar. Researchers showed 202 women photos of men paired with short stories: some men helped someone, from buying coffee for a homeless person to saving a child from a river, while others refused to help. The kind men were rated as more attractive, and for long-term relationships, altruism mattered more than good looks. “Being altruistic is better than being attractive for long-term relationships,” Farrelly said.
There was a catch worth being honest about: women looking for a fling rated the selfish men as more desirable. Looksmaxxing culture tends to stop right there. But most people aren’t looking for a weekend. They’re looking for a person.
What makes love last
The psychologist John Gottman spent decades watching couples interact, and his findings had nothing to do with bone structure. What mattered were small moments: one partner pointing out a bird outside the window, telling a joke, asking a question. Gottman called these “bids” for attention. In his research on newlyweds, couples who were still married years later had turned toward each other’s bids about 86% of the time. Couples who later divorced had done so only about a third of the time. The ones headed for trouble tended to ignore those moments, or meet them with contempt.
That’s the part no app can score. Can you listen? Are you curious about other people? Do you keep your word, laugh at yourself, show up when someone needs you? Those traits are learnable, they compound over time, and they don’t require a hammer.
What it looks like in real life
Character isn’t abstract. It shows up in a hundred small ways, and people notice every one of them, often on the very first date.
It’s how you treat the server. Few things sink a date faster than someone who is charming across the table and curt to the person bringing the food. Kindness to people who can’t do anything for you is one of the clearest signals there is, and almost everyone is watching for it.
It’s how you handle a bad moment. The flight gets canceled, the restaurant loses the reservation, it starts pouring rain halfway through the walk. One person sulks, snaps or blames. Another cracks a joke, finds a plan B and makes the disaster part of the story. You learn more about someone in 10 minutes of things going wrong than in a month of things going right.
It’s whether you listen. Most people can tell within minutes whether someone is actually curious about them or just waiting for their turn to talk. The person who remembers the name of your sister, asks a follow-up question and wants to hear the end of your story is rare, and rare is attractive.
It’s whether you can laugh at yourself. A man who can tell a story about his own embarrassing moment, or a woman who can shrug off a spilled drink with a grin, comes across as secure. Insecurity, on the other hand, shows up as defensiveness, bragging and needing to win every exchange.
It’s how you talk about other people. Listen to how someone describes their exes, their coworkers, their family. Someone who has a cruel word for everyone will eventually have one for you. Someone who can say “it didn’t work out, but they were a good person” is showing you how they’ll treat you on your worst day.
It’s whether you do what you say. Texting when you said you would. Showing up on time. Remembering the thing you promised to help with. Reliability doesn’t make for viral content, but it’s the foundation of trust, and trust is what turns attraction into a relationship.
It’s having a life of your own. People are drawn to someone who is excited about something, whether it’s cooking, a band, a business idea, a pickup basketball game or a garden. Passion is magnetic because it’s proof of an inner life. A person whose whole personality is their appearance has nothing left to talk about once the novelty wears off.
And it’s how you make people feel. Years later, few people remember exactly what someone’s jawline looked like on the first date. They remember whether they felt safe, seen, respected and like themselves around that person. That feeling is the real attraction, and no surgeon can install it.
A better kind of maxxing
None of this means young men should stop caring how they look. Sleeping well, exercising, eating real food, getting a good haircut and dressing like you mean it are all worth doing. They make you feel better, and feeling better makes you better company. Doctors call that the healthy end of the spectrum, and it’s fine.
The problem is the promise that your face is your fate. It isn’t. If young men put a fraction of the energy they spend on jawline forums into friendships, hobbies, honesty and learning how to make another person feel seen, they would find that the thing they’re chasing gets a lot closer.
Call it charactermaxxing. It won’t get you a 9 out of 10 from an AI. It might get you someone who loves you.
Two Miamis: The Money Keeps Arriving. The People Keep Leaving.
A record number of residents moved out of Miami-Dade last year, even as hedge funds build towers, luxury condos sell faster and hotel rates soar. The city’s economy is being remade from the top down, and the middle is getting squeezed out.
Stand on Brickell Avenue and Miami looks like a city that can’t stop winning. Cranes swing over new towers. Citadel, the hedge fund giant that moved its headquarters here in 2022, is building a 58-story skyscraper on the bay. Sales of $1 million-plus condos jumped more than 15% in the first quarter of 2026. Hotels are raising rates faster than almost anywhere else in the country.
