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Not many people get to have the word "explorer" in their title but Arati Kumar-Rao does. She's an environmental photographer, writer, and artist as well as a National Geographic Explorer. In 2023, she was named one of the BBC 100 Influential and Inspiring Women from around the world. Splitting her time between Bangalore and the Western Ghats mountain range in India, she takes on all sorts of assignments, from documenting the people of the Thar desert to photographing the Sunderbans, the world's largest unbroken mangrove stand. Recently, she wrote a beautiful story for Orion magazine, " Hunting with Dolphins: Night fishing on India's Brahmaputra River ." The story is part of her book, Marginlands: A Journey into India's Vanishing Landscapes . All along the Brahmaputra River, wetlands serve as nurseries for fish. Photo by Arati Kumar-Rao. Evan Kleiman: I'm very intrigued by the title "National Geographic Explorer." What does that mean? Arati Kumar-Rao: Well, it's actually really simple. It just means that I have been given a grant by the National Geographic Society to do a bunch of work. There are different kinds of grants that they hand out every few months. Some of them are research grants, and some of them are storytelling grants. I have a storytelling grant, and I'm currently on the grant documenting forced human migration across South Asia. I can't wait to see the fruit of that work. Tell us about the Brahmaputra, the ninth largest river in the world. Where is it? How long is it? What is its significance to different cultures? So this is a fascinating river. It starts from a glacier in western Tibet, and it flows all the way past Lhasa , which is the capital of Tibet in China. Then it makes this stunning U-turn or bend between two very high mountains in the eastern Himalayas. Then, it comes down south, through the deepest gorge in the world. And it comes into India, in a state of ours called Arunachal Pradesh , where it takes on the name Siang. It's born as the Yarlung Tsangpo in China then it takes on the name Siang when it reaches India. Then, it flows south, and it joins two other rivers, the Lohit and the Dibang , to become this massive river called the Brahmaputra . While the Brahmaputra is the ninth largest river, it is ridiculous to look at, especially in the monsoon. You can't see the other bank. If you're standing on one bank, it's about 18 kilometers wide. It's crazy. That flows through first China and Tibet, so basically through Buddhist areas. Then it flows through India, which are a bunch of Hindu areas and so on. Then it flows into Bangladesh, which is a Muslim country. So it flows through three religions and three countries before it ends in 1,000 tongues where it flows into the Bay of Bengal, and that is the Sunderbans, which is the largest unbroken stand of mangrove forests in the world. Wow, what a story of its geography. In your piece, you went out on this river at night with two fishermen. Where along the river were you? We were in the Indian state of Assam , so it has come down the mountains and it has come into the plains, and that's where we camped by the river. It was in the dry season, so the river was not quite 18 kilometers wide, but it had these huge sandbars that we'd have to walk across to reach some water on which we jumped onto this boat, this fishing boat with these two fishermen. Then we found a sand island, a silt island, actually, on which we camped and then went out fishing on the darkest night of the month. It was just two days before and two days after the new moon, and we went out with them on those dark nights fishing, because that's when they fish. Harpoon fisherman on the Brahmaputra River are a dying breed, says National Geographic Explorer Arati Kumar-Rao. Photo by Arati Kumar-Rao. Can you describe the two men, Lekhu and Ranjan, and what they do? Why do they go out at night? What do they fish for? How do they go about fishing? These guys are traditional harpoon fishermen. It's a dying breed. They're probably the last two of their kind left in India, for sure. They do it only on the very dark nights of the month, and only in the dry season, not in the monsoons, because the river just swells up when it's the monsoon. So not then, but when it is shallow and very clear, is when they go fishing. They fish with this handheld harpoon, which has six prongs, and there's this long, dingy boat, and they hang a small lamp in the front of the boat, which throws an arc of light in front of their boat. The rest of the whole place is dark, if you can imagine it. You can't even see your hand in front of your face. It's that dark. So they use their oar and their harpoon to