The hit thriller You, whose fifth and final season just dropped on Netflix, managed to be both chameleonic and consistent. Each season, a romantic psychopath named Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) moved to a new place and projected his fantasies on a new woman, only to attain her and find himself dissatisfied with the flesh-and-blood person in front of him. Why were these women not flattered by his willingness to kill for them? (Never mind that some of those murder victims were their friends and family.) Why did they feel the need to exert their own wills? They, inevitably, needed to be locked up. From there, their fates were sealed.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]In this final season, a woman ridiculously nicknamed Brontë (Madeline Brewer) purposefully attracts Joel’s attention. A onetime student of Joe’s Season 1 victim Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail), Brontë tries to entrap Joe and prove his guilt, only to briefly doubt he could truly be evil and fall for him. The writers apparently intend for Brontë to be a stand-in for the audience: A woman who knows Joe’s murderous past but is simultaneously susceptible to his charm. They also grant her the reward of executing the ultimate punishment for Joe: Shooting off the misogynist’s manhood, humiliating him in a public trial, and sentencing him to a fate worse than death for a self-styled romantic—a lonely life spent in a prison cell.
If that all sounds rather blunt, it’s because You dispenses with any sense of subtlety in its final season. The show assumes its audience—like Brontë—forgets that Joe, a serial killer whose modus operandi amounts to locking people in a box, is a bad guy, or that the love he professes to have for his female victims is really just a violent, obsessive form of objectification. Which left two of its longtime fans on the TIME culture team feeling a bit disappointed and condescended to. So, after groaning our way through the finale, we regrouped for a postmortem.
Judy Berman: I was an early fan of You, back when it was airing on Lifetime and no one seemed to know it existed, before it showed up on Netflix and became such a hit that the streamer saved it from cancellation. Seasons 1 and 3, in particular, strike a really exhilarating balance between twisted thrills and social satire—but I even had fun with the weaker seasons. So it pains me to say that I found these last 10 episodes to be a repetitive slog, culminating in a scoldy, didactic finale that insulted my intelligence. “No, really, serial killer Joe Goldberg is a bad person” is not exactly the mind-blowing revelation it’s presented as being throughout Season 5.
In retrospect, the writing was on the wall by the fifth episode, when Joe and his new “you,” Brontë, talk about the dark romance genre and she insists, “I am not your trope.” It’s like she’s speaking right to the viewer. Though there were plenty of twists left to come, that was the moment I realized the show was preparing to sacrifice its sharp wit in order to leave viewers with a Very Important Lesson. Eliana, at what point in the season did you start to despair?
Eliana Dockterman: I was frustrated from the first episode. Each season, Joe has wormed his way into a different elite group—New York literary society, L.A. wellness gurus, suburban Stepford Wives, the landed gentry of England—and skewered that particular genre of wealthy folks. It was hard not to delight in Joe’s murdering sprees when the focus of his ire was so often on the entitled and cruel—even if innocent people died along the way.
This meandering final season did not have a specific group as its target. Instead, it turned an accusatory finger at the audience for indulging in Joe’s past exploits. The writers assumed a lack of sophistication from the audience—that we cannot at once enjoy an “eat the rich” narrative and acknowledge that misogynistic serial killers are bad people—that frankly felt a little insulting. Badgley has made no secret of the fact that he was discomfited by fans online begging Joe Goldberg to lock them in cages. But Season 5 of the series takes these thirsty tweets at face value rather than with the sense of irony with which they were likely written.
And so Joe gets punished in the most literal way possible. Let’s just say it, in the finale, Joe is shot in the penis. Subtle!
JB: That was bonkers. And of course we had to then see people on the internet roasting Joe for, er, losing a few inches… or whatever the actual damage was. As if we couldn’t have figured out on our own that this is a guy whose sexual exploits deserve nothing but our derision.
To go back to what you were saying about past seasons, one of the things I always liked about You was that it was smart enough—and it trusted its audience to be smart enough—to satirize more than one thing. On one hand, you had these sendups of rich, elitist social worlds that made Joe’s murder sprees kind of frictionless. And in later seasons there was the added element of genre parody; Season 3 took the piss out of Real Housewives/Desperate Housewives type entertainment, while Season 4 spoofed the Agatha Christie-style whodunits that have been everywhere over the past few years. At the same time, especially in Season 1, you had the character of Joe as a thought experiment: What if the bookish, hopelessly devoted guy—like Badgley’s own breakout character, Gossip Girl’s Dan “Lonely Boy” Humphrey—who is the hero of so many rom-coms were a real person? Wouldn’t he be kind of a delusional, nightmare stalker? Put all those elements together, and the show remained fun and witty and insightful despite all of its darkness because viewers never got attached to any one character.
Season 5 broke that pattern by speaking solely to the contingent New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum has called “bad fans”—viewers who fundamentally misunderstand the shows they love by actually rooting for psycho protagonists like Breaking Bad meth kingpin Walter White. Are there really women out there who want Badgley to put on his Joe Goldberg cap and choke them? Probably! But, as you said, Eliana, most of the chatter to that effect surely comes from fans who a) have a sense of humor about what often used to be a very funny show; and b) understand the difference between fantasy and reality. So why would you end a great run with an utterly humorless lecture to a small group of bad fans? Breaking Bad and The Sopranos and Mad Men didn’t need to condescend to their viewers, and neither does You.
ED: My theory is someone came up with the final monologue of the series, and they constructed the entire season around getting Joe to a place in which he could utter that last line.
The series ends with Joe Goldberg sitting in prison reading a lusty fan letter. He muses, “Why am I in a cage when these crazies write me all the depraved things they want me to do to them? Maybe we have a problem as a society. Maybe we should fix what’s broken in us. Maybe the problem isn’t me. Maybe it’s you.”
Cue: Radiohead’s “Creep.” Again, subtle. Not only does Joe outright state the thesis of the show for anyone too busy folding laundry or cooking dinner to have paid attention to the last five seasons, but he says the title of the show! Out loud! Get it?? Someone got too excited by that prospect. What did you think of this coda, Judy?
JB: I hated it, Eliana. Hated it. Not because I don’t think there’s any truth to it. Joe’s final voiceover is so broad and vague and easy that you can’t really argue with it. Obviously “we have a problem as a society.” We have many of them, no small number of which cluster around the eons’ worth of ambient misogyny that shaped norms around heterosexual love! Obviously we all need to do some introspection about this stuff. This is, in fact, the basic premise from which You sprang, not the destination it should’ve reached after a fully circular five seasons.
There’s a somewhat more specific line in this vein earlier in the finale, when Brontë and Joe are having their final showdown in the woods. “The fantasy of a man like you is how we cope with the reality of a man like you,” she tells him. I think there’s actually something worth considering in what she’s saying there. It made me flash back to Joe killing Clayton, who was supposed to be Brontë’s ally in taking down Joe but couldn’t restrain himself from trying to hurt her once their plan went sideways. Do women obsess over serial killers and vampires and “fairy smut” (as Joe calls it at one point in the season) because there’s so much violent misogyny in the world that we find ourselves drawn to the violent misogynists who promise to cherish and protect us?