Now look at the moving trucks. Between July 2024 and July 2025, 72,254 more people left Miami-Dade for other parts of the United States than moved in, according to Census Bureau estimates. That’s the largest net domestic outflow on record for the county, up from about 67,000 the year before. And for the first time in years, immigration from abroad didn’t make up the difference. Miami-Dade’s population fell by 10,115, to about 2.8 million, the third-largest numeric drop of any county in the nation.
Both pictures are true. Together, they describe an economy splitting in two.
Who’s leaving
The numbers point to a simple driver: cost. In 2025, 54% of Miami-Dade households couldn’t afford basic necessities, up from 51% two years earlier, according to United Way data reported by Axios. Rents had already jumped about 49% in the first two years of the pandemic alone, the steepest increase among Florida’s large counties, according to Zillow figures analyzed by the University of Florida.
The exodus isn’t only from Miami. Broward lost 29,517 residents over the same period and Palm Beach County lost 11,953, while cheaper places like St. Johns County near Jacksonville and the Ocala area kept booming. South Floridians aren’t just shuffling between neighboring counties. Many are leaving the region entirely.
That has consequences for everyone who stays. “The collapse in domestic migration is a direct threat to jobs and paychecks for the state’s current residents,” Eric Finnigan, vice president of demographics research at John Burns Research & Consulting, told The Wall Street Journal. He warned it could also drag on home values, the main source of wealth for most Florida families.
“The collapse in domestic migration is a direct threat to jobs and paychecks for the state’s current residents.” — Eric Finnigan, John Burns Research & Consulting
Who’s arriving
At the top, Miami is still a magnet. Wealthy people keep coming, including some looking to avoid a possible wealth tax in California, according to Business Insider. Buyers closed 424 condo deals of $1 million or more in the first quarter, up from 368 a year earlier, at a median price of about $1.84 million, according to CondoBlackBook.
Tourists are paying up, too. For the week ending Sept. 26, Miami-Dade posted the biggest year-over-year jump in average daily hotel rates of any U.S. market, up 19.8% to $177.65, according to CoStar data reported by Miami Today.
But even the Wall Street South story is more complicated than the cranes suggest. Business Insider found that eight of the world’s largest hedge funds had 218 investment professionals in Miami a year earlier. A year later, they had 20 fewer, even as those firms grew their investing staffs overall by more than 11%. The people who decide where the money goes are still mostly in New York. One manager who launched a firm in Florida and moved it back north put it simply: “There wasn’t enough flow.”
The condo squeeze
The middle of the housing market is where the split shows most clearly. In July, the median price of an existing Miami-Dade condo was $400,000, down about 1.5% from a year earlier, according to MIAMI Realtors. There was about a year’s worth of condos on the market, well into buyer’s market territory. Units took 86 days to go under contract, up from 65.
Much of that pressure comes from rules written after the 2021 Surfside collapse. Florida’s deadline for milestone safety inspections on older condo buildings is Dec. 31, 2026, and required reserve funds rise again in January. Many owners face special assessments to pay for repairs. Since August, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have generally required a full review of established condo projects before backing conventional loans. “Condo deals that worked in the past don’t work anymore,” mortgage lender Shant Banosian said.
Borrowing isn’t getting easier, either. U.S. mortgage rates recently jumped to 7.28%, their biggest weekly rise in four years. Miami-Dade commissioners are now weighing up to $650 million in bonds to fund below-market mortgages for buyers earning up to 115% of the area’s median income, a sign of how far the market has drifted from the people who work here.
What comes next
There’s some relief at the edges. Citizens Property Insurance cut average Miami-Dade personal-lines rates by about 14%, and reinsurance costs fell this year. Condo sales are up even as prices soften, which suggests buyers come back when the price is right.
But the broader trend is hard to ignore. Miami is becoming a place where the luxury end keeps booming while the middle gets squeezed out, where hotel rooms get pricier while longtime residents pack up for cheaper places. The money is still flowing in. The question for the next decade is whether there will be enough teachers, nurses, cooks and bus drivers left to keep the city running.
Snatched Outside a Westchester Pool Store, Held for $4 Million: How a Pizza Receipt Helped the FBI Crack a Miami-Dade Kidnapping
Federal prosecutors say two men grabbed a man on Bird Road, demanded millions over a “15-year debt” and raised the price when his family called police. The FBI says the trail ran through a Hialeah Gardens Walmart and the pizzeria next door.