just kind of tickle the water. They make sounds, and that's what summons river dolphins. They fish with river dolphins. This is something that they have been doing for several generations, and it's not going to last, I think, beyond our generation. Unfortunately, in fact, I just spoke to Lekhu the other day, and he isn't fishing anymore, and he's doing some building work and so on. This is primarily because they are not finding fish in the river anymore. Fish in the Brahmaputra has fallen by 80% to 85% in some places. What a shame. So these Gangetic dolphins, you write so beautifully about the speed and the grace and the power of these dolphins. Can you describe them for us and the role they play in this ballet between the men, the fish, and themselves? So the Gangetic dolphins are river dolphins. They're the oldest cetaceans in the world. They're blind because both the Ganga and the Brahmaputra, the two big river systems in which they're found, are extremely silty rivers, so they can't really see underwater. Therefore, over time, they've lost sight, and they can only barely tell the direction lights are coming from. They use echolocation for everything — for feeding, for mating, for any communication whatsoever, it's echolocation. So they're blind dolphins. They're side-swimming dolphins. It's really funny to see them. They turn on their side and they swim. These dolphins are not like their marine cousins. They don't jump up and spin and fall back into the water. They barely break the surface of the water. They poke their snout out, and they take a gulp, and then they whoosh back in. It's a very gradual, very graceful arc. There was a recent census that was conducted, and the numbers still have to be verified, but we have a few thousand left in the whole river systems in both India and Bangladesh. So these dolphins are the apex predators in the rivers. They're the ones that are like the tigers of the river systems, and they eat fish. Unfortunately, that can also be their undoing, because rivers are used by everyone, and the Ganga Brahmaputra basin is the most populous basin in the world. 800 million people depend upon this river basin. What happens is that there are dams along the river, which fragment the habitat, but more importantly, impound water. So there are times there's very low water and these dolphins love deep water, so they go looking for deep water, which is also where the fish are, therefore, which is also where the fishermen congregate. Very often, these dolphins get stuck in the fishing nets and because they have sharp teeth, the fishing nets get wound around their snouts, which are pretty long as well, and then they thrash about, which makes it much worse. A lot of them die in fishing nets. So that's a pity, but they're beautiful creatures. They're actually India's national aquatic animal. You write about the beauty of being out on this boat with these fishermen. Can you dig into that a little bit, this human/animal symbiosis in this way of fishing? What happens is that the dolphin and the fishermen both want the fish in the river, right? When the fishermen call the dolphin by making those sounds on the water with their oars, the dolphins come to the boat. They're predators, right? So the fish are afraid of the dolphins and they're running away from the dolphins. The dolphins are coming towards the boat. So of course, the fish are also coming towards the boat, because they're running away from the bus. It's almost like they're chasing the fish towards the boat, and the fishermen then harpoon those fish. But as a reward, they leave a few fish for the dolphin to get as well. That night that you spent fishing alongside these dolphins on the Brahmaputra, how long did you spend out there and how many fish did you have at the end to show for it? Not too many fish to show for it. We spent three days of about two to three hours each. The first day we didn't even have any. The second day, I think we had one fish. Then the third day, we had two fish, or something like that. I forget now exactly, but it was the number of fish you could count on the fingers of one hand and you would still have fingers left over, which is the real pity, because that was fishing season, and there should have been fish in the river. We just have seen a huge drop off in riverine fish thanks to river mining upstream, because that takes away the habitat where the fish breed, as well as wetlands, which are also habitats where the fish breed. So both those are endangered spaces, which are affecting the wild fish in these rivers. Gangetic dolphins are the oldest cetaceans in the world and are blinded by the silt in the Ganga and the Brahmaputra rivers. Photo by Arati Kumar-Rao.