For me, that line begins to express an idea the season could’ve explored with depth and nuance. It could’ve shown how that sort of Stockholm Syndrome psychology manifests rather than just telling us about it, as an afterthought. I found that to be a real missed opportunity.
ED: I am intrigued by that theory about why women are attracted to stories of true crime and would have happily watched an exploration of that topic. But the show feels like a remnant of the #MeToo era in which it premiered—one in which toxic men masquerading as nice guys were something we’d just started discussing rather than an omnipresent political force.
In that vein, I want to touch on Joe’s son, Henry. As a person currently pregnant with a boy, who doomscrolls articles about the growing influence of the “manosphere” before she falls asleep at night, I’m deeply interested in—and anxious about—how boys are drafted into the online toxic hellscape. Henry commits an act of violence early in the season, and the implication is he’s picking up on his dad’s anger. I wish Henry’s psychology had been explored more, but ultimately he’s largely relegated to pawn status in the legal battle between Joe and his wife. I guess not every show can be Adolescence.
The second and reportedly final season of Andor, easily the best Star Wars television show or film that LucasFilm has produced in years, is set to premiere on Disney+ on April 22. But it arrives at a moment of potential transition for the studio. Creator Tony Gilroy recently said he doesn’t think the streaming era can support shows like Andor. “No one’s ever gonna start a show on this scale again, and shoot it practically, and have the resources and the protection to do something like this,” he told Empire.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]So what does the future of Star Wars television—and film—look like? Eight years after The Last Jedi hit theaters, we haven’t gotten a single Star Wars film. Instead, Disney has churned out a glut of television series: The mega-hit The Mandalorian, the miraculous Andor, and many more shows of varying levels of quality. The Star Wars universe even expanded into the real world with a hotel at Disney World that invited its guests to play Jedi and Sith as they interacted with in-character hotel staff. The closure of that cosplay resort sparked a multi-hour long viral video analyzing why the concept failed.
The future of the franchise does seem to hinge on a successful return to the big screen. And many potential Star Wars movies from famous writers like Game of Thrones’ David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, Lost’s Damon Lindelof, and The Shape of Water’s Guillermo del Toro have been announced and then scuttled. Meanwhile, President of LucasFilm Kathleen Kennedy is reportedly contemplating stepping down soon. Earlier this year, she told Deadline, “We’ll probably make an announcement [about my replacement] months or a year out, and I have every intention of sticking around to help that person be successful.”
Kennedy does have a couple films on the theatrical calendar. Iron Man director and Mandalorian creator Jon Favreau will helm The Mandalorian and Grogu, a spinoff of the hit TV series set to debut next year. And Deadpool & Wolverine’s Shawn Levy will soon begin shooting Star Wars: Starfighter starring Ryan Gosling. Here’s where LucasFilm stands ahead of Andor’s final season.
Read more: Andor Is the Best Star Wars Show Yet. Why Does It Feel Like No One’s Watching?
From a critical perspective, Andor should be a blueprint for success at LucasFilm. In theory, the story could have been a rote Rogue One prequel: The show focuses on one of that film’s heroes, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), and his indoctrination into the Rebellion. Instead, its a compelling spy thriller interrogating the reality of a gritty fight against totalitarianism. There are no Jedis, no secrets about Darth Vader’s past for Reddit sleuths to hunt down, no adorable creatures to slap on backpacks and lunchboxes. The show resists the temptation, to which so many of its peers have caved, to incessantly reference characters, objects, or plot points from its mother IP. (See: House of the Dragon or The Rings of Power’s obsession with flashbacks and Easter eggs.)
And while The Mandalorian is structured like a monster-of-the-week series with a new planet or challenge every episode or so, Andor is structured like well-crafted prestige television. Every few episodes, Cassian visits a new planet. Gilroy, who also wrote Rogue One, settles into each new location, meticulously builds character arcs there, and delivers an often crushing emotional blow at the end of each character’s story.
As I wrote of Season 1, Gilroy’s use of language is precise, and we’ll often hear the same turn of phrase uttered by both Empire stooges and the rebels, blurring the lines between good and evil. And the show’s focus on the daily, deadly, often stifling struggle against fascism strikes particularly hard at this moment: House of Cards’ Beau Willimon wrote a harrowing three-episode arc in Season 1 during which Cassian is picked up by authorities for a crime he didn’t commit and arbitrarily sentenced to years in a labor camp.
If there is a reason why Andor has succeeded creatively where other Star Wars TV shows have failed, credit must go to Gilroy, the writer behind Michael Clayton and the Bourne movies, as well as Willimon, who has become perhaps the most in-demand script polisher in Hollywood thanks to his work on both Andor and Severance.
Gilroy has credited the incredible commercial success of The Mandalorian, Disney+’s most popular series, with his ability to take creative risks with Andor. “The success of The Mandalorian gave us the platform to jump off,” he told Empire. “No Baby Yoda, no Andor. Seriously. Don’t think that we don’t know that.” And LucasFilm certainly deserves credit for trusting Gilroy and giving him ample funding even if his contemplative show didn’t reach the ratings highs of The Mandalorian. They were willing to take the risk because of the potential upside. Why the studio hasn’t found a similar collaborative approach with the likes of Lindelof or del Toro remains a mystery.
Before LucasFilm even wrapped the Skywalker saga with 2019’s Star Wars: Episode IX—The Rise of Skywalker, the studio seemed to be struggling with the cinematic direction of the franchise. Originally Colin Trevorrow was supposed to direct the ninth entry in the Star Wars series, then titled Star Wars: Duel of the Fates. But LucasFilm replaced Trevorrow with J.J. Abrams, who had helmed The Force Awakens, the first of several director switch-ups for the franchise.
The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street directing team Phil Lord and Chris Miller were dismissed from 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, an origin story for Han Solo, midway through production and replaced by Ron Howard. Solo underperformed at the box office, and the sequels that were seeded in the movie never came to fruition.
Disney CEO Bob Iger said at a 2023 conference that the “disappointing” box office returns for Solo, “gave us pause…maybe the cadence was a little too aggressive.” He added that going forward, “we’re going to make sure when we make one, it’s the right one. So we’re being very careful there.”
And careful, they have been. Star Wars movies that were announced only to disappear include a Boba Fett film from A Complete Unknown’s James Mangold, a Jabba the Hutt movie directed by del Toro, a trilogy from Benioff and Weiss, and a movie from Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige. Films from Thor: Ragnarok’s Taika Waititi and Wonder Woman’s Patty Jenkins appear to be on indefinite hold. That’s a lot of big directorial names who have come and gone with nothing to show for it.