On the morning of Sept. 29, a Miami-Dade man pulled his Ford pickup into the parking lot of the Pinch A Penny Pool Patio Spa at 11035 Bird Road in Westchester. He went inside to buy a pool cleaner, paid and walked out with his receipt. He never made it back to his truck.
Federal prosecutors now say two men kidnapped him there and held him for days while demanding a ransom of as much as $4 million. Yansel Hernández, 34, and René Quintana, 31, are charged in federal court in Miami with conspiracy to commit kidnapping, a charge that carries a maximum sentence of life in prison, according to a criminal complaint described by Local 10 News and CiberCuba. The victim, identified in court papers only by the initials A.Q., was rescued alive by the FBI.
The two men are being held at the Federal Detention Center in Miami. They have not been convicted of any crime, and no hearings had been scheduled when the charges were announced on Oct. 7.
‘A 15-year debt’
According to the complaint, store surveillance video shows a gray sedan pulling into the lot shortly after the victim walked in, and leaving without him a short time later. About two minutes after the abduction, a license plate reader caught a gray Chrysler 200 roughly half a mile west of the store.
That night, the victim’s son got a call from a blocked number. The voice on the line was distorted, but he could make out the words “three million,” “dad” and “son.” Eight minutes later, a text message in Spanish confirmed that the caller had his father and referred to “a 15-year debt.”
Shortly after 8:15 p.m., another message demanded $3 million. The kidnappers wrote that they knew the family’s businesses, properties and relatives, and told them to show up in West Palm Beach within 48 hours. They even knew the son drove a blue Hyundai, the car they apparently expected him to use to deliver the cash.
The family went to the police anyway. The price went up. According to the complaint, the next message said that because the son had contacted the police, the ransom was now $4 million.
“Because the son contacted the police, the ransom is now four million dollars.” — Ransom message, according to the federal complaint
The pizza receipt
Investigators traced the phones used for the threats to cash purchases at a Walmart in Hialeah Gardens back in late June, months before the kidnapping. Store cameras showed three men arriving together in a black Honda Accord. While one of them bought the phone, the other two walked over to a nearby pizzeria.
That stop turned out to matter. Agents found a pizzeria receipt under the name “Rene,” linked to a phone number that led them to Quintana. Cellphone location data later put both suspects near the pool store at the time of the abduction, and showed the two had been in contact before the crime, according to the complaint.
“They came in normally, like any customer, to order pizza,” a pizzeria employee told CiberCuba. “And we didn’t know.”
The arrests
On Friday, Oct. 3, FBI agents watching Quintana’s home spotted a gray Honda Accord registered to someone who had left the country before the kidnapping. Agents followed the car, confirmed two men were inside and arrested Hernández and Quintana on foot. In Quintana’s bag, according to the complaint, agents found a SIM card holder and a slip of paper with the phone number used in the ransom call.
The FBI rescued the victim alive the next day. Court documents don’t say where he was held.
Open questions
Plenty remains unclear. The complaint doesn’t explain the “15-year debt” the kidnappers referred to, or whether the victim actually owed anyone money. The third man seen on the Walmart video hasn’t been publicly identified or charged. Neither has the owner of the Honda who left the country.
For now, the government’s case rests on surveillance video, plate readers, phone records and a pizza order that two men apparently didn’t think twice about.
Four Weeks Out, the Midterms Are Breaking Toward Democrats, Even in Texas. Florida Is Another Story.
With President Trump’s approval near a second-term low and Democrats posting their best generic-ballot numbers of the cycle, the House looks likely to flip and the Senate is suddenly in play. In Florida, Republicans still hold the lead.
Election Day is Nov. 3, and with less than four weeks to go, the national numbers are pointing in one direction. Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot by 8.9 points in the Silver Bulletin polling average as of Oct. 7, their best showing of the cycle and up from 6.7 points on Sept. 1. President Trump’s approval rating sits at 37% in the same average.
Every one of the 435 House seats is on the ballot, along with 35 Senate seats and 39 governor’s races. Two of the Senate contests are special elections, in Florida and Ohio, to fill seats now held by appointed Republicans.
