"Madonna, who for so long was pushing the boundaries of what women could and should be able to do, has instead become the most powerful avatar of our terror of aging."

"Everything about her appearance signals that she has capitulated to some very punishing beauty standards that insist women’s value lies only in their performance of youth.... After a childhood so influenced by her boldness, and years of being encouraged to express myself unapologetically, I confess I felt a sense of betrayal that she seemed to have finally succumbed to society’s expectations. But as uncomfortable as it can be for me to recognize, I wonder if Madonna isn’t simply once again forcing us to confront some hard truths. That deep down, we are not perhaps as bold or fearless as we’d like to believe ourselves to be. That none of us want to age, or lose our beauty or the power that comes with it. That in the end, we are all vain creatures desperate to hold on to, by any means possible, a shred of youth. Transgression is out; filler is in. Instead of being uniquely, aspirationally free, is she — are we all — trapped?"

Writes Glynnis MacNicol, in "Madonna Has Become an Avatar for Our Fear of Aging" (NYT).

MacNicol is 48. She doesn't really know how we all feel, but I'd just like to say, at age 76, that it certainly isn't youthful to be desperate about clinging to youth. And we're not "all... trapped." If all the singing about expressing yourself has value, it should mean respecting who we really are, not hating it to the point of attacking it with needles and knives.

***

People are talking about Madonna because her new album arrives today: "Madonna’s Confessions II is her best album in 20 years/A celebration of the dance floor that incorporates tributes to her earliest days on New York’s club scene, the queen of pop’s new music is engineered to make you move, or indeed, sweat" (Independent).

Madonna shows love/"shows love."

Madonna’s jealousy is adorable, she’s basically saying “I’m the queen of pop, but Kylie’s the queen of cute, and I’m just here for the fireworks.” pic.twitter.com/hb9hvRcDUG

— tino.la (@CakeChutikan) June 27, 2026

Madonna has a plan to make you watch this video more than once.

Madonna, 67, turning heads as she steps out in a blue dress in Paris pic.twitter.com/gamqCWmx8m

— TaraBull (@TaraBull) June 24, 2026

"As a Frida Kahlo portrait glared protectively at me over Madonna’s shoulder, we talked past, present, future, prayer, dicks, nutritional yeast, and more…"

Writes Mel Ottenberg, introducing "The Madonna Interview" in Interview Magazine.

EXCERPT:

OTTENBERG: When was the last time you confessed?

MADONNA: Well, every song on this record is—not every song. Some are just joy. “Love Sensation” is just joy. But a lot of the songs here are confessional.

OTTENBERG: What about the last time you confessed in a church?

MADONNA: Oh, that’s been a while.

OTTENBERG: Do you have a relationship with organized religion?

MADONNA: Well, I was raised a Catholic and I’m a cultural Catholic.

"The first duty in life is that we all strike a pose... I struck a pose, I put a mask on, and at times my face grew into it, becoming someone I couldn't even recognize.""

Two-faced California Governor Gavin Newsom says that he's been wearing a "mask" for years.

NEWSOM: "I put a mask on, and at times my face grew into it…"

What a strange, little man. pic.twitter.com/HawZxCDqk6

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 25, 2026

Newsom attributes the line —"The first duty in life is that we all strike a pose, and the second duty no one's really figured out" — to Oscar Wilde.  

Did Oscar Wilde say that? In "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young." he said, "The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered." 

"Strike a pose" is Madonna:

But who doesn't mix up Oscar Wilde and Madonna?

"Through one Canadian ancestor, Louis Boucher de Grandpre, who was born in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, the pope is related to... Angelina Jolie, Hillary Clinton, Justin Bieber, Jack Kerouac and Madonna."

The NYT informs in an article that seems mostly concerned with whether the Pope is — in some sense — black.

We're told the article is written "by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in collaboration with American Ancestors and the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami."

The article contains an amazing — and amazingly wrong — assertion: "Every one of us descends from an astounding number of recent ancestors: two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, 16 great great grandparents, 32 third great grandparents and 64 fourth great grandparents — that’s 126 unique ancestors through two parents. Go back to our 12th great grandparents, and everyone has a whopping 32,766 forebears."