When Disney+ launched in November of 2019, just before the pandemic, they flooded the streaming service with content derived from the House of Mouse’s most popular franchises, Marvel and Star Wars (and, for children, Pixar). A few early shows were huge hits, including The Mandalorian and WandaVision, in part because they defied expectations of what paint-by-numbers franchise TV-making might be. Marvel’s high-concept WandaVision, for instance, spoofed sitcoms through the ages. And The Mandalorian featured a massive twist at the end of the first episode: the introduction of an adorable creature we on the internet collectively dubbed “Baby Yoda.”
But perhaps in an effort to churn out as much content as possible, the shows that followed often felt like pale imitations of what came before them—series that were less creative, less compelling, more dependent on the viewer having watched hundreds of hours of Marvel or Star Wars content just to keep up with the plots. For Marvel, the simultaneous glut in content and drop in its quality have had an impact on box office for its feature films, which have not performed as well as the studio had hoped post-Avengers: Endgame.
LucasFilm hasn’t suffered the same fate in theaters simply because the studio has not produced any Star Wars movies in six years. But they have continued to flood Disney+ with TV shows, including Ahsoka, The Skeleton Crew, The Acolyte, Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Bad Batch, and Boba Fett. None of these shows have quite captured the zeitgeist like The Mandalorian did or garnered the critical praise of Andor. The overall effect on fans, based on social media chatter, has been simultaneous Jedi fatigue on the small screen and a yearning for a larger, sweeping stories in the cinema.
Star Wars fans shouldn’t despair. Disney’s shareholders will pressure the company to eventually get another film set in a galaxy far, far away into movie theaters. Two Star Wars projects currently have a firm release date. The Mandalorian & Grogu, a spinoff of the hit TV series starring Pedro Pascal and Baby Yoda, is set for May 22, 2026. And Levy is directing a movie called Star Wars: Strarfighter starring Ryan Gosling, will debut in May 2027. That second film will star entirely new characters and be set about five years after the events of The Rise of Skywalker.
Meanwhile, after his Boba Fett movie fell by the wayside, Mangold is now reportedly working on a different Star Wars movie set 25,000 years before The Phantom Menace. And Simon Kinberg, who wrote many of the X-Men movies, has signed on to do a trilogy for the franchise.
The Last Jedi’s Rian Johnson says he may or may not return to the Star Wars universe for a once-announced trilogy after the he finishes writing and directing the Knives Out franchise. Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron movie was originally set for 2023 and has been delayed for years. An announced Waititi film similarly seems to be trapped in development purgatory. Still, perhaps one of these movies will see the light of day.
LucasFilm also announced a movie—or perhaps even trilogy—based on Rey Skywalker. Initially, the studio hired Lindelof for a Rey project. Lindelof later said (with good humor) that he was “asked to leave the Star Wars universe.” LucasFilm then tapped Locke’s Steven Knight to replace The Leftovers creator, though Knight, too, left the project, which may now be in limbo. Intriguingly, frequent Lindelof collaborators Carlton Cuse (Lost) and Nick Cuse (The Leftovers and Watchmen) are reportedly working on a Star Wars live-action series. Though a separate project, it’s easy to imagine those writers might share Lindelof’s sensibility.
Amid all these announcements, in 2023, Dave Filoni was named Chief Creative Officer at LucasFilm and charged with planning the future of Star Wars films and shows. Filoni cut his teeth on Star Wars animated series like The Clone Wars before working on The Mandalorian with Iron Man director Jon Favreau. But beyond bringing his biggest TV project to the big screen, details on the other future plans remain scarce.
That’s a lot up in the air, and fans are hopeful that some of these tentative plans will firm up in the near future. Until then, at least we’ve got Andor.
It’s axiomatic that you can’t solve a problem if you don’t admit it exists—and the best way to admit it exists is to talk about it. That’s particularly true when it comes to climate change.
For more than four decades, the state of the climate has been part of the national conversation—especially when severe weather events linked to a warming world such as droughts, floods, heat waves, and hurricanes occur. Between those emergencies, climate often retreats to a secondary issue—or less. A pair of studies—one from 2015, one from 2021— found that only 35% of Americans discuss climate change even occasionally. Since 2009, respondents to surveys have been more likely to say they discuss climate “rarely” or “never” than “occasionally” or “often.” Now, a new study in PLOS Climate explores what the authors term the “climate silence” and offers insights into how to break it.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Any public discussion of a political or social issue can be subject to what’s known as a “spiral of silence.” The less people hear a topic talked about, the less likely they are to bring it up themselves, which just leads to even fewer people discussing it and fewer still to raise the issue. The opposite is also true: the more that people discuss and debate a topic, the likelier it is that other people will join the conversation. In the case of climate change, the latter leads to what the researchers call a “proclimate social feedback loop.” It’s that loop—or lack of it—that the authors of the PLOS One paper were looking for.
To conduct their research, they analyzed three existing studies by different research teams conducted in 2020 and 2021 in which a total of more than 3,000 people were asked for their beliefs and feelings about climate change. Across the surveys, the subjects responded to questions about whether they believe there is a scientific consensus that global warming is happening; how certain they themselves are that global warming is real; assuming they accept that it is indeed real, whether they believe humans are responsible for it; how much they worry about global warming; how much of a risk global warming poses to themselves, their families, and their communities; whether they think global warming is a bad or good thing; how much of an effort their families and friends make to combat the problem; how important it is for their family, friends, and, significantly, themselves to take such action; and how often they hear about global warming in the media. Finally, they were asked how often they discuss global warming with family and friends.
What the surveys didn’t address was whether it was all of the initial variables that led to the discussions—an important measure of causation—or if they just existed side by side. The new study conducted statistical analyses of the surveys to make that determination.
“Those surveys did not analyze how much the independent variables influence climate discussion,” says Margaret Orr, a PhD student in George Mason University’s department of communications and the lead author of the paper. “They just report survey results without looking at any interactions between variables.”
Across the entire sample group, the researchers found that all but three of the variables led to increased discussions about climate change. Those three that sparked little or no conversation were: how convinced the respondents themselves were that climate change is happening; belief in a scientific consensus that it is; and belief that humans are causing the problem. Those are three pretty powerful factors—ones that ought to spark concern and conversation. The researchers have some idea about why they don’t.
“One potential reason for these [variables] not being significant predictors of climate discussion is the potential for indirect effects,” says Orr. Each of the three factors that don’t directly lead to climate conversations, she says, may nonetheless lead to worry, which in turn may spark conversations.
The more of those conversations that happen, the better. “Previous research has shown that people are more likely to take actions if asked to do so by someone they like and respect,” says Orr. “Climate conversations will help reverse the spiral of silence: the more people realize that others are concerned about climate change and support climate action, the more people will talk about it.”
The new Fantastic Four: First Steps trailer reveals the quite literal meaning behind the film’s title: Sue Storm and Reed Richards, two of the Fantastic Four team members, are expecting a baby. In the comics, the couple has two children, Franklin and Veleria. It will perhaps come as no surprise that these children are born with superpowers. So this could be the introduction of yet another set of superheroes to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Here’s what you need to know about Marvel’s First Family, little baby Franklin’s role in the Fantastic Four, and what his arrival means for the MCU.