The House
Republicans hold a narrow House majority, and almost every signal says it’s in danger. A New York Times/Siena poll released Sept. 15 found voters preferring the Democratic candidate in their district 51% to 43%. On the prediction market Kalshi, traders gave Democrats a 91.7% chance of winning the House as of Monday. Nate Silver’s forecast, updated Oct. 7, says Democrats are in an “excellent position” to retake the chamber.
The wild card is the map. Texas, Missouri and North Carolina redrew their districts in the middle of the decade to help Republicans, and California answered with Proposition 50, a new map aimed at offsetting those gains. Ohio and Utah are using new court-ordered maps, and Missouri’s was still tied up in court as of September. The net effect won’t be clear until the votes are counted.
“Democrats are in an excellent position to retake the House and are also favored to retake the Senate.” — Silver Bulletin forecast, Oct. 7
The Senate
The Senate is where things have changed fastest. Republicans hold a 53-47 majority, so Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take control, since Vice President JD Vance breaks ties. The Cook Political Report now rates control of the chamber a toss-up, after shifting three races toward Democrats in the past week.
The list of competitive Republican-held seats has grown well beyond the usual suspects. In Maine, Democrat Troy Jackson leads Sen. Susan Collins 51% to 47% in a Marist poll released Oct. 6. In Texas, state Rep. James Talarico leads Attorney General Ken Paxton 51% to 45%, and in Ohio, former Sen. Sherrod Brown leads Sen. Jon Husted 49% to 46%, both in New York Times/Siena polls released Oct. 3. The same polling found tight races in Iowa, where Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson leads state Rep. Josh Turek 48% to 47%, and even in Kansas, where Sen. Roger Marshall is ahead of Democrat Adam Hamilton by a single point.
Democrats have seats to defend, too. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed leads Republican Mike Rogers 50% to 49% in a Fox News poll, and in New Hampshire, Rep. Chris Pappas leads former Sen. John Sununu 51% to 44% in a St. Anselm College poll. Many of these leads sit inside the margin of error, and a few points of movement in either direction could swing control.
Florida bucks the trend
Florida is the clearest exception. A Mason-Dixon poll for NBC6 and Telemundo, conducted Sept. 28 to Oct. 1 among 625 likely voters, found Republican Byron Donalds leading Democrat David Jolly 48% to 41% in the governor’s race, with 10% undecided. In the Senate special election, Sen. Ashley Moody led Democratic state Rep. Angie Nixon 50% to 40%. The margin of error was plus or minus 4 points.
Not every poll agrees. A St. Pete Polls survey for FloridaPolitics.com in mid-September had the Moody-Nixon race tied at 45%. But most recent surveys show Republicans ahead in a state that has moved steadily to the right over the last decade.
Florida voters will also decide Amendment 3, which would raise the homestead exemption on non-school property taxes to $150,000 in 2027 and $250,000 in 2028. The Mason-Dixon poll found 55% in favor and 26% opposed, short of the 60% a constitutional amendment needs to pass.
What to watch
Four weeks is a long time in politics, and midterm polling has missed before. Turnout will decide a lot, especially whether younger and less frequent voters show up. Watch Maine, Texas and Ohio on election night. If Democrats win two of the three, they’ll be well on their way to a Senate majority.
In Miami-Dade, voters can check their registration, sample ballot and early-voting locations with the county’s Elections Department before heading to the polls.
Joe Rogan Is Still No. 1. He Just Doesn’t Matter the Way He Used To.
Two years after he helped decide the “podcast election,” Rogan still tops every chart. But his criticism of the president barely registers, his rivals have multiplied, and his biggest bookings now look like late-night TV.
In October 2024, Donald Trump flew to Austin and sat with Joe Rogan for three hours. The episode drew more than 26 million YouTube views in its first 24 hours and 41 million within a week. Days later, Rogan endorsed him. Pundits called it the podcast election, and Rogan was its kingmaker.
Two years later, Rogan is still on top of the charts. He is also, by most measures that matter beyond the download count, past his cultural peak.
The numbers still say yes
First, the case against this argument, because it’s a strong one. “The Joe Rogan Experience” ranked No. 1 in Edison Research’s U.S. podcast rankings in both the first and second quarters of 2026, a spot it has held since Edison started ranking shows in 2019. As of late 2025, it was more than two and a half times the size of the No. 2 show, “Crime Junkie.” Spotify re-signed him in 2024 in a deal reported at $250 million, this time without exclusivity. The show passed 2,550 episodes in September.