As if the 32,766 positions on the family tree are always — and for everyone — going to be 32,766 different individuals! I think it's unlikely that anyone has 32,766 different individuals on a family tree going back to the 12th great grandparents.

The terms for this very well known issue is "pedigree collapse."

Calling other people stupid is a dangerous business.

What's going on here? Stupid people who don't realize the Madonna song "Like a Prayer" is about sex?

The answer is no. See "How choir cover of Madonna hit got caught up in America’s culture wars/The version of Like a Prayer is at the centre of an internet storm as American users assume the singers are ignorant Donald Trump-supporting Christians" (London Times):

"Later on, Madonna would admit to sharing a lot with the character of Susan. Both used their powers of persuasion..."

"... to get friends and lovers to do what they wanted. Both were charming con artists that didn’t let you know you were being conned. There was an art to seduction, and Madonna had mastered it. She was a flirt who made everyone she flirted with feel a little bit sexier. Men and women. That was her gift."

Writes Susan Seidelman, in "'Directors Don’t Cry!'/Madonna, Rosanna Arquette, and the Wild Birth of Desperately Seeking Susan/In an excerpt from her memoir, Susan Seidelman watches Madonna go from newcomer ('I’ll do anything to get this part') to icon" (Vanity Fair).

"In a complaint filed Wednesday... Justen Lipeles... alleges that [Madonna concert] attendees were subjected to 'pornography without warning'..."

"... including 'topless women on stage simulating sex acts' in an uncomfortable, sweltering environment. He claims that Madonna demanded the air conditioning be turned off and he became physically ill in the heat. Lipeles also cites Madonna's tardiness.... 'Forcing consumers to wait hours in hot, uncomfortable arenas and subjecting them to pornography without warning is demonstrative of Madonna's flippant disrespect for her fans'...."

From "Madonna hit with new lawsuit alleging unwanted exposure to sexual content and emotional distress/California concert attendee Justen Lipeles is the latest to sue the pop star over her 'Celebration' tour" (Entertainment Weekly).

It was hot and she was late are not interesting complaints. The key phrase here is "pornography without warning." I remember seeing "Marat/Sade" in New York in the 1960s when I was a teenager and feeling quite surprised to see the lead actor become completely naked at one point. Somehow I dealt with it. Should I have been warned? It was supposed to be shocking, not that it was "pornography without warning." It was about revolution and madness, not sex.

Maybe some people would like advance consent to anything sexual, including a theatrical performance. Isn't it enough to know it's Madonna? Who goes to a Madonna concert then complains about topless women on stage simulating sex acts?

"The free show... was a grand finale to the pop superstar’s latest world tour, which has delivered 80 performances since last October...."

"[C]oncert crowd sizes can be difficult to gauge; Riotur, the municipality’s tourism department, estimated that 1.6 million people flooded onto the 2.4-mile stretch of sand on Saturday that had been turned into a roughly $12 million playground surrounding the 8,700-square-foot stage. It was the culmination of days of Madonna-mania in the city, where talk of the singer, 65, was inescapable. Her songs spilled out of stores and car stereos. Fans assembled outside her hotel and shouted her name. Updates about the concert, which was broadcast on the network Globo TV, dominated local media reports...."

From "Madonna Brings Massive Free Concert to Rio, Capping Celebration Tour/The pop superstar performed a final date on her global trek marking four decades of hits: a set on Copacabana Beach before the largest live crowd of her career" (NYT).

"'Here we are, the most beautiful place in the world,' Madonna announced.... 'This is magic.'... 'You have always been there for me,' she said. 'That flag: that green-and-yellow flag, I see it everywhere. I feel it in my heart.'"

"Could President Biden and Donald J. Trump really be locked in a close race among young voters — a group Democrats typically carry by double digits...?"

Asks Nate Cohn (at the NYT).

There are "dozens" of recent polls, but people are still skeptical, Cohn says, and I find it funny, because it corresponds to the way Trump supporters find it hard to believe the results of the 2020 election. It can't be!

Cohn offers the solace that, though "the polling is mostly right... things might change." I'd say you need to shake yourself out of denial and think about why the polls are the way they are. Cohn says:

Did you think Madonna would lay down and die?

Love for Madonna.