Read more: All the Future MCU Movies Announced in Marvel’s Major Revamp
Previous spots for the new Fantastic Four movie revealed that the film will not be an origin story. It is set years after the Fantastic Four—Reed Richards, his wife Sue Storm, her brother Johnny Storm, and their friend Ben Grimm—travel into space, encounter radiation, and return to earth with superpowers. Reed (played by Pedro Pascal) becomes the ultra-stretchy Mr. Fantastic; Sue (Vanessa Kirby) becomes the Invisible Woman; Johnny (Joseph Quinn) becomes the Human Torch; and Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) transforms into an ultra-strong rocky creature called simply the Thing. In their universe (one that presumably runs parallel to the universe in which Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man and Tom Holland’s Spider-Man exist), they serve as Earth’s only superheroes.
Early in the new trailer, Sue announces that she is pregnant and reassures Reed that they can raise a family together despite their superhero responsibilities. Johnny and Ben celebrate the fact that they’ll get to be fun uncles.
Then a villain named the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) shows up to inform the Fantastic Four that their planet is “marked for destruction.” The Silver Surfer traditionally heralds the coming of Galactus, a cosmic entity who consumes planets. Reed, a scientist and one of the smartest men in the world, desperately scribbles out calculations trying to find a way to save the planet. We see the Fantastic Four team don space suits, presumably headed into the cosmos to find or fight either the Silver Surfer or Galactus himself.
Given the title of the film, I think we may just see little Franklin’s—ahem—first steps. The baby is not featured in the trailer. But Sue is visibly pregnant when the Silver Surfer first arrives and does not seem to be in later fight scenes in the trailer. It’s a reasonable assumption that Sue will give birth to their elder child, Franklin, at some point in the movie. In another shot, Reed and Sue are seen gazing into an empty crib, presumably in preparation for Franklin’s arrival.
The Fantastic Four are known as Marvel’s First Family. Their whole deal is that they care for one another not as coworkers or a team but as siblings. With the arrival of a baby, the stakes of those familial responsibilities become much higher, especially considering Galactus may destroy the planet before Franklin reaches his first milestones. Still, we’re confident the baby will not only survive this movie but play a role in the future Marvel films.
Franklin is a very powerful little toddler in the comic books. Like Scarlett Witch and Jean Grey, Franklin has the powers of telekinesis and telepathy. Intriguingly, Agatha Harkness—who is portrayed by Kathryn Hahn in WandaVision—acts as Franklin’s nanny for awhile.
Marvel has announced two future Avengers films, Avengers: Doomsday starring traditional Fantastic Four nemesis Doctor Doom as the main villain, and Avengers: Secret Wars. (In a twist, Doom will be played by Robert Downey Jr. who famously kicked off the MCU as Iron Man before that character sacrificed his life to save the world in Avengers: Endgame. He will presumably play a Doom who hails from a parallel universe to the one where our Iron Man exists.)
The Fantastic Four cast is confirmed to appear in Doomsday—frankly it would be odd if Mr. Fantastic and Doctor Doom didn’t face off in the film given their long history as nemeses in the comics. Without spoiling the potential plots of Doomsday or Secret Wars, we’ll just tease that Franklin plays a significant role in the Secret Wars storyline in the comic books. So expect him to not only pop up but perhaps flex his powers in those upcoming films.
As for First Steps, it’s unlikely we’ll see infant Franklin battle Galactus—though who knows? After all, baby Jack-Jack took on the villain in The Incredibles all by himself and won.
The last day to file your taxes is fast approaching. As such, you may find yourself curious as to if you’re eligible for a tax extension and how you would go about obtaining one. A January news release from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said that “more than half of all tax returns are expected to be filed this year with the help of a tax professional.” The IRS also urged people once more to use a “trusted tax pro to avoid potential scams and schemes.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]For those who have yet to file their taxes, here is what you need to know about the 2025 tax deadline and how to apply for an extension.
Per usual, the tax deadline for this year is April 15—the U.S. tax day, which falls on a Tuesday in 2025.
Though the deadline is April 15, the IRS predicted in January that more than 140 million individual tax returns for the tax year 2024 would be filed ahead of the deadline.
As of April 4, the IRS had already received 101,422,000 individual income tax returns for the 2025 tax filing season.
Read More: Here’s When You Can Expect Your IRS Tax Refund and How You Can Track It
Natural disasters have affected U.S. citizens around the country this past year—from the wildfires in Los Angeles, to hurricanes in Florida and North Carolina, to floods in New York.
Disaster victims in twelve states have automatic extensions to file and pay their 2024 taxes. Though some of these extensions only apply to certain populations within said states.
For California wildfire victims, per the IRS, “these taxpayers now have until Oct. 15, 2025, to file various federal individual and business tax returns and make tax payments.
For victims of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton in various states including West Virginia, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina—and parts of Tennessee and Virginia—the deadlines have been extended to May 1, 2025 to file for the 2024 fiscal year.
Other areas that qualify for a May 1 extension due to disaster relief include Juneau in Alaska and Chaves County in New Mexico, while those affected by severe weather in Kentucky now have until Nov. 3 “to file various federal individual and business tax returns and make tax payments.”
If you are unsure whether you qualify for a state’s extension, the IRS has a page specifically dedicated to news in each state, where taxpayers can toggle into the state, or states, they will be filing taxes in, to see if there is a delayed deadline.
The IRS also has a “Frequently Asked Questions” page for disaster victims, as well as a help line for general questions about individual tax filing at 1-800-829-1040 and for business tax filing at 1-800-829-4933.
A standard federal tax return extension gives taxpayers six more months to file their taxes after the April 15 deadline.
It’s important to note, however, that according to the IRS, this extension is only for “filing” your returns. “An extension of time to file is not an extension of time to pay,” the IRS instructs.
You can file for a tax extension in three different ways.
Taxpayers can use IRS Free File to electronically request an automatic tax-filing extension.
Alternatively, when paying taxes using an online payment option—including a wire transfer or a credit card— via the IRS website, taxpayers can check the box that says they are paying as part of filing for an extension.
Lastly, those filing personal tax returns can file Form 4868, also known as the “Application for Automatic Extension of Time To File U.S. Individual Income Tax Return.” (Businesses can apply for an extension using Form 7004.)
Form 4868 can be filed by mail, online with an IRS e-filing partner, or through a tax professional.
Applicants will need to include the taxpayer’s name, address, Social Security number, and several payment estimations for the 2025 tax filing season. Though those who file for an extension still need to pay their taxes, filing Form 4868 itself does not incur a fee.
The deadline to file for an extension is the same as tax day itself—Tuesday, April 15.
Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Season 3 finale of Yellowjackets.