No one else in podcasting is close. But reach and influence aren’t the same thing, and the gap between them has been growing.
“Reach and influence aren’t the same thing, and the gap between them has been growing.”
From kingmaker to lobbyist
Since the start of 2026, Rogan has sharpened his attacks on the president he helped elect. In January, he suggested the administration was using immigration raids to distract from the Epstein files. In February, he said the redactions in those files looked “terrible for Trump.” In March, he said the war with Iran was “exactly the opposite of what we were told” and warned it could lead to “World War III.” He called a lot of MAGA supporters “dorks.”
In 2024, a Rogan endorsement felt like an event. In 2026, Rogan’s criticism of the same president lands as one more voice in an already crowded chorus. Trump’s approval rating sits at 37% in the Silver Bulletin average. Rogan isn’t leading his audience away from Trump so much as following the rest of the country.
He hasn’t lost his access. In April, Rogan stood in the Oval Office as Trump signed an executive order to speed up federal review of psychedelic treatments, including ibogaine, a drug Rogan has championed for addiction. Rogan said the whole thing started with a text: he sent Trump some information, and the president wrote back offering FDA approval. “Literally that quick,” Rogan said.
That’s real power. But it’s a different kind of power. A man who once seemed to swing an election now gets a personal favor on a cause he cares about, while his broader warnings about war and the Epstein files go unheeded. That’s not a kingmaker. That’s a very well-connected lobbyist.
The listeners got there first
It’s worth remembering how much pull Rogan once had. Researchers cited by Australia’s ABC News estimated that Trump’s 2024 podcast tour added between 1 and 2.6 percentage points to his vote, with more than half of that tied to Rogan’s show alone. In a close election, that’s the margin of victory.
His turn didn’t start this year. In July 2025, he called the administration’s mass deportation push an “overcorrection” that was hurting innocent people. That fall, after Jimmy Kimmel’s show was suspended, he argued the government shouldn’t be telling comedians what they can say. On an episode with the comedian Dave Smith, he said of Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen, “I don’t think they have any evidence.”
Other big podcasters made the same move. Theo Von objected when the Department of Homeland Security used a clip of him in a deportation video. The comedian Andrew Schulz said Trump was “doing the exact opposite of everything I voted for.” Roughly four in five of Rogan’s listeners are men, and about half are between 18 and 34, the group that swung hardest toward Trump in 2024. Trump’s approval among young men has been sliding ever since.
Rodney Taveira, a senior lecturer at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, has argued that backing Trump felt rebellious before the election, and that the appeal faded once Trump became the establishment. The same goes for the people who backed him. When the outsiders win, they stop being outsiders. And it’s hard to be the voice of the rebellion when you’re standing in the Oval Office.
A crowded room
Rogan built the template for the long-form, anti-establishment podcast, and now everyone is using it. His friend Theo Von ranked No. 8 in Edison’s first-quarter list. In February 2025, the progressive MeidasTouch podcast briefly passed Rogan in Podscribe’s monthly download rankings, after a month in which “The Joe Rogan Experience” dropped about 32%. He bounced back, but the illusion that nobody could touch him didn’t.
The wider genre he spawned is cooling, too. Megyn Kelly’s show fell from No. 13 to No. 19 in Edison’s rankings between late 2025 and early 2026, and Tucker Carlson’s fell from No. 20 to No. 29. The anti-establishment podcast boom that peaked around the 2024 election has started to look like what it is: an establishment of its own.
The Johnny Carson of podcasting
Look at what works for Rogan now. His most-watched episode of 2026 so far is an interview with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. That’s a late-night booking. This is the same show that once let Elon Musk smoke weed on camera, sending Tesla’s stock down 9%, and that prompted Neil Young and Joni Mitchell to pull their music from Spotify over its COVID-19 commentary. Today, it’s where movie stars go to promote movies.
Its audience is enormous but narrow, too. About 78% of Rogan’s listeners are men, according to Edison data shared with Forbes. That’s a huge, loyal base. It isn’t the whole culture.
None of this means Rogan is finished. Johnny Carson stayed on top of late night for decades after his biggest cultural moments, because being the comfortable default is its own kind of power. Rogan has become that default: the show people put on while driving, working out or doing dishes. It will probably stay No. 1 for years.
