they can feel their own pain first. We’re in the Kale
Smoothie Era of Democratic politics.
They seem to be responding to the sizable
wellness-oriented portion of the American elector-
ate that’s now a Twilight Zone away from a few
election cycles ago, when politicians were scram-
bling to be the one you’d most want to knock back a
beer with.
If the #selfcare movement has an avatar in this
2020 campaign, it is, of course, Marianne William-
son: spiritual adviser to Oprah, author of 13 self-help
books (four of them No. 1 New York Times bestsell-
ers, including 1992’s “A Return to Love”), and the
SEE SELF CARE ON C2How many yogis does it take to fill a Democratic
presidential primary?
On a single-night, triple-header CNN event this
summer, two out of three candidates professed their
love of the self-care arts. Almost up there with the
number of dentists who recommend Crest.
“I love doing hot yoga!” Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio
said during one of the news network’s many
“Presidential Town Halls” while detailing the multi-
ple seven-day silent meditation retreats he’s gone
on. Rep. Seth Moulton, who has since dropped out of
the race, echoed Ryan’s sentiments.
It’s not enough for candidates to feel America’s
pain right now; they apparently have to prove thatBY JADA YUAN AND BEN TERRIS
See how they run
Democratic candidates make wellness a part of their political personas
KLMNO
Style
MONDAY, AUGUST 26, 2019. SECTION C EZ REGIJS KAST FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTBY SEBASTIAN SMEE
The cars in Quentin Taranti-
no’s “Once Upon a Time in Holly-
wood” come close to stealing the
show. Given that the film stars
Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt
— both grizzled and a bit beaten
up but all the more handsome for
it — that’s saying a lot.
There’s some early Oscar buzz
around both male leads. But what
about the cars? Cars can have a
darker side, too — especially the
slightly grizzled, beaten up ones.
“Once Upon a Time” is more
layered — and, in an unwitting
way, more disturbing — than it
initially appears. It is set in Los
Angeles in 1969, so there are
vintage cars everywhere you
look. There’s a gorgeous old 1950s
MG TD — a stately English con-
vertible driven by Roman Polans-
ki (played by Rafal Zawierucha)
and his wife, Sharon Tate (Margot
Robbie). There’s the creamy yel-
low 1966 Cadillac Coupe de Ville
owned by the actor Rick Dalton
(DiCaprio). And then there’s the
blue, beaten-up 1964 Volkswagen
Karmann Ghia, which belongs to
Dalton’s stunt double, Cliff Booth
(Pitt).
Oh, that Karmann Ghia. It’s
lovely. I read that to help it
perform in the movie as Taranti-
no wanted it to, he had its VW
engine replaced with a pumped-
up Subaru engine. The result,
strange to say, is exactly what
Tarantino’s films are like: cult
cars souped up with new engines.
They’re exercises, in other
words, in having it both ways:
nostalgic and up-with-the-times;
viscerally violent and glibly car-
toonish; knowing and innocent.
Tarantino’s casting of the Kar-
mann Ghia expresses this duality
in more ways than one.
I should stress at this point
that I am in no way a “car guy.” I
SEE CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK ON C3BY CHRIS KELLY
As the summer of 2019 winds
down, everyone seems to have
the summer of 1969 on the brain:
We almost celebrated the
50th anniversary of Woodstock
(in Columbia, Md., of all places)
and Quentin Tarantino’s latest
stab at hysterical/historical fic-
tion, “Once Upon a Time in
Hollywood,” takes place back
then, too.
Nostalgia for those days fuels
Tame Impala, the brainchild of
Kevin Parker that played the
Anthem on Saturday night. For
about a decade, the Australian
polymath has been surfing the
time stream, venturing into psy-
chedelia with a choir boy’s voice,
impeccable melodies and wall-
of-sound sonics.
As he sang during one of the
concert’s several confetti-cannon
concussions, “It feels like I only
go backwards, baby.” And while
Tame Impala goes backward, the
audience undulated forward, en-
SEE IMPALA ON C4CRITIC’S NOTEBOOKA film’s cool
car deserves
a look under
the hood
How do you cover
a president who
has become a
parody of himself?
During the past
few years,
journalists
learned that some
long-held
assumptions about White House
reporting had to be put to rest.
There was, for example, no
such thing as a weekend under
President Trump. (In that distant
time, barring unforeseen
disasters, news would slow to a
crawl.)
Regular White House press
briefings deteriorated, dwindled,
then died off. (The last one was
more than 160 days ago, replaced
by Trump’s impromptu and
falsehood-ridden, “chopper talk”
outside Marine One.)
And this past week, we learned
that there’s no such thing
anymore as the dog days of
summer.
Rather than a break when,
with Congress out of session,
government officials — even
presidents — went on vacation to
be blessedly silent, we had a
superpowered news cycle of one
eye-popping development after
another.
The briefest of refreshers:
President Trump was angry
that his desire to buy Greenland
was rebuffed. He embraced the
notion that he was “king of Israel”
and called himself “the chosen
one.” He backed off his previously
expressed interest in gun-control
reforms. And his administration
proposed a new immigration
policy that could indefinitely
detain migrant families who
enter the country illegally.
Whipsawed and overwhelmed,
the national media found it
justifiably challenging to do the
part of their job that involves
prioritizing and curating the
news — that is, making sense of
SEE SULLIVAN ON C8
Look past
the chaos
and focus
on the news
Margaret
Sullivan
MUSIC REVIEWA staid ride through Tame Impala’s altered reality
KYLE GUSTAFSON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Australian polymath Kevin Parker of Tame Impala performs at the Anthem on Saturday.CAROLYN HAX
She wants a child. He reluctantly said yes
but is stalling. What’s the next step? C3
BOOK WORLD
The mysteries get a little muddled in the
latest Lisbeth Salander thriller. C3CARTOONING
Pia Guerra’s poignant political cartoons
are making her a star in the Trump era. C4KIDSPOST
KidsPost readers made their vacations
a peak experience in many ways. C8