Ever since the very first episode of Yellowjackets aired back in November 2021, fans have been both eagerly anticipating and dreading finding out who the Antler Queen and her masked followers were hunting down and eating in the opening scene of the pilot.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Now, over three years later, the Season 3 finale has finally revealed the identity of the so-called “pit girl.” It’s been a long journey to get to this point for the teen girls stuck in the wilderness, who have thus far avoided making a meal out of any teammate who wasn’t already dead (R.I.P. Jackie) by dining on their male companions, a.k.a. Javi and Coach Ben, instead. Only Travis has been spared (and we already know he makes it back home).
But, over the course of the past few episodes, a number of the Yellowjackets seem to have descended even deeper into a volatile mental state fueled by what is either collective psychosis or supernatural forces. In Episode 8, despite being offered a shot at being led to safety by wilderness guide Kodiak (Joel McHale), who stumbled upon the team while guiding a pair of hikers who were researching frogs, Lottie (Courtney Eaton), Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown), and Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) united together to force the entire team to remain at camp. Then, when a contingent led by Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) tried to rebel in Episode 9, it resulted in hiker Hannah (Ashley Sutton) stabbing Kodi through the eye to save herself from Shauna’s wrath.
In the finale, this all culminates in Shauna, the team’s newly-crowned leader, pressuring the girls to agree to another hunt in which their prey will be decided by a random card draw.
Earlier in the season, Akilah (Nia Sondaya) had a vision of finding all of their livestock dead. In the finale, the vision appears to come true when Akilah finds the bodies of all the animals she’s lovingly raised. (However, a later conversation between Akilah and Lottie reveals Akilah herself killed the animals in order to convince the rest of the girls that they needed to hunt to appease the wilderness.)
After being swayed by Lottie and Shauna, the Yellowjackets do in fact decide they should sacrifice one of their own in order to get back in the wilderness’ good graces and, per what’s become a dark tradition, they will use a deck of cards to decide who their prey will be. Tai and Van (Liv Hewson) try to rig the card pull so that newcomer Hannah will end up with the deadly queen of hearts, but Shauna catches on to their ploy and messes with the order of the circle. This results in Mari (Alexa Barajas) ultimately puling the fatal draw. Shauna then places Jackie’s heart necklace around Mari’s neck and begins counting down.
The rest of the girls don their furs and makeshift masks and begin the hunt. Once she’s gained some distance, Mari attempts to avoid being spotted by stripping off her bright colored jacket and pants (a decision that also costs her her shoes), leaving her only in a nightgown that feels very familiar—it’s what the pit girl was wearing in the pilot when she died.
Not everyone wants Mari to be caught. Gen (Vanessa Prasad) tries to draw Taissa away from the pursuit in order to give her friend a better shot at survival. But in the end, it doesn’t matter, as Mari once again tumbles into the same pit she fell into earlier in the season when she dislocated her knee. Except, this time, the bottom of the pit has been lined with sharpened stakes (by Travis, in the previous episode, in an unsuccessful attempt to kill Lottie). Mari is impaled and dies.
The feast scene we originally caught a glimpse of in the pilot then plays out, with Shauna presiding over the ceremony in her Antler Queen costume—which we now know she creepily insisted be decorated with locks of Mari’s hair.
We now know who the pit girl is, but the finale’s ending reveals there is more to the story. Fortunately for the girls who still want to go home, the hikers who came upon the Yellowjackets had a broken satellite phone with them that Misty (Samantha Hanratty), Natalie, and Van have repaired using a connecting piece from their crashed plane’s transponder (which Misty purposefully destroyed in Season 1).
During the hunt, Natalie ends up colluding with Hannah, Misty, and Van to get away from an increasingly paranoid Shauna and attempt to make contact with someone who can help them. While the girls go after Mari, Natalie slips away from camp with the repaired phone.
After the feast, Shauna notices something is up when Natalie is strangely quiet. She tears off Natalie’s mask to find that it’s not Natalie at all, but Hannah. Natalie successfully got away and has hiked up a snowy mountain, trying desperately to get a phone signal. The closing scene of the finale shows her making contact with a mysterious voice on the radio that says, “Yes, I can hear you.”
They will go home—but given Shauna’s rage over being tricked, it certainly doesn’t seem like the journey back will be an easy one.
Though The Amateur is a new movie, and a fairly entertaining one, in many ways it feels like a missive from a lost era. A brilliant but low-level encryption employee at the CIA, played by Rami Malek, discovers that a group of rogue operators have tried to cover up a drone strike that killed American allies, blaming the attack on insurgents. When he confronts them with this knowledge, threatening to leak it to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN, they seem genuinely nervous—as if any of those august news institutions still had the power to shock the average U.S. citizen, or even most of the country’s elected officials, with a revelation about arrogant government bigwigs violating protocol. If you’re looking for a work of fantasy to make you feel wistful about the old world order—one in which whistleblowers could blow a whistle and people would actually hear it—The Amateur is the movie for you.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]But we can still dream, can’t we? In the 1990s and early 2000s, a thriller like The Amateur would hit theaters every few weeks. These pictures didn’t have to be earth-shatteringly good; if they provided a few hours of moderate pleasure on a weekend evening, that was enough. Similarly, The Amateur is pleasantly average, a semi-preposterous thriller that’s also transportive—parts of it were filmed in France, England, and Turkey, and by the end, you feel you’ve at least gotten a movie’s-eye view of those places. If The Amateur is unremarkable, it’s also efficient and effective, and sometimes all you need is a movie that gets the job done.
Malek’s Charlie Heller is mindful and methodical in everything he does. When he makes a cup of coffee for his wife Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), who’s about to head off to London for a short business trip, he measures the grains so precisely you can almost smell their earthy, cock-a-doodle-doo briskness. Then he heads to work; the couple live somewhere in the country, which seems about a thousand breaths of fresh air away from Langley. Once Charlie arrives there, we get some sense of his place in the pecking order. A hotshot agent known as the Bear (Jon Bernthal) asks him if he’s free for lunch. Charlie is awkwardly pleased by the invitation, until he realizes that the Bear only wants him to fix a computer problem. He’s OK with it all, though: he toils away alongside a bunch of other similarly brilliant and equally underappreciated nerds, and that’s just the way it is.
Yet there is something that sets Charlie apart: he maintains contact with a mysterious entity he knows only as Inquiline. He has no idea where Inquiline is located, and Inquiline isn’t telling. But this secret contact entrusts him with sensitive information that will prove useful when tragedy strikes, just hours after Charlie has kissed his wife goodbye. Not long after her arrival in London, she’s seized and killed in a terrorist attack, and Charlie’s crusty, shifty-eyed supervisor, Moore (Holt McCallany), breaks the bad news to him, even showing him a video of the event. Charlie can think of nothing but taking revenge on his wife’s killers; Moore tries to get him to stand down. But Inquiline has given Charlie some damning information about Moore’s involvement in those drone strikes, which Charlie uses to blackmail his boss. Moore agrees to send Charlie to CIA agent training school—his teacher will be Laurence Fishburne’s strict, flinty Henderson, who bluntly tells his pupil he lacks the killer instinct. No matter. Charlie won’t give up, and he proceeds to chase the bad-news weapons dealers responsible for his wife’s murder from Paris to Marseille, later trekking to Istanbul and the Baltic Coast. On the fly, this mild-mannered, excessively nervous analyst becomes an action hero.