But the next voice that shakes up an election or starts a national argument probably won’t come from a studio in Austin. It will come from somewhere nobody is watching yet, just like Rogan once did.
Was Joe Biden Even a Real President? Amerigo’s Least Qualified Reporters Investigate
Four years, one Corvette, an alarming amount of ice cream and not a single pair of eyes we could verify. We followed the aviators wherever they led.
It began, as all great investigations do, with a guy at a party. “Name one thing Biden did,” he said, holding a hard seltzer with total confidence. The room went quiet. Someone said “infrastructure.” Someone else said “the bridge thing?” Nobody could name the bridge.
And so, armed with a corkboard, a spool of red string and a deadline we had already missed, Amerigo set out to answer the question no serious publication would touch: Was Joe Biden ever actually president?
Exhibit A: The aviators
Consider the sunglasses. In photo after photo, the man wears the same pair of aviators, tilted at the same jaunty angle. Have you ever seen his eyes? Really seen them? You have not. You have seen the reflection of a helicopter.
Our photo desk ran several images through enhancement software. After a great deal of whirring, it produced a slightly sharper helicopter.
Exhibit B: The ice cream
By our count, which we did not technically do, the 46th president was photographed holding an ice cream cone in front of roughly every ice cream shop in the continental United States. A man cannot eat that much chocolate chip and also run a country. Either he was not running the country or he was not eating the ice cream. Our team believes it may have been neither.
Exhibit C: The paperwork
Critics have spent years arguing about the autopen, the machine that reproduces a signature. Our team took this to its logical conclusion. If the signatures came from a machine, and the speeches came from a teleprompter, and the eyes came from a sunglasses store, what, exactly, was left?
We sent a reporter to Delaware to find out. He came back four days later with a sandwich, a sunburn and no new information. He has since been reassigned to horoscopes.
“We sent a reporter to Delaware. He came back with a sandwich and no new information.” — Amerigo’s investigations desk
Exhibit D: The vocabulary
Then there is the word “malarkey.” No American has said “malarkey” unprompted since roughly 1953, and yet this man said it on national television, on purpose, as if it were a normal word. Add “C’mon, man” and a lifelong devotion to Amtrak, a railroad that most of us only know as a rumor, and the picture gets murkier. Who loves a train that much? A real person? Or a very committed bit?
Exhibit E: The Corvette
Biden famously owns a green 1967 Corvette Stingray, which he loved to talk about and was almost never allowed to drive, because the Secret Service frowns on presidents doing donuts. So we have a car that is never driven, owned by a man whose eyes are never seen. When investigators searched his Delaware garage in 2023, they found classified documents near the car. Our team asks the question nobody else will: What was the Corvette reading?
Exhibit F: The dogs
Then there are the dogs. Major, a German shepherd, was sent home to Delaware after biting people at the White House. His successor, Commander, bit Secret Service officers so many times that he was eventually moved out, too. Dogs are excellent judges of character, and possibly of reality. Two separate German shepherds looked at this administration and said, essentially, no.
Exhibit G: The laser eyes
The internet ran its own investigation and came back with Dark Brandon, a version of the president with glowing red laser eyes. His own staff happily played along. Our team has a theory: What if the aviators were never a fashion choice? What if they were a safety measure? It would explain why no one ever saw his eyes, and why the White House lawn always looked so neatly trimmed.
Exhibit H: The Easter Bunny
In 2022, as the president drifted toward reporters at the White House Easter Egg Roll, a staffer in a full Easter Bunny costume stepped in and steered him away. Consider what this means. At the most powerful address on Earth, the final authority over where the president walked was a giant rabbit. We are not saying the Easter Bunny was president. We are saying the Easter Bunny has not been ruled out.
The tip line
When we announced this investigation, our tip line lit up. One reader insisted the president was three men from Scranton stacked inside a trench coat, which would explain the stamina but not the height. Another believed he was a hologram projected by Amtrak to boost ridership. A third sent a blurry photo of a pair of aviators on a bench in Rehoboth Beach with the caption, “He’s right there.”
We followed up on every lead. The trench coat turned out to be just a trench coat. The aviators belonged to a retired dentist named Gary, who asked us to stop calling.
Finally, we reached out to Mr. Biden himself for comment. We did not hear back, which is exactly what someone who doesn’t exist would do. It is also, our lawyers point out, exactly what a busy former president would do with an email from a magazine asking whether he exists.