By day, Tyler Harper teaches environmental studies at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. By night, he dons a wetsuit, often during storms, and heads out into the turbulent surf to fish for striped bass. It's an extreme sport known as "wetsuiting." He wrote about the dangerous, secretive world of extreme fishing for The Atlantic. Evan Kleiman: I'm eager to find out about this wetsuiting. What exactly is it, and what drew you to it? Tyler Harper: Wetsuiting is a form of surf fishing for striped bass, which involves wearing a wetsuit, as the name implies, which allows you to access deeper water than traditional waders, which will fill up. And so you're usually either deep-wading or often swimming to offshore rocks in the ocean to fish from, that let you access a little bit deeper water and faster currents, where hopefully you can reach some bigger fish. And what drew you to it? Was it a dare? No, I've always been a very serious fisherman. When I started fishing for striped bass, I became really obsessed with it very quickly. And soon learned that very serious people were wetsuiting and that kind of thing appealed to me. It mostly takes place at night, which is also a little easier to make happen around my work and family schedule, so it immediately appealed. Although I'm an academic, I suppose I have a bit of an adrenaline streak so that that factor appealed to me. That's the part that just makes me insane in my mind. It's bad enough imagining myself swimming out to rocks to fish but the nighttime thing, wow. That is extreme. Tell us a bit about the history of the sport. How and when did it originate? Wetsuiting began in Montauk, New York, in the 1960s and quickly took off in Montauk, which for many decades, remained the epicenter of the sport, but also spread throughout New England pretty quickly as well. Now, it's relatively popular. I say relatively. I mean in the grand scheme of things there are not a lot of people doing this. But you know, it became more popular throughout the Northeast. Do you only fish for striped bass? Are you looking for other kinds of fish too? At other times of the year, I do some freshwater fishing and fly fishing and so on, but the wetsuiting is just for striped bass. Let's talk about striped bass. What's so special about them? Do they have a particular migratory pattern that lends to catching them by this activity? Striped bass are a migratory fish. They arrive in New England, let's say early May. They tend to depart in late October, early November. You know, I think they are special fish in a number of ways. They have large tails, which allows them to swim in really rough surf conditions and even tropical storms and hurricanes. So they have a feeding advantage when the water is really rough. And the big striped bass are nocturnal. They like storms and inclement weather. So the best fishing is generally when it's the most unpleasant out. They’re really challenging fish to pursue for that reason but they're also a really remarkable animal. There's something quite incredible about fishing the front edge of a hurricane, and the water looks like there certainly couldn't be anything living in it, and yet there are striped bass feeding with abandon. Take us through an evening of you going out there. Tell us what happens in a more granular way. Sure. Partly that depends on what kind of territory you are fishing. If you are fishing in Maine, we have a varied topography. I don't just fish in Maine. I fish in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, too. In some places, you're fishing from cliff faces or ledges where you're not actually in the water. Often, you are fishing from offshore sandbars that you are wading out to. Other times, you're fishing in what we call boulder fields, which are boulder strewn parts of the coastline where you are swimming out to these offshore rocks that you can fish from. The average night, striped bass, they feed in ways that are pretty tide-dependent. So when you start fishing is often dictated by the tides. In general, I would say I'm usually leaving to go fish sometime around nine or 10 at night, usually getting back, two or three in the morning. But if the fishing is really good, sometimes that's fishing until the sun comes up. Myself, I try to fish four nights a week, five, if I can. It's one of these things where you really have to go all in or it's not worth doing. Striped bass are what we would call pattern-dependent, which means they're going to be at a specific place at high tide for a very specific reason, at a specific place at low tide for a very specific reason. Those reasons are pretty hard to figure out unless you're fishing a ton. So it's the kind of thing where you need to be going a lot to figure out where the fish are, and the returns are exponential. The more you fish, the better you're going to do, generally speaking. Brandon Sausele wears a wetsuit and wades or swims out to offshore rocks in shark-filled waters —­ almost exclusively at night. Photo by Peter Fisher. I'm imagining you out there, let's say, in a boulder field, standing kind of precariously on the edge of one of the rocks. After you manage to catch the fish, you haven't schlepped a creel or something to put it in or a cooler with you have you? How do you get the fish back to where you can pack it away? Oh, one of the interesting things about this sport is that most of us who wetsuit, I would say 99% of us catch and release everything. It's really just about the experience. The other piece of this is that most of us are fishing for trophy class striped bass. Really large fish and striped bass are regulated by what's called a "slot limit," which means you can only keep fish within a certain size, length, roughly 28-31 inches. Most of the fish people who are wetsuiting are targeting fish in the 40-inch plus range, generally speaking. We often don't catch smaller fish as well, but the size fish that you can eat are generally not the size fish we're targeting. And most people who do this are pretty conservation minded. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the least dangerous and 10 being the most dangerous, where would you rank wetsuiting? It's certainly not as dangerous as something like free solo mountain climbing or something like that but it's definitely more dangerous than your average fishing. The parts of it that are scary are actually different than the parts of it that are risky. Being out on a sandbar 150 yards offshore in the middle of Maine's white shark season, the fog rolls in, and it's really quiet and it's just you up to your chest, it gets spooky very quickly. But in the grand scheme of things, the risk of a shark attack is probably really minimal. The risk of getting caught in a rip current and drowning, or you've been fishing for five days straight, and you've got a cumulative, you know, 15 hours of sleep over those five days, and then you have to drive 45 minutes home, those are the risks. People have died during the sport. The risks are more associated with, I think, drowning and driving than, you know, toothy critters in the night. But, yeah, it's certainly not without its risk. If I had to put a number on it, I'd probably give it a 7. The striped bass population collapsed back in the 1980s and you write that many people think we're on the verge of another collapse, if we're not there already. Can you speak to that a bit? Yeah, absolutely. The striped bass have been historically pretty poorly managed, and they're being very poorly managed right now. The governing body that manages them, because they're a migratory fish, it's called the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission , which has the very tough job of navigating stakeholders who have very different interests. You have recreational fishermen like me, who are trophy fishermen, who mostly catch and release everything. You have recreational fishermen who are meat fishermen who are catching fish in the hopes of feeding their family. You have commercial fishermen whose livelihood in no small part, depends on harvesting this fish. Striped bass represent, quite literally, a multi-billion dollar industry. They're really hard to regulate for that reason because everyone, people like me, for example, would love to see the striped bass declared a game fish, which means they can't be harvested or sold for food. But then, very understandably, you have other folks who make their living on this fish, so it's really hard to please everyone. For that reason, the ASMFC has tended away from heavy-handed regulation, which it's looking like is increasingly necessary. There have been a lot of poor spawning years for the striped bass related to a number of factors — pollution, climate change and so on — so it looks like they're considering some emergency measures right now. I hope they take it seriously, because this has happened before, in the '80s, and it would be a shame for history to repeat itself.

Emmy-winner Kerry Washington often embodies steeliness and emotional strength. Think: signature characters like crisis management expert Olivia Pope on the series Scandal and real life public figure Anita Hill in the HBO film Confirmation. In her honest and unflinching 2023 memoir Thicker than Water, she displayed great fortitude in revealing a family secret that challenged her identity and sense of belonging. Through her newest project, the action film Shadow Force, Washington taps into her physical strength, playing a member of an elite special forces group who must go underground to protect her family. Washington tells The Treatment about loving the physicality of her latest role (she’s particularly proud of her newfound boat driving skills), about how her life and her acting changed after learning her family’s secret, and how public television saved her family.

