Former and current staffers paint a picture of an erratic senator who has become almost impossible to work for and whose mental-health situation is more serious and complicated than previously reported. No one is saying every controversial position (for example, his respectful relationship with Trump) stems from his mental health — but it’s become harder for them to tell which ones do. When I spoke with Fetterman in April and shared those concerns, he denied anything was amiss. He told me that he felt like the “best version” of himself and later texted that the staff turnover at his office was typical of Washington. “Why is this a story?” he asked.

Those first days in the hospital were rough. Fetterman was experiencing delusions. He thought that if he took a bed at the hospital, he would be arrested. He told doctors that he believed members of his family were wearing wires to secretly record him. In one chaotic moment, Fetterman grew convinced that a political rally was being held in the hospital’s lobby and that he needed to break out of his room to attend. David Williamson, Fetterman’s doctor, told me that the main causes of the delusions were the lingering effects of the stroke, dehydration, and depression and that the original medication for the depression could also have been a factor. According to paperwork from Walter Reed, doctors then stopped all antidepressants and put him on other drugs. (Williamson declined to comment on the specifics of the medication plan.)

After six weeks in the hospital, the doctors determined his mental-health issues were in remission. Williamson said, “He expressed a firm commitment to treatment over the long term.” Doctors provided Fetterman with a multi-faceted treatment approach. He needed to stay on his medication and to get his blood checked regularly. It was also important that he stay hydrated, so staff made sure his office fridge remained stocked with Gatorade. He needed to eat healthy and get regular exercise (this was both for his mental health and for the underlying heart problems that had led to his stroke). It was also strongly suggested that he stay off social media, which exacerbated his mental-health challenges. “I’ve never noticed anyone to believe that their mental health has been supported by spending any kind of time on social media,” he said in 2023.

it wasn’t until October 7 that it became clear Fetterman was the most outspoken Israel hawk in his party, offering constant and unconditional support for the military action in Gaza. Early on in the conflict, 16 of his former campaign staffers wrote a letter — anonymously — saying they found his full-throated support for Israel to be a “gutting betrayal.” Jentleson had taken to defending Fetterman on X from such criticisms, posting, “The thing about being a staffer is that no one elected you to represent them.”

In early November, just weeks after the attack, Gisele arrived at her husband’s Senate office and, according to a staffer present, they got into a heated argument. “They are bombing refugee camps. How can you support this?” the staffer recalled her saying with tears in her eyes. “That’s all propaganda,” Fetterman replied. Later, a still visibly upset Gisele pulled the staffer aside. She asked him if members of Fetterman’s team were pushing him to take these stances for political reasons. The staffer told her that the opposite was true: Many of them were as upset as she was. “If you’re pushing back on this, there’s no hope,” the staffer recalled her saying. “This is horrible news.”

Gisele might have disliked what her husband was up to, but his father loved it. Karl Fetterman, an insurance executive, was way more conservative than his son. He used to have a magnet on his refrigerator that warned that his dog bites Democrats, and he watched Fox News constantly. When Fox would air segments about Fetterman’s strong stances on Israel or invite him on as a guest, the senator’s father would, according to former staff, almost always call to say how proud he was.

Gisele then texted that she had told her husband that his staff and doctor were worried about him but that he told her “that’s not true and I guess I am not talking to you today” before hanging up. The doctor had also “said that he was fighting to get access of the Twitter account,” she went on. “Please promise me that he’ll never have access.” The staffer said that Fetterman was asking for the passwords but that he would not give them up. “I told him I don’t want to talk to him until his blood is tested,” Gisele wrote.

There was also the possibility that Fetterman’s illness had drawn out or intensified his existing predilections. In some ways, Fetterman was being the guy voters sent to Congress. He keeps to himself? He cancels fundraising events last minute? He thinks a lot of his colleagues are morons? Make him president already! He was never a particularly easy person to work with — he’d had that reputation throughout his entire political career. So sometimes the staff would debate whether a fundamental change had occurred or they were just imagining things, particularly since there were stretches of time when he was lucid and together. “It got hard to know which way was up,” Jentleson told me. “Was he acting crazy, or were we overreacting? I asked myself that a lot.”

Years after the stroke, Fetterman continues to struggle with auditory processing. To chat with me, he had put an iPhone on the table that transcribed my questions to him in real time. Sometimes Fetterman wouldn’t finish reading a question before answering, and other times his sentences could come out a bit garbled. After a podcast taping earlier this year with The Bulwark, the interviewer Tim Miller came away feeling like Fetterman might not be all there. “He’s struggling,” Miller said in a separate podcast taping. “He’s, like, really struggling. And I just think coming off of the Biden thing, we should not be hiding the ball on this sort of stuff.”