I’m not religious, but I feel so moved. Makes me wanna pray. Pray you’ll always be here. 👑 #Madonna pic.twitter.com/8LZAXbJuow

— Michael (@_lusotart_) June 29, 2023

To those of you who are comparing Roseanne and Madonna.

I've seen this now in several places:

What I wrote when I saw it again, just now, at Facebook:

"Beyond the question of what she’d had done, however, lay the more interesting question of why she had done it."

"Did Madonna get sucked so deep into the vortex of beauty culture that she came out the other side? Had the pressure to appear younger somehow made her think she ought to look like some kind of excessively contoured baby? Perhaps so, but I’d like to think that our era’s greatest chameleon, a woman who has always been intentional about her reinvention, was doing something slyer, more subversive, by serving us both a new — if not necessarily improved — face and a side of critique about the work of beauty, the inevitability of aging, and the impossible bind in which older female celebrities find themselves.... [W]hatever her intentions, the superstar has gotten us talking about how good looks are subjective and how ageism is pervasive. In the end, whether she meant to make a statement or just to look younger, better, 'refreshed,' almost doesn’t matter. If beauty is a construct, Madonna’s the one who put its scaffolding on display."

 
Writes Jennifer Weiner in "Madonna’s New Face Is a Brilliant Provocation" (NYT).

If you don't know what Weiner is talking about, see "Fans 'so confused' by Madonna’s ‘new face’ at Grammys 2023" (with photos).

Express yourself/Don't repress yourself.

I think I'm cuter than Madonna... https://t.co/x6rQth1MoX

— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) January 12, 2023

"The more serious that an artist takes themselves, the easier it is to lampoon them, because it doesn’t take much to pop the bubble of pretentiousness."

"And thankfully [Nirvana had] a good sense of humor about it, too. But there are some songs that people are just, like, waiting for the Weird Al treatment: 'Oh, Al’s going to step in and, like, take this down a peg.'... [S]ometimes my parody didn’t work so well, because I was parodying something that was already perceived as not all that serious.... Most artists in pop culture are very serious.... But I always like to make sure that the artist and songwriters feel respected."

Said Weird Al, quoted in "How Weird Al Spoofed Himself/In a new bio-pic, the singer applies his talents to a surprising subject: his own rise to stardom" (The New Yorker).

Al reveals that the reason Daniel Radcliffe was chosen to play the lead in the bio-pic is that he'd done this...

 

We watched "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story."

Just watch the trailer and you'll easily see if this movie is for you:

We laughed a lot. I especially liked the big scene early on that had a lot of celebrities — including Andy Warhol (played by Conan O'Brien) and Salvador Dalí. Rainn Wilson plays Dr. Demento, and Jack Black plays Wolfman Jack. Madonna is an important character — played by Evan Rachel Wood. Al is played by Daniel Radcliffe, and Weird Al himself plays a stern record executive. 

We streamed it on the Roku Channel, and it was interrupted by commercials — as you might expect, a ton of political commercials. I don't know how I put up with it, because I normally watch zero commercials — other than in front of YouTube videos, like that embedded clip itself. I saw an absurd number of commercials related to Mandela Barnes... and don't remember a damned thing about them. Why would I vote based on commercials?

At Britney Spears' wedding, Spears, Madonna, Paris Hilton, Selena Gomez, Donatella Versace, and Drew Barrymore attempt a spontaneous rendition of Madonna's hit song “Vogue.”

I found that at the NY Post, which calls it "awkward." I think they were just standing together and needing to pose, so the lyric "Don’t just stand there, let’s get to it/Strike a pose, there’s nothing to it" worked as a comical way to get in the spirit of producing a good visual for still photography. We weren't really meant to listen.

And let me say they all look great. I especially love Madonna's dress and find Drew Barrymore's giant black bag pretty funny. I'm sure it must mean something, maybe something like the polar opposite of a wedding dress. Drew is not currently married (and has 3 ex-husbands).

Garner, the name (I approve!).

Julia Garner has been offered the role of Madonna in an upcoming biopic about the pop icon, Variety has learned exclusively. https://t.co/a1YSuV84Gb pic.twitter.com/mIh7ABezIm

— Variety (@Variety) June 7, 2022

ADDED: The film will be directed by Madonna!