Our conclusion
After weeks of rigorous research, most of it conducted in a group chat, we have reached a verdict. According to the National Archives, the Electoral College, the courts, Congress, roughly four years of the federal register and several million photographs, Joe Biden was the 46th president of the United States, serving from 2021 to 2025.
We regret this finding. It made for a much worse story.
Still, we can’t shake the feeling. Next week, our team asks: Was Millard Fillmore real? Our sources say yes, but then again, they would, wouldn’t they?
Editor’s note: This is satire. Joe Biden was absolutely, verifiably a real president. Please do not email us.
Louis Prima: The Sicilian Kid From the French Quarter Who Made America Jump
Raised in New Orleans’ “Little Palermo,” Louis Prima wrote “Sing, Sing, Sing,” sang in Italian when it wasn’t safe to, and invented the Las Vegas lounge act. Then he became a Disney orangutan.
During Mardi Gras in 1934, Guy Lombardo, one of the most popular bandleaders in America, wandered into a nearly empty club on Bourbon Street. The place was the Shim Sham, run by a New Orleans cornetist named Leon Prima. The trumpet player on the bandstand was Leon’s younger brother, Louis, and Lombardo couldn’t believe nobody was listening.
Lombardo pushed him to try New York. When Prima got there, one club owner, Eddie Davis, backed out of a booking. Davis had taken Prima, with his olive skin and tight curly hair, for a Black man, and worried that a Black bandleader would scare off his customers, according to the historian Gregory Theriot. A story about union rules served as the cover. Lombardo found Prima another stage at the Famous Door, and he quickly became a sensation.
That episode holds much of Louis Prima’s story. He belonged to two worlds that segregated America insisted on keeping apart, and he turned the space between them into some of the most joyful music of the 20th century.
Little Palermo
Louis Leo Prima was born on Dec. 7, 1910, in New Orleans. His father, Anthony, was the son of Leonardo Di Prima, an immigrant from Salaparuta in western Sicily. His mother, Angelina Caravella, had come over as a baby from Ustica, a small island off Sicily’s northern coast. The family lived at 1812 St. Peter Street, at the edge of the lower French Quarter, which had become a Sicilian enclave locals called Little Palermo. It was the same community that, in 1891, watched 11 Italian men lynched by a mob after the killing of the city’s police chief.
Angelina insisted that each of her children learn an instrument, and Louis started on violin. As a teenager he switched to the horn, learning by listening to Leon practice with Black and white musicians. He fell for jazz hearing Black players, Louis Armstrong among them, and watching Italian and Black musicians share bandstands in the neighborhood’s Italian clubs. In New Orleans, Sicilians were often treated as not quite white, and many lived and worked alongside Black and Creole neighbors. Prima absorbed all of it.
Sing, Sing, Sing
By the mid-1930s Prima was a national name. “The Lady in Red,” recorded in 1935, was a jukebox hit. In March 1936 he wrote and recorded “Sing, Sing, Sing.” Benny Goodman turned it into the anthem of the swing era and the showstopper of his famous 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall. Plenty of people who know every drum break still have no idea a Sicilian kid from St. Peter Street wrote it.
During World War II, when Italian Americans were viewed with suspicion and hundreds of thousands of Italian immigrants were labeled enemy aliens, Prima did something that took nerve. He recorded songs in Italian and Sicilian-flavored English: “Angelina,” named for his mother, “Please No Squeeza Da Banana,” “Felicia No Capicia.” Some heard them as novelty records. They were also a public refusal to hide where he came from.
“He belonged to two worlds that segregated America insisted on keeping apart.”
The wildest show in Las Vegas
In 1948, at a club in Virginia Beach, Prima met a 20-year-old singer named Keely Smith. They married in 1953. A year later he landed a stay at the Sahara in Las Vegas with a young New Orleans saxophonist, Sam Butera, and his band, the Witnesses. The shows ran deep into the night: Prima shouting and mugging, Butera honking, Smith delivering her lines with a perfectly straight face. It became the blueprint for the Vegas lounge act.
The act earned a Capitol Records contract in 1955. Their first album for the label, “The Wildest!,” arrived in 1956, and its medley of “Just a Gigolo” and “I Ain’t Got Nobody” became a signature. Prima and Smith won a Grammy at the very first Grammy Awards in 1959 for “That Old Black Magic.” In January 1961, Frank Sinatra invited Prima to perform at John F. Kennedy’s inaugural gala. He and Smith divorced later that year.