But in my conversation with Fetterman, I didn’t find any indication that the stroke had left him cognitively impaired. Our interview lasted just over an hour, during the first half of which he seemed excited to discuss just about anything I threw at him. He had problems with the way Democrats had estranged themselves from the public, he said, but still had no intention of leaving the party to become a Republican or even an independent: “Same chance I’m going to end up with a beautiful head of hair.”

He said that no one in his staff would know about his personal health situation and that anyone who told me otherwise was simply misinformed. “There’s not really anything to respond when that’s just not accurate,” he said. “What they say,” I pressed on, “is that they’ve witnessed ups and downs that could be associated with kind of a relapse. And they also worry that the medication that you’re on is not just for depression, but more serious drugs that if you’re not on them would be a problem. Is there truth to that?” “I don’t have any comment on that,” he said. “I’m going to go off record. Go off record. Go off record.” I cannot report what Fetterman said over the course of the next four minutes, but I can say that after he was done talking, I found myself in the hallway outside his office making awkward small talk with one of his press aides. Five minutes later, the door opened and I was ushered back in. The office felt different now. Quiet and tense. Fetterman was still in the same chair but slumped into himself, like a deflated parade float. His shoes were now on, and he avoided looking at me. Finally, I broke the silence. “Anything to say about that?” I asked, hoping to pick up our conversation where we had left off.

In the beginning, VFA was an institution beloved by many of its fellows. “It was a wonderful way to leave college and enter the real world because you’re surrounded by a community and there’s support from the organization,” says Jamie Norwood, co-founder of feminine hygiene brand Winx Health. Norwood and her co-founder, Cynthia Plotch, are a VFA success story. They met as fellows in 2015 and VFA eventually helped them launch their company with a grant and advisement. “We always say, Winx Health would not be here without VFA,” Norwood says.

Norwood and Plotch went through the standard VFA admissions protocol, which was rigorous. It required two written applications, a video interview, and in-person interviews at an event called “Selection Day,” many of which were held in New York City and Detroit over the years. By the end of each university term in May, accepted fellows would get access to Connect, VFA’s job portal, and have until November to land a job. For each fellow hired in a full-time job, VFA received a $5,000 placement fee, paid by partner companies. This fee became a crucial revenue stream for the organization—effectively wedding the professional success of its fellows to its bottom line.

Selection Day interviews were conducted by judges who often pitted interviewees against each other. Candidates were told to organize themselves in order of least to most likely to be successful, or according to whose answers had the most value per word. The format felt ruthless. “People cried” during the interview process, Plotch remembers.

The problems with the business bled into the fellows’ experience in 2023 and 2024, leaving them disenchanted, financially struggling, or expelled en masse from the program for reasons they believe were beyond their control. Despite a multitude of financial red flags, VFA leadership still insisted on recruiting for the 2024 class. “The talent team was traveling nonstop, using prepaid Visa cards since the corporate cards didn’t work,” explains a former director who worked closely with fellows.

Onboarding fresh recruits became increasingly crucial if VFA was going to survive. The organization asked companies for placement fees upfront in 2023, according to internal VFA documents and conversations with former employees. The policy change gave companies pause. Fewer companies signed up as partners, meaning fellows weren’t getting jobs and VFA was losing money.

In the spring of 2023, “there were 15 jobs on opening day,” for a class that eventually grew to over 100 fellows, the former director explains. Gabriella Rudnik, a 2023 fellow, estimates that when training camp began in July 2023, less than half of her peers had jobs, “whereas in previous years it would be closer to like 80 percent.”

Fellows were made to pay the price for the shortage of companies partnering with VFA in 2023. “We weren’t getting more jobs on Connect, and that’s what led to so many fellows being off-boarded,” explains a former director who worked closely with fellows.

Traditionally, VFA gave fellows a deadline of November of their class year to find a job, which typically meant a few stragglers were given extra help to find a position if they were late. In those rare cases during earlier years, fellows were offboarded by the organization, a former director says.