Crazily, Malek makes it all believable. The Amateur was directed by James Hawes (who has worked on TV’s Slow Horses and Black Mirror) and adapted from Robert Littell’s 1981 espionage novel of the same name; it’s constructed with a breezy sense of confidence. Malek’s Charlie is a babe in the wood when it comes to tracking down ruthless international bad guys, but his chutzpah counts for something. Plus, he knows where to get basic information: we watch in real time as he figures out how to bust into an old-school Parisian apartment with the help of an instructional YouTube video. (He jiggles the lock with one hand and holds his phone in the other as the expert in question—“Hey there, lock-pick fans!”—cheerfully passes his expertise along.)
Malek is good at playing characters who are a little—or even very—out of step with the world. There’s something immensely trusting about him, with his heart-shaped face, pointed pixie ears, and perpetually haunted eyes. It’s easy to buy him as a dutiful public servant who feels shocked and betrayed by the world’s random cruelty. But he’s a naif with nerve. When he finds out one of the terrorists he’s targeting suffers from serious allergies, he figures out a devious way to clog her breathing passages with pollen. He knows enough about physics to bring a swanky glass swimming pool, suspended 60 stories in the air, crashing to the ground. As vigilantes go, he’s an endearing one. And he makes a mean cup of coffee to boot.
Dr. Peter Marks is the kind of health official both Democrats and Republicans used to admire. He served in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for 13 years, most of them as director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. There, Marks oversaw the critical process of reviewing and approving vaccines—like those against COVID-19—and biologic therapies, including gene- and cell-based treatments.
Marks earned trust and respect from academic and industry scientists as well for his emphasis on requesting the strongest evidence in evaluating new therapies, and for his willingness to support new technologies and approaches.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]But he did not last long in the new Trump Administration. On March 28, Marks resigned after he says he was pressed by Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) officials to come in line with skepticism about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines or be fired. He says his team was also asked by HHS to turn over sensitive health information from the database the FDA maintains with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to track adverse reactions to vaccines. Concerned about how the data would be used, Marks refused and resigned. (HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.)
Now, he is warning of a fundamental change at HHS and the FDA—one he believes is already proving to be very dangerous. “What I saw at the agency was an increasing anti-vaccine tone,” he told TIME On April 8. “I was hoping to work through it, but it was very clear to me that they just didn’t want to work through it.”
Since Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a long-time vaccine skeptic, was appointed to head HHS, the agency has removed pro-vaccination public service ads made by the CDC, and it missed a deadline to decide whether or not to approve a COVID-19 vaccine from Novavax.
Marks, aware of Kennedy’s position on vaccines, began in November to draft a “package of things we could do to hopefully try to address some of the issues” that anti-vaccine groups have. “I’ve been trying to reach out and say ‘I’m willing to meet you halfway,’” says Marks.
He came up with a four-point proposal on how the FDA could accomplish that. First, the agency would reassess how vaccines are labeled. “Vaccine labeling over the course of several decades has gotten very messy,” he says. “And the information for the patient is not as clear as it could be. That is a fact, and a legitimate criticism. We would look at ways to clean up labels and make them more transparent.”
The FDA would also hold listening meetings to hear from people about their concerns about the components that go into vaccines—such as thimerosal, which was removed from the MMR (measles) vaccine and other childhood vaccines in 2001 but is still used in some flu shots—along with vaccine safety and efficacy. The FDA already uses this practice while it reviews any major drug and vaccine, inviting the public to provide comments to its advisory committee of independent experts before the group votes on whether to approve a product.
Read More: Food Safety Was Slipping in the U.S. Then Came Mass Layoffs
Marks offered to have the FDA ask the National Academy of Medicine—a nonprofit, independent group that evaluates scientific questions to inform policy and improve the health of Americans—to study any of Kennedy’s concerns about vaccines, such as the role of adjuvants, which are ingredients to boost the body’s immune response.
And the FDA proposed revising the current system for reporting side effects or adverse events related to vaccines, so that the process of evaluating them and determining if they are reasonably linked to vaccines could become more transparent.
But Marks says he didn’t receive any response or feedback on these proposals before he left the organization. Dr. Marty Makary, nominated by President Trump, was sworn in as the new FDA director on the day Marks submitted his resignation and signed off on Marks’ departure shortly after taking office.
The change in tone among the top U.S. health agencies has coincided with an ongoing measles outbreak, which has killed two children and caused hundreds of infections. “I was so disturbed when I heard about the second measles death in a child that I used profanity with a reporter without realizing it,” Marks says. “Anyone who knows me would know that’s something I never do. I was so disturbed, and remain disturbed, because this is absolutely needless.”
As head of the FDA section that was responsible for reviewing data submitted by vaccine makers to approve their vaccines, Marks reiterates that the data supporting the safety and effectiveness of the measles vaccine is both clear and robust. “Measles vaccine is one of the safest, most effective vaccines we have,” he says. “Unlike other vaccines, which you might be able to argue about whether people should take them or not, the measles vaccine that has been given to children saves lives. It saves lives because one in 1,000 children who get measles die up front. Another one in 10,000 to 20,000 children die a few years later from persistent measles infection in the brain. So it saves lives. The measles vaccine is not associated with death, encephalitis, autism, or long-term adverse effects.”
Still, Kennedy has reportedly appointed vaccine critic David Geier, whose research on vaccines and autism has been discredited by judges and medical professionals alike, to study data on the safety of the MMR vaccine and a link to autism—despite the fact that scientists say any connection has been debunked for decades.
When resident Dr. Melissa “Mel” King (Taylor Dearden) first appeared in The Pitt with her atypical body language and her enthusiastic if not entirely appropriate “I’m so happy to be here,” I thought I knew exactly where her character was going.
She’d be brusque but brilliant, filled with just enough savant-like insight to make up for her lack of bedside manner. We’d never get confirmation of an actual diagnosis, but she’d exhibit a number of behaviors and mannerisms that the average viewer might recognize as autism, ADHD, or a combination of the two that many people in neurodivergent circles have taken to calling AuDHD. These traits would probably be used for drama or comedic relief as necessary. A mix of House, Sherlock, Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon and countless other autistic-coded or “autistish” characters who came before her.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]I’ve never been more delighted to eat my words. As the real-time ER drama’s 15-hour shift progresses, Mel evolves into a nuanced person with strengths, weaknesses, charms, and foibles. Every development in her story adds a new layer to her complex character. In the second episode, she mentions that she has an autistic sister. She performs well under pressure, but can struggle to pick up on hints and humor. Her thorough explanations of medical situations comfort some patients, but unsettle others. Her enthusiasm for her work and moments of success are met with a similar mix of reactions. She sometimes moves her fingers in repetitive patterns and hums or recites lyrics to herself. The prospect of picking countless pieces of gravel out of a patient’s skin excites her. She’s exceptionally empathetic, and can have an intense emotional response to what her patients are going through. She can also be exceptionally aware and proactive about her needs and issues, whether that involves taking a time out to regulate herself with an app, or explaining a thought pattern that’s tripping her up to a colleague.