James Mangold — freshly minted Best Director Oscar-nominee — occupies a fascinating space in the Hollywood firmament. A contemporary of auteurs like Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, and fellow CalArts alum Tim Burton, Mangold has carved his own niche which can best be described as “elevated journeyman.” Mangold moves deftly between genres, delivering films whose strongest connective tissue lies within the effectiveness of his filmmaking, and just how good he is at telling stories in a visual language. Mangold directed a 24-year-old Angelina Jolie to a scene stealing performance (and Best Supporting Actress Academy Award win) in 1999’s Girl Interrupted. He did the same for Reese Witherspoon in 2005’s Walk The Line. His 2017 entry into the X-Men cinematic universe — the stealth Western Logan — is often cited as a pinnacle of the superhero genre. And his 2024 Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown overcame a litany of advance skepticism to emerge as a box office hit — and nab eight Oscar nominations in the process. It was also critically acclaimed and met with a notable degree of approval from Dylan’s famously opinionated fanbase. More: Director James Mangold + costumer Arianne Phillips on their big designs for ‘A Complete Unknown ’ For his Treat, Mangold recommends the “glorious and beautiful” 1957 film Sweet Smell of Success; a movie that he believes that everyone should seek out, but especially writers, directors, and actors. He also offers a glimpse into his mentorship with the film’s director Alexander McKendrick. This segment has been edited and condensed for clarity. Hi, this is Jim Mangold, and this is The Treat: [the 1957 film] Sweet Smell of Success, written by Clifford Odette and Ernest Lehman, directed by my old mentor Alexander McKendrick, starring Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis — and many others — with music by Chico Hamilton and Elmer Bernstein. It is a swinging film. It has taught me so much about writing, about storytelling, about characterization… about how you don't need anyone in your movie to be good, to make them compelling. You can [just] make a movie about desire, need, avarice, greed, longing… I was 17 [at first viewing] because I’d just gotten to CalArts up in Valencia, and Sandy McKendrick — the director — was there in residence. It was shown in the first week as kind of representative of his work. I saw that movie, and I was like: “I gotta work with that guy.” He only worked with master's students, and I was fresh out of high school, but I clawed and I scratched until I ended up becoming his teaching assistant for several years. He was a really great friend and a huge and important teacher in my life. It is also just beautiful black and white locations in New York City in the late 50s — [shot by cinematographer] James Wong Howe — it is a glorious and beautiful film. I can't advocate it enough if you're a writer, if you're a director, or an actor. It's also, in my opinion, Tony Curtis’ best movie because he's playing someone [that’s] probably close to something going on for him inside… Burt Lancaster, as well, is just demonically powerful in the movie. And that's it, that's my Treat.

The latest film releases include Clown in a Cornfield, Friendship, Fight or Flight, and Absolute Dominion. Weighing in are Witney Seibold, senior writer at SlashFilm and co-host of the Critically Acclaimed Network, and Katie Walsh, film reviewer for The Tribune News Service and The Los Angeles Times.

The latest film releases include Clown in a Cornfield, Friendship, Fight or Flight, and Absolute Dominion. Weighing in are Witney Seibold, senior writer at SlashFilm and co-host of the Critically Acclaimed Network, and Katie Walsh, film reviewer for The Tribune News Service and The Los Angeles Times. Clown in a Cornfield From director Eli Craig (Zombieland and Tucker & Dale vs. Evil), a teenage girl and her dad move to a small town and learn it’s socially fractured, economically troubled, and threatened by a homicidal clown. Walsh: “It's pretty fun. It's very reverent towards the material. But it's not doing anything new. … There's a clown. He's in a cornfield. Mayhem ensues. But it's pretty straightforward in terms of the genre.” Seibold: “I was a teenager when Wes Craven’s Scream came out in the mid-90s, and that was really trying to deconstruct slashers. Slashers were done at that point. And for a brief period, there was this deconstructionist slasher wave where we’re just picking apart slashers. … And it's really unusual to come to something like Clown in a Cornfield and find that they're just doing it again, there's no self-reference, there's no self-awareness. We're just doing something that we would have seen in the 1980s, just with a little bit more of a teen-friendly vibe. It's still very bloody. It's still very gory. … There's one or two twists, but they're not so dramatic that they're even notable. … It is a slasher movie. It's right up the middle. I want there to be more cleverness in my slasher movies. I want there to be creative kills. And this doesn't