In previous years, expulsion was a much more serious and infrequent occurrence. “Removal from the fellowship was not something done lightly. During my tenure, we instituted an internal investigation process, similar to an HR investigation,” says the former executive who worked at VFA from 2017-20.  In total, at least 40 fellows from the 2023 class were expelled for failing to get jobs that weren’t available, according to research by former VFA fellows who tracked the number of fellows purged from a Slack channel. Records of their participation were removed from the VFA website, the fellows say.

Many fellows had made sacrifices to be part of the highly selective and prestigious VFA, which cited acceptance rates of around 10 percent of applicants. “There were fellows who turned down six-figure jobs to be a part of this program, and were told that the program that Andrew Yang started would live up to its reputation,” says Paul Ford, a 2024 fellow.

Though internal documents show that VFA was slowly imploding for months, in all external communications with fellows, the nonprofit still maintained that 2024 training camp would take place in Detroit.

“From an ethical perspective, it does reek of being problematic,” says Thad Calabrese, a professor of nonprofit management at New York University. “You entered into an arrangement with people who don’t have a lot of money, who believed that you were going to make them whole. Then you’re going to turn around and not make them whole.”

Mr. Musk had largely come to peace with a price of $100 a year for Blue. But during one meeting to discuss pricing, his top assistant, Jehn Balajadia, felt compelled to speak up. “There’s a lot of people who can’t even buy gas right now,” she said, according to two people in attendance. It was hard to see how any of those people would pony up $100 on the spot for a social media status symbol. Mr. Musk paused to think. “You know, like, what do people pay for Starbucks?” he asked. “Like $8?” Before anyone could raise objections, he whipped out his phone to set his word in stone. “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” he tweeted on Nov. 1. “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”

The men and women of the Senate might not need their government salary to survive, but they needed the stimulation, the sense of relevance, the power.

Perhaps Romney’s most surprising discovery upon entering the Senate was that his disgust with Trump was not unique among his Republican colleagues. “Almost without exception,” he told me, “they shared my view of the president.” In public, of course, they played their parts as Trump loyalists, often contorting themselves rhetorically to defend the president’s most indefensible behavior

Riverdale has gone in so many directions since it started. What did you think it was going to be?Petsch: A way to get me out of my restaurant hosting job. Charles Melton: I was a dog walker and working a Chinese takeout when I did my chemistry read with KJ and Cole for season two.In season one, Reggie was played by Ross Butler, who left to continue his role on Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why. Lili Reinhart: I had just signed a lease by myself in L.A., and I was terrified because I couldn’t afford it. This was my second time moving there to try and make it work, and I had no money and no job. I remember after my final audition, I was on the phone with my mom and told her it was the first time ever in an audition process that I felt like I truly was okay and at peace with whatever the outcome was: “I gave them my version of what this character is, take it or leave it.” That night, I found out I got it.

Casey Cott: I don’t think people understand how Riverdale works. Very quickly, before you start shooting an episode — we’re talking two days — you get the script. And sometimes you don’t even have a script. You just get an email that says, “You have a recording session.” And if you’re really lucky, you get a text from Roberto that says, “Hey, we should sing this song.” Mendes: If there’s one thing that show taught us, it’s how to wing it.

Reinhart: I think it’s important to acknowledge that our show is made fun of a lot. People see clips taken out of contextBy 2019, “Riverdale Cringe” videos had become a genre online, be they TikTok reactions to particularly funny lines of dialogue or YouTube compilations of strange moments from the show. and are like, What? I thought this was about teenagers. And we thought so as well—in season one. But it’s really not been easy to feel that you’re the butt of a joke. We all want to be actors; we’re passionate about what we do. So when the absurdity of our show became a talking point, it was difficult. It is What the fuck? That’s the whole point. When we’re doing our table reads and something ridiculous happens, Roberto is laughing because he understands the absurdity and the campiness.

If you want to watch a teen show where there’s just a bunch of kids in a high school dealing with relationship drama, there’s a lot out there. Sprouse: Go watch Euphoria. Mendes:  But Roberto didn’t want to do that. I think he wanted something that was more outlandish. Sprouse: That’s the natural life cycle of a cult program. North America is the only part of the world that raises vocal opposition to the absurdity of the show. England, which has a more dry, sort of crass, sarcastic sense of humor, loves it and gets it. We find a huge audience in France that has a fascination with classic Americana. Mendes: And don’t forget Brazil! All the show’s fan accounts. We’ve done so much that anytime we get a new script or go into a new project, it’s like, I’ve done a version of this on Riverdale.