King Louie
In 1967, Disney cast Prima as the voice of King Louie, the jazz-loving orangutan in “The Jungle Book,” and he sang “I Wan’na Be Like You” on the soundtrack. A new generation of kids grew up knowing his voice without knowing his name.
He married his fourth wife, Gia Maione, in 1963, and they had two children, Lena and Louis Jr. After a heart attack in 1973, Prima was diagnosed with a brain stem tumor in 1975. Following surgery he suffered a hemorrhage and slipped into a coma from which he never woke. He died in New Orleans on Aug. 24, 1978, at 67. He is buried in Metairie Cemetery, in a marble crypt topped by a statue of Gabriel, the angel with the trumpet.
Still jumping
Prima’s music has never really gone away. David Lee Roth took “Just a Gigolo” back up the charts in 1985, and Brian Setzer’s cover of “Jump, Jive an’ Wail” helped set off the swing revival of the late 1990s. Every wedding band that closes the night with “Sing, Sing, Sing” is playing his song.
He came from a neighborhood that much of America looked down on, at a time when Italians in New Orleans had learned to keep their heads down. Louis Prima never did. He played loud, sang in his grandparents’ language, shared the stage with whoever could swing, and made the whole country dance to the sound of Little Palermo.
Sunset Place’s Long Goodbye: South Miami’s Empty Mall Is Still Standing as Its Seven-Tower Replacement Takes Shape
Demolition of the mostly vacant Shops at Sunset Place has slipped to early 2027. But a new $149 million infrastructure district and a plan for 1,513 homes point to a very different Sunset Drive.
For a generation of Miami teenagers, Shops at Sunset Place was where Friday night happened: a movie at the 24-screen AMC, a round at the arcade, a few frames at Splitsville. Today the outdoor mall at U.S. 1 and Red Road is largely vacant. A few years ago its directory went blank, and a Spirit Halloween was one of the few storefronts with lights on.
It was supposed to be rubble by now. Demolition, once slated for the first quarter of 2026, is now targeted for early 2027, Miami Today reported this week. The plan to replace it, though, keeps moving. Miami-Dade commissioners recently approved the Downtown SoMi Community Development District, a financing tool for roughly $149 million in new streets, utilities and other infrastructure around the site.
Seven towers, 1,513 homes
The project, approved by the South Miami City Commission in October 2024, calls for seven towers ranging from 12 to 33 stories. Plans include 1,513 residences, a 287-room hotel, a 1,300-seat movie theater, about 202,000 square feet of shops and restaurants, and about 66,000 square feet of offices. The first phase, a condo-hotel and new streets, is targeted for around 2029.
There’s a deadline built into the deal. Under its development agreement, the project has to reach $300 million in property value before 2034 to keep the bonus height that lets its tallest towers climb to 33 stories.
“The idea there is to get away from the sterile mall kind of feel,” Carlos Villanueva, district sales manager at The Keyes Company’s Coral Gables office, told Miami Today. He called the development “the epicenter of South Miami” in the making and said he was confident it would meet the 2034 target.
“The idea there is to get away from the sterile mall kind of feel.” — Carlos Villanueva, The Keyes Company
Why the mall never worked
Sunset Place opened in 1999 on the site of the Bakery Centre, a 1986 shopping and office complex built where the old Holsum bread bakery once stood. Both projects ran into the same wall: multilevel retail that made it hard to get shoppers past the ground floor. Villanueva said Sunset Place also drew a younger crowd with less money to spend.
The sale prices tell the story. Simon Property Group sold the mall in 2015 for $110 million. In 2021, Midtown Opportunities bought it for $65.5 million, a $44.5 million drop in barely five years.
What’s still open
Not everything has gone dark. As of this summer, AMC, LA Fitness, GameTime, Barnes & Noble and Splitsville were still operating on the property. The delay has been tied to permits and condo presales, according to The Real Deal, and the timing isn’t easy: U.S. mortgage rates jumped to 7.28% last week, their biggest weekly rise in four years.
For now, South Miami waits. The mall that was built to be the neighborhood’s heart has spent years as its emptiest block. If the new plan holds, the next version of Sunset Place won’t be a mall at all, but a neighborhood where people actually live.