Mel is still very much an autistic and/or ADHD-coded character. All of the above characteristics are things I’ve experienced as an autistic person, or something I’ve learned about from my fellow autists and AuDHDers. There’s increasing evidence to suggest that there can be a genetic component to autism, and many autistic people end up discovering that they also have parents or siblings on the spectrum. A number of autistic people excel in some areas and struggle in others, or have a “spiky skills profile.” Some people, regardless of neurology, can be quite receptive to our styles of communication while others are less so. A lot of autistic people stim both physically and vocally. We can find repetitive tasks soothing and rewarding. Some of us might even break out the hyperfocus for them. Many of us experience intense emotions that aren’t always easy to manage in the moment, or even hyper-empathy. And some of us wind up very self-aware as a result of the lifetime we’ve spent figuring ourselves out and trying to explain that to other people.
What makes Dr. King such a refreshing change from the old autistic-coded tropes, though, are the range of characteristics she embodies, how they’re integrated into her character, and how she’s incorporated into the show.
First, a number of the above mentioned traits have rarely if ever appeared in a character of this nature before. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Mel comes closer to being a true portrayal of autism. There are many autistic people who do identify with parts of the Sheldons and Sherlocks of the entertainment world. Plenty of us do speak and move rigidly or “awkwardly” for lack of a better word. Many of us have had a moment or 20 where we’ve been exasperated at others’ inability to keep up with our train of thought. And some of us have probably come across as condescending, whether we intended it or not. But there are just as many or more who don’t see themselves in these portrayals, and it’s heartening to see different autistic attributes and experiences make their way to the screen. (Of course, it would be even better to see a wider range in film and television. Outside of a few beloved outliers like Abed from Community and Moss from The IT Crowd, the majority of autistic-coded characters are still very, very white.)
It’s even more encouraging to see these traits as part of such a fully realized character. This is still all too rare among explicitly identified autistic characters, let alone ones who only hint at it. Autistic activist Lydia Brown once described The Good Doctor’s Dr. Shaun Murphy as a “cardboard cutout of what people believe an autistic person should be like,” and I often get the sense that autistic and autistish characters are more of a collection of random traits shoehorned into a vaguely human-shaped cog in a story than a fully realized component of a series or film. Mel, on the other hand, strikes me as a complete person whose traits are a part of a greater whole.
This is a strength of The Pitt in general. Its diverse cast of characters are all given a truly impressive amount of space to grow into rich and multi-dimensional human beings who excel in some ways, struggle in others, and bring their unique perspectives and experiences to their work. While I can’t speak to how well all of these identities are represented on the show, I will say that Mel and her sister Becca (Tal Anderson), who we meet in the Season 1 finale after Mel finally leaves her neverending shift, are written and realized with a notable degree of care and knowledge.
For example, there’s a brief but comprehensive scene in the seventh episode in which Mel is far better able to address an autistic patient’s needs than the more experienced senior resident Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball). In just a couple of minutes, this interaction manages to touch on a number of common autistic supports, including reducing sensory stimuli, being receptive to the patient’s use of formal and technical language, reframing questions in a way that made more sense to his way of thinking, clearly and directly explaining his prognosis, and providing a simple social story for what would come next. There’s a lot of genuine understanding of autistic people packed into that moment. There’s at least one person in that writing room who knows what they’re talking about, and is able to weave it into something deeper than a hacky laundry list of traits.
Actor Taylor Dearden was also able to bring her personal experience as a person with ADHD to the role. “I’m neurodivergent so I think it’s really coming from me,” she recently told Decider when asked about her character’s neurodivergent qualities. “I have severe ADHD. So we’re on the same spectrum now as autism, which was I think for all ADHD people was like, ‘Ohhhhh.’ And then all autistic people are like, ‘That’s why we got along with them.’ I’ve never really seen a character, especially with ADHD, but being on the same spectrum, it just feels, it felt right anyway.”
The absence of any clear diagnosis for Mel throughout the season also feels perfectly natural. One of my issues with spectrumy characters in general is that the lack of confirmation about their neurology appears to be less of a creative choice than a convenience. As autistic activist and advocate Mallory Thomas once put it, “I also think that a lot of the time writers are looking for an easy out if they mess up the portrayal of an autistic character. It’s a lot easier to sort of crib certain traits and when questioned about it say that the intention wasn’t to create an autistic character even though as an audience, we know autistic characters when we see them.” (Novelist David Mitchell basically confirmed our suspicions when he told Macleans that a scriptwriter for The Big Bang Theory confessed to him that Sheldon is autistic, “but we don’t mention it because, a) it’s not relevant, and b) it then takes the show into a political dimension that we might not want to take it in.”)
In Mel’s case, the writers have no need to avoid criticism or accountability. She’s a great character, regardless of what labels may or may not officially apply to her. But it also makes sense that it hasn’t come up over the course of The Pitt’s day, for a number of reasons. An autistic person might not feel like there was a safe or pertinent time to bring up her own diagnosis in the situations we’ve seen Mel navigate. The fast pace and life-or-death nature of the ER means there’s not much time for icebreakers for the new faces on staff. It’s also perfectly possible that a woman in her situation wouldn’t actually know she’s autistic or has ADHD yet. Many women her age and older are still slipping through the cracks. It’s equally possible that she could have a number of neurodivergent traits but not qualify for any specific diagnosis. That happens in the real world, too.
Regardless of what exactly Mel might be and whether that’s ever addressed in future seasons of The Pitt, though, I believe her existence in the pantheon of autistic-coded characters is a small but meaningful step forward for autistic people. No autistic character is ever going to fix all of the problems we face as flesh and blood people trying to survive in this world. It can’t even address the somewhat less pressing concerns that some autistic people have about representation and inclusion on both sides of the camera. But the fact that a creative team could write and portray a character like this who could be considered autistic—and that audiences can recognize her as such—does suggest that there’s been some shift in what the general population sees and understands about autism.
At a time when people in power are perfectly happy to treat us as boogeymen or a looming specter, it’s encouraging to know that some people out there can see us as human.
Looking back, Evelyn freely admits that she made some rash decisions.