Petsch: Does anyone remember when I had my whole-ass own church in season five? I think my favorite line is “I am Cheryl Blossom, queen of the bees!” And by “favorite,” I mean that’s the only time I ever texted Roberto and said, “Please, please, please, don’t make me say this.” I had to shake honeycombs at my mother to banish her.

Mendes: I had this long line, and I remember I was like, “I fucking hate this!” I couldn’t get it, and it was so complicated, but now it’s my little party trick. Sprouse: Say it, Cami. Petsch: Say it, girl. Mendes: “Word of my exploits serving Nick his comeuppance has seeped into the demimonde of mobsters and molls my father used to associate with.” [Everyone cheers and applauds.]

If you are wondering whether Barbie is a satire of a toy company’s capitalist ambitions, a searing indictment of the current fraught state of gender relations, a heartwarming if occasionally clichéd tribute to girl power, or a musical spectacle filled with earworms from Nicki Minaj and Dua Lipa, the answer is yes. All of the above. And then some.

Gerwig still can’t seem to believe she got away with making this version. “This movie is a goddamn miracle,” she says. She calls it a “surprising spicy margarita.” By the time you realize the salted rim has cayenne mixed in, it’s too late. “You can already taste the sweetness and you sort of go with the spice.”

Every single actor I spoke to cited Gerwig and the sharp script as the reason they joined the film. “I knew this was not going to shy away from the parts of Barbie that are more interesting but potentially a little bit more fraught,” says Hari Nef, who plays a doctor Barbie. “The contemporary history of feminism and body positivity—there are questions of how Barbie can fit into all of that.”

At one point Richard Dickson, COO and president of Mattel, says he took a flight to the London set to argue with Gerwig and Robbie over a particular scene, which he felt was off-brand. Dickson dials up his natural boyish exuberance, imitating himself righteously marching off the plane to meet them. But Gerwig and Robbie performed the scene for him and changed his mind. “When you look on the page, the nuance isn’t there, the delivery isn’t there,” explains Robbie.

Robbie had laid the groundwork for this with Mattel’s CEO when she met with him in 2018 in the hopes that LuckyChap could take on the Barbie project. “In that very first meeting, we impressed upon Ynon we are going to honor the legacy of your brand, but if we don’t acknowledge certain things—if we don’t say it, someone else is going to say it,” she says. “So you might as well be a part of that conversation.”

“The most important transition was from being a toy-manufacturing company that was making items to becoming an IP company that is managing franchises,” he says. It’s a particularly prescient strategy at a moment when superhero fatigue has set in and studios are desperate to find new intellectual property with a built-in fan base—from Super Mario Bros. to Dungeons & Dragons.

Issa Rae, 38, who plays President Barbie, argues that the entire point of the film is to portray a world in which there isn’t a singular ideal. “My worry was that it was going to feel too white feminist-y, but I think that it’s self-aware,” she says. “Barbie Land is perfect, right? It represents perfection. So if perfection is just a bunch of white Barbies, I don’t know that anybody can get on board with that.”

Still, in an interview for this story, Brenner called Gerwig’s film “not a feminist movie,” a sentiment echoed by other Mattel executives I spoke with. It was a striking contrast to my interpretation of the film and conversations with many of the actors, who used that term unprompted to describe the script. When I relay Mattel’s words to Robbie, she raises an eyebrow. “Who said that?” she asks then sighs. “It’s not that it is or it isn’t. It’s a movie. It’s a movie that’s got so much in it.” The bigger point, Robbie impresses upon me, is “we’re in on the joke. This isn’t a Barbie puff piece.”

Gerwig’s team built an entire neighborhood made up of Dream Houses that were missing walls. The actors had to be secured by wires so they wouldn’t topple off the second floors. The skies and clouds in the background were hand-painted to render a playroom-like quality, as was much of the rest of the set.

But McKinnon, 39, watched her sister and friends play with the dolls: they cut Barbie’s hair, drew on her face, and even set her on fire. She theorizes, “They were externalizing how they felt, and they felt different.” So when Gerwig offered McKinnon the role of Weird Barbie, a doll that’s been played with a little too aggressively in the real world, she jumped at the chance. McKinnon was impressed by the way the script dealt with girls’ complicated attachments to the doll. “It comments honestly about the positive and negative feelings,” she says. “It’s an incisive cultural critique.”

“We’re looking to create movies that become cultural events,” Kreiz says, and to do that Mattel needs visionaries to produce something more intriguing than a toy ad. “If you can excite filmmakers like Greta and Noah to embrace the opportunity and have creative freedom, you can have a real impact.”