have enough of that. It's not scary, it's not clever, it's just blah.” Fight or Flight Josh Hartnett is a former CIA agent who’s tasked, by his former boss and ex-girlfriend (Katee Sackhoff), with finding “the ghost” on a plane. However, he learns that his target’s location has been leaked to all the world’s assassins. Seibold: “Every single person on this flight is a very colorful, cartoony assassin who wants to locate and kill the ghost before Josh Hartnett can protect them. This seems like pretty standard action movie fare, just a little bit overblown with the number of assassins in it. The tone of this film, however, is really broad and slapstick. It's really cartoonish. The violence is super over-the-top. And Josh Hartnett is playing his character as a put-upon slapstick everyman who just can't believe how bad his day is getting. … Your mileage is going to vary, whether you find the slapstick violence really brisk and exhilarating, or really affected and stylized and obnoxious. … I think Josh Hartnett is really the rock of this. He is the one who not only is capably handling the action, but really capably handling the comedy.” Walsh: “The pilots are an afterthought. … I'm very here for the Josh Hartnett renaissance that's been happening in the past few years with Trap and Oppenheimer, and he just really holds it together. … There's a flight attendant on the flight played by Charithra Chandran, who was in Bridgerton season two. And I think she has really fun chemistry with Josh Hartnett. So she's also a standout for me.” Friendship Comedian Tim Robinson (I Think You Should Leave) plays a suburban dad named Craig who becomes obsessed with his new neighbor (Paul Rudd) who’s a local weather forecaster. But then Craig gets platonically dumped. Walsh: “I would highly recommend seeing this in the theater. … Seeing this movie with a crowd of people is absolute joy. It is extremely funny. … It's definitely a dark comedy or a weird comedy. … It does not go into thriller, scary vibe. I think that the trailer is trying to position it as this friendship horror movie, like, ‘Oh my god, I made a social faux pas. How devastating is that?’ … It's very relatable in the sense that anybody who's tried to make friends as an adult, or felt that they did something wrong or had an awkward moment in friendship, it blows that up to epic proportions. I think it's also tackling this idea of the ‘male loneliness epidemic,’ how adult men who are married and have kids and families are maybe not socializing with each other enough, and the struggle that is to find friends as an adult. … So I think that as much as the film is over-the-top, it's also deeply human and very relatable. This is one of the best movies of the year.” Absolute Dominion In 2063, world religions send representatives to compete in a martial arts tournament to decide which faith will govern humanity. This stars Patton Oswalt, Junes Zahdi, and Julie Ann Emery. Seibold: “This character … played by Désiré Mia is going to fight for the institute of humanism. He is the atheist fighter, and he is the underdog of this story. Will the atheist be able to fight all of these religions? It has a super persecution complex. … And it has all of these straw man arguments that it likes to make against and for religion. Nothing comes together just because the film is so unbearably cheap. All of the exteriors were done on Photoshop-style computer animation programs. The gigantic stadiums where the fighters are supposed to fight are clearly just like a local dojo with mats on the floor, and there's like 30 people surrounding the mat. … There are so few fight scenes that we're just wading through all of these really dull conspiracy scenes where people are snarling at the idea of religion. And we're trying to approach a serious topic about the role of faith in the modern world, but we never really get there.” Walsh: “This is written and directed by Lexi Alexander. And I'm always going to root for Lexi. … She's very outspoken, and in a way that has made it hard for her, I think, to get things financed in Hollywood. But what's interesting is that she started as a kickboxing champion martial artist. … She also played Princess Katana in a traveling Mortal Kombat show, so it's interesting that this is a Mortal Kombat-esque movie but with a fighting tournament and everything. She shoots the fighting really well, but the budgetary limitations on this severely hold this film back, and also, I think the inelegance of the script.”

Public media in rural America is often the only source of local news and emergency information. They rely heavily on federal funding to fulfill their missions.

Fires tore through Pacific Palisades and Altadena four months ago today. KCRW's Adria Kloke, who went on air while she evacuated, shares an update.

Trump and Republicans are trying to end the Energy Star program and stop California from phasing out the sale of new gas vehicles. On EVs, they enjoy some Democratic support.