In the late summer of 2018, this working mother left a violent, stagnating neighborhood in Southern California’s high desert region. She moved with her husband and five children to a community just outside Los Angeles that was known for its well-rated public schools. They had almost $5,000 in savings and a modest vision for how the next passage of life would unfold but no true understanding of the real estate landscape they were entering. The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles was nearly double a full-time minimum wage salary. Even with her job as a server at Applebee’s, she was overwhelmed by the city’s punishing disparity. Her husband’s subsequent descent into alcoholism and domestic abuse drained her bank account and cast her and her children into the urban wilderness. Less than three months deep in that school year, Evelyn (whose name is a pseudonym to protect her privacy) found herself to be a homeless single mother.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]From Los Angeles to New York, Portland to Phoenix, Seattle to Washington, D.C., the broad arc of Evelyn’s story is a prevalent narrative in urban America: an aspirant working family pinned down by economic weights from which far more than resilience is required to rise. Homeless families in this nation—almost 260,000 total individuals and 145,000 children in 2024, according to HUD’s annual assessment—often require all manner of medical, educational, and housing support merely to survive. They also tend to possess virtually no assets to give back in return.
As a society, we carry a real aversion to this stark mathematical imbalance of poverty, including when it encompasses children, most likely because it contradicts national values of upward mobility based on work and merit. Such values are easy to oversimplify in our own personal narratives as well as in those of prominent figures ranging from Oprah Winfrey to JD Vance. We do so and risk losing the ability to imagine the obstacles for those hundreds of thousands of anonymous individuals in circumstances of pure economic helplessness. Our generational failure to meaningfully address the housing crisis is rooted in this inertness.
Read More: America’s Laws Make Us Bystanders to the Homeless Crisis
Evelyn’s absolute priority throughout her long and brutal homeless saga was to keep her kids stably situated in the same public school that had originally drawn her to the city. They were thriving there. A corollary to this imperative meant ensuring that the people most capable and invested in helping them—employers, teachers, even family—remained ignorant of their homelessness lest they would be obligated to initiate agency interventions with the potential to uproot the kids from their school, place them in the foster system, and shunt them to the city’s physical and educational periphery. Instead, the family slept in motels or in their 2009 Toyota Highlander. They lived this way for five years.
In Evelyn’s Los Angeles and almost all American cities, the majority of homeless services are concentrated in marginalized areas far from healthy residential districts, as they have been nationwide for centuries Both common sense and academic research show that such an approach places hardships upon hardships for families striving to land a foothold. Long and costly commutes, lack of quality schools and safe play spaces, and exploitative landlords are just a few.
Yet leaders who promote more inclusive housing options for homeless families seem to be faced with disruption from many members of the housed, voting public. At least part of this antagonism is due to a psychology of conflation, by which a typical homeowner reflexively associates the notion of any homeless neighbor with the most dangerous depictions of the unsheltered: the addict desperate for a fix, the lunatic raging at unseen demons. This mental trickery accompanies the broader truth that most homeowners work hard for their properties and take pride in their neighborhoods and schools, all of which together represent status and asset value in the world. Homeless people—including those who are gracious and family-oriented—do not easily situate within this order.
Even in the context of vast government spending on housing and services nationwide (over $900 million per year in Los Angeles County, nearly $4 billion in New York City for the fiscal year 2025), the path of least resistance for city governments is to leave the most basic supportive provisions in poor, far-flung areas of rich cities. This is not so much a matter of managing resources so much as a passive, effective strategy to remove those who are in great need from the daily loops of those who are not.
In many cities, shelter capacity is maxed out and voucher systems are closed. The edgy status quo will worsen as continuing natural disasters, government layoffs, and tariff wars push more working families toward the precipice where stability drops into the abyss. We are living through an iteration of a very old cycle in America in which political leaders scramble for actual solutions long after the numbers have crossed the tipping point into humanitarian disaster.
The result, as in any true health crisis, is the kind of triage with which Evelyn and her children contended daily, for years, so that they could stay in school. While bedding down in her SUV on so many nights because the vehicle felt safer than any available alternatives, the kids designated the front seat of the SUV their dining room and the middle row of seats the living room. The storage space in the way back is made for the bedroom. Evelyn herself slept in the driver’s seat in case she needed to peel away quickly from a threat. Imagine what those nights looked and felt like for that family and for many thousands of others forced into the same set of decisions.
Then, try to imagine this: in one neighborhood that is close to decent schools and jobs, a compassionate group of residents chooses generosity over fear by approving the conversion of an empty home into a transitional housing facility that serves about six families at a time. These families are thoroughly vetted as mentally sound, safe neighbors and permitted to live there for up to a year. The parents receive counseling and job training while children attend local schools. Instead of doing what most homeowners in America currently tend to do and protesting the shelter’s existence, members of the surrounding neighborhood contribute to potluck dinners, provide childcare during adult education sessions, maybe help with school tutoring and job placement. This one location provides a platform by which a dozen or so families each year graduate into stable homes.
Imagine that another neighborhood follows the same model, and another after that, until this pathway of socioeconomic ascent becomes a part of the fabric of a city, then a region, then a state. Imagine the current and future poverty ameliorated by such a movement.
The details of this whole process—particularly the vetting aspect—would raise valid concerns for many. The great emotional, imaginative, and moral leap here involves understanding that although the causes of family homelessness are nuanced, the strategies for maintaining a safe residential space are simple. The intake process in such a facility begins with multiple reference points that measure a family’s desire and capability to be there. A rotation of staff ensures 24-hour onsite care of the shelter and its inhabitants while enforcing visitation rules and in-house policies. Those who can’t abide are placed elsewhere. The apparatus is ideally managed by local non-profits and faith-based organizations possessing some knowledge of the community and its rhythms rather than city or state agencies.
On a daily basis, this form of transitional housing carries per person costs comparable to emergency shelters, which are more expensive for families. Over time and taking into account the success rates for transitional housing graduates—up to 91% according to HUD’s most recent comprehensive study of regional factors—long-term costs for families who find permanent housing stability are almost certainly far lower. These structures can also be readied much faster since a house can be converted into apartments in a few months versus the years of zoning decisions and construction delays inherent to larger facilities. Most importantly, families who have already been traumatized and marginalized will be nurtured by communities rather than pressed farther away from them, deeper into despair.
While homeless, Evelyn’s children achieved a 98% attendance rate at their school. On weekends when she wasn’t working restaurant shifts, she took them to museums, the beach, the library—any nourishing place where they could be safe together. Through profound good luck, they eventually found transitional housing, job training, and school tutoring within a small shelter in a residential area. Most of their neighbors received them with grace. Evelyn now works at an accounting firm. Her oldest son is a freshman in college.
The proliferation of narratives like Evelyn’s could come to pass if stably housed Americans on a widespread scale begin to frame the incorporation of homeless families as an opportunity for absolutely altruistic largesse. If a movement to allot physical structures and school placements within communities were to become a new ethos, then many tens of thousands of working parents who possess neither assets nor hope would be furnished with roofs overhead as well as the gift of knowing that they are welcome here.
