The Cut - Dancing in the Name of the Lord

For 40 excruciating minutes, Melanie Wilking, a trained dancer-slash-influencer with more than 3 million TikTok followers, sat in front of a camera, flanked by her weeping parents. It was a dramatic departure from her usual smiling choreographed videos, which for years she’d performed with her older sister, Miranda. Now Melanie claimed that Miranda had been pulled into what she described as a “cult.” “Miranda is a part of a religious group and she’s not allowed to speak to us,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. Her sister and the other group members are “not in control of their lives,” she continued. “Someone else is controlling their lives, and they’re all victims of this.”

The WHO has nearly tripled its estimate of the pandemic’s death toll. Meanwhile, Republicans in Louisiana have advanced a bill to make abortion a crime of murder. On the same subject, Olivia Rodrigo paused her concert today to speak out in favor of abortion rights. And Ben Franklin put an abortion recipe in his math textbook, for goodness’ sake. That man knew a thing or two about life. This is depressing: Mitt Romney says it’s “hard to imagine anything that would derail” the GOP’s support for Trump’s nomination in 2024. A man tried to rob a bank from the back of a taxi. It didn’t go well. If your employer loves you, they should give you money, not a granola bar. And skip the new Doctor Strange and see Everything Everywhere All At Once instead — both explore the idea of the multiverse, but only the latter is genuinely great filmmaking.

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