Aimee Semple McPherson was the most famous evangelist in the U.S. during the 1920s. She harnessed the new medium of radio to spread her gospel. In Echo Park, she built a megachurch called Angelus Temple, which still exists today. However, during the height of her popularity, in 1926 at age 35, she suddenly vanished. That day, she drove to Venice Beach to work on her Sunday sermon, dipped into the Pacific Ocean wearing a bright green bathing suit, and disappeared. A massive search went on for weeks, but nothing turned up. Her mother started a church collection for her funeral. Then about a month later, she reappeared in Mexico. Her story was dramatic — she had been kidnapped and held prisoner, then fled on foot through the desert. And yet, her skin was still pale, her clothes weren’t torn, and she didn’t ask for water. Thus, some people were skeptical. Witnesses also claimed they saw her strolling in Tucson and at a beachside cottage in Carmel with a married man. The press covered the story obsessively, including charges of fraud against McPherson, which were eventually dropped. To this day, the public doesn’t know for sure what happened. Her saga is traced in journalist Claire Hoffman ’s new book titled Sister, Sinner . Hoffman recalls driving by McPherson’s temple each day when commuting to work for The LA Times. “Everyone in the city knew her name. She was this founding forebearer of so much of what Los Angeles is. And I didn't like that she had been erased.” Hoffman says a big part of McPherson’s story is her mother, who fed her ambition and outsized self-esteem by telling her that God chose her. “She just really believed in her dreams and her ability to do them, even though she was operating in a world where women weren't allowed to have property, they weren't allowed to vote. She just had a bigger sense of self.” Before coming to Los Angeles in 1918, McPherson was traveling the U.S. with one or two of her kids, living hand-to-mouth, and hosting tent revivals and “divine healings,” Hoffman explains. Then at one point, McPherson said that Jesus told her to go to LA, so she listened. As for her preaching style, McPherson was not a hellfire and brimstone type. Instead, she was uplifting and talked about Jesus in a romantic and matrimonial way, Hoffman describes. During her so-called illustrated sermons, she had a large orchestra, live animals, and props like palm trees onstage — all meant to rival movie houses. “Even though it was very sophisticated entertainment, she often would be dressed as a nurse or as a milkmaid to represent her time on the Canadian farm. She often preached sermons about her time on the farm. So that was this real old-fashioned religion, in a way. It was fundamentalist. And it was really meant for these new arrivals in Los Angeles in the 1920s. … Many of them are coming from small towns and farms across America. And they're coming to this city just as it's being built.” McPherson even captured the attention of Charlie Chaplin, who said they were doing the same thing with different goals. “Her sense of Christian entertainment is totally formative to what we see today. And not just in Christian entertainment, but also in terms of influencers or self-help gurus or these big mega preachers. … The way that she used herself as a story and as a platform really is incredibly innovative at the time,” Hoffman says. Though McPherson became famous when women earned voting rights and dressed more liberally, she didn’t openly support the suffragist movement or feminism, Hoffman points out, though she completely believed in her own potential. Plus, “she was a lot of contradictions, like she was divorced twice, she did a lot of things that weren't necessarily part of the doctrine that she was preaching,” Hoffman says. As for McPherson’s disappearance, how did she explain it? “Aimee says that she walked down to the beach after sending her assistant away to make a phone call. And just as she was about to swim, a couple … asked her to come up to the street where they had their sick baby, and they wanted her to pray for the baby. And she says, ‘How did you know I was here?’ And they say, ‘Oh, your mother told us.’ And she says, ‘Okay, let me just go back and get my robe.’ And they say, ‘No, no, we just have to hurry.’ And they rush her to the car, and she leans over to pray over the baby in the back seat. And she gets knocked in the back of the head and drugged. And she wakes up, and she's chained to a bed. … She's being held by people … who are seeking retribution for her political activism. She was considered an enemy, so to speak, of the mafia and the underworld.” Hoffman continues, “And she was held, according to her, for 35 days until she managed to escape through a window in a desert shack where she was being held in Mexico. She ran through the desert, through day and through the night, and showed up in somebody's backyard on the border and asked for a telephone. Not water. She asked to call her mother.” The public quickly doubted the veracity of McPherson’s story. Hoffman says two consecutive court inquiries in 1926 took over LA. A grand jury originally focused on finding the kidnappers, then quickly picked apart McPherson’s life, business, romances, and relationship with her mother, Hoffman notes. The scrutiny led to the church expanding. “She goes from … sometimes 10,000 people on Sunday, to 15,000-plus. So just huge numbers. People sitting in their cars outside the church, standing on the sidewalks, just traffic stopped for hours. She becomes just an even bigger public sensation.” However, the growth warped and changed McPherson, who served as a cautionary tale about fame, Hoffman says. “She thought, when she first began this journey, that she could control the media. If she did run away to a love nest in Carmel … I think she thought that she could. … It's just this funny inflection point in the city's history and the history of the way that we interact with celebrities. Because after that, she really almost seemed to … embody a lot of the criticism that her critics had lobbed at her for years, that she was too commercial, too economically driven, too vain, too sexual, too frivolous. And in some ways, those things started to almost come true.” Over the years, McPherson spent a ton of time in court, became estranged from her mom, and died of an apparent overdose. “There's a lot of tragedy in her story. … She consistently felt that she had to choose her legacy and her church over her family. So she has this falling out with her mother and later on with her daughter that are both around church management issues. … And she treated … her son a bit like an afterthought. But he's the one, when she dies, Ralph McPherson … takes over the church for five decades and brings it to economic prosperity.”

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Playwright, screenwriter, and director David Mamet is known for his distinctive and often profane dialogue. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1984 play Glengarry Glen Ross — now in the midst of limited engagement revival, starring Kieran Culkin and Bob Odenkirk, at the Palace Theatre on Broadway. His screenplays include The Verdict and Wag the Dog, both of which garnered Oscar nominations. His directing credits include The Spanish Prisoner, State and Main, and Heist. His latest project is the film adaptation of his 2023 play Henry Johnson, starring Shia LeBeouf. Mamet tells The Treatment about sticking to the script as a director, his experience of working with the late actors Gene Hackman and Val Kilmer, and getting pranked by Hackman.

Melanie Lynskey’s acting career took off at age 17, when she landed the role of Pauline Parker in Peter Jackson’s 1994 film Heavenly Creatures. Since then, she's given countless memorable performances across both TV and film. Lynskey showcased her comedic chops as a series regular on the long-running sitcom Two and a Half Men. On the film side, she’s a mainstay in comfort-classics like Sweet Home Alabama, Coyote Ugly, and Up in the Air. Plus, she routinely garners widespread acclaim for performances in indie dramas that include Hello, I Must Be Going and I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore. Most recently, Lynskey earned two Primetime Emmy nominations for her gripping portrayal of Shauna Sadecki on the hit Showtime series Yellowjackets. The third season finale aired in April, 2025. More: Melanie Lynskey delights in working with women in their 40s (The Treatment, 2025) More: ‘Yellowjackets’ creators on making the show and landing a second season (The Business, 2022) For her Treat, Lynskey expresses a profound admiration for British director Mike Leigh’s style of filmmaking. Seeing his film Naked as a teenager made quite the impression on Lynskey. She shares how she’s particularly inspired by Leigh’s unique casting approach, recalling a moment when actress Katrin Cartlidge auditioned for Naked and was simply encouraged to be in the moment as her character. Lynskey appreciates the freedom Leigh offers to his actors, and she admires his collaborative and improvisational process. This segment has been edited and condensed for clarity. I would like to talk about the films of Mike Leigh, who as a filmmaker, I just absolutely adore. I was a teenager and I started seeing his movies, and the first one that really had a huge impact on me was Naked. I just could not believe what I was seeing. And Katrin Cartlidge then became an actor I was obsessed with and I sought out everything that she'd done. She reunited with him in Career Girls, and she was so wonderful. I got to work with her when I was 20, and I was just so excited to meet her and work with her. I couldn't believe it. I had so many questions. At that point, I had seen pretty much every Mike Leigh movie, and I just said: "What was the process like?" She told me that when she auditioned for Naked he asked her to choose a character and then [Leigh] said, “just be in the room. Be in the room as this character, and I'm gonna watch you.” [So] she sat in a window and read a book for two and a half hours. There was something about that that was the most beautiful thing. He watched her read a book, and she said, “I was so in it. I was that person.” She felt an immense freedom in not trying to do something or trying to be interesting. She realized: "Oh, he's just interested in somebody being and that's the most interesting thing to him." It is so hard for me when I'm working in a situation where there's a lot of control, because all I have is my instinct. I feel I start to second guess myself. I don't like the feeling of being controlled by somebody. And you know, I'll take a note. I love a note. I love working with a director, but the thought of really being in such collaboration with somebody is just magic. That's my favorite thing about his films. He's never trying to force a moment. There's never anything in anyone's performance that feels artificial. And the thought of being an actor and getting to work that deeply on something and improvising in rehearsal… He comes up with this incredible script, and you know each other, there's an intimacy. And you know, just seeing Hard Truths recently, seeing what Marianne Jean-Baptiste does in that movie, and Michele Austin, and the rest of the cast — I just was like, “this is the dream.” It's my life's dream to get to work In this way and create something that feels like that.