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‘Lorne’ Review: The mysterious mad genius behind ‘SNL’ takes center stage in laugh-out-loud documentary

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“Remember when ‘SNL’ used to be good?”

That’s a question you’ve probably asked yourself at one point or another — perhaps even now. “Saturday Night Live” has certainly gone through its ups and downs across the decades, miraculously reaching its 50th anniversary last year.

One man is truly responsible for that: the show’s creator and executive producer, Lorne Michaels.

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The 81-year-old Canadian, who has worked on a whopping 46 seasons of the long-running NBC sketch comedy show, rarely gives interviews but approaching the milestone season was talked into being the subject of a documentary by Oscar-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville (“20 Feet from Stardom,” “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”).

Neville was given unprecedented access to Michaels over a two-year period, capturing the behind-the-scenes chaos that goes into every show, seeing him dining at his go-to Italian spot in New York City, even visiting his farm and blueberry field in Maine, a secluded getaway residence a select few have been invited to. The end result is “Lorne.”

What’s remarkable about “Lorne” is how so many people who were interviewed — many of whom have worked with him for decades — don’t really know Michaels. As “SNL” alum Maya Rudolph tells Neville there’s “folklore” that people hear about him in the hallways of Studio 8H. Or Kristen Wiig, who says, “He has this man-behind-the-curtain mystique about him.” Even Tina Fey downplays her coziness with him, and she worked with him on “SNL” and “30 Rock.” Cast members of past and present laugh about how intimidating their mentor can be and his bizarre work habits like kicking off the workday at 4:30 pm since he doesn’t wake up til noon.

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“Lorne” is stacked with A-list interviewees including Adam Sandler, Conan O’Brien, Chris Rock, Lily Tomlin, Martin Short, Paul Simon, Candice Bergen, Alec Baldwin, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, Bill Hader, Andy Sandberg, John Mulaney, Bowen Yang, Fred Armisen, Mike Myers and Dana Carvey. And that’s not even counting the various hosts Neville was able to catch working behind the scenes like Timothée Chalamet, Emma Stone, Shane Gillis and Jake Gyllenhaal. We even get to hear from Michaels’ longtime “fish guy.”

The documentary, narrated with humor by “SNL” alum Chris Parnell, packs a lot in 100 minutes. It benefits from a treasure trove of source material as many classic sketches are sprinkled throughout. But it doesn’t hurt to also be interviewing more than two dozen comedians and comedy writers who spend most of the time cracking jokes. It’s difficult to think of a documentary funnier than “Lorne.”

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While the film puts emphasis on the good times, it also revisits the show’s rough patches. But it ultimately persevered time and time again. It reinvents itself.

At the center of this documentary is the question, “Who is Lorne Michaels?” Whether it answers the question is up for debate, but one “SNL” historian had a good theory.

“The show is an X-ray of Lorne,” he said.

Maybe he’s right. There wouldn’t be a “Saturday Night Live” without Lorne. He lives and breathes “SNL.” And the show will truly face uncharted territory once he retires. It is widely believed, even those in his orbit, that NBC will take a chainsaw to the show’s hugely bloated budget, something the network wouldn’t dare touch with Lorne around.

But judging by this film, Lorne doesn’t seem to be slowing down just yet. Conan O’Brien calls him the “ultimate show business survivor, noting, “He’s still here and 100 executives are not.”

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Whether you love or hate “SNL” in its current form, there’s no denying the show’s impact on American culture, so a glimpse of the mastermind behind it all is warranted. “Lorne” is a laugh-out-loud stroll down memory lane for anyone who appreciate Michaels’ contribution to comedy.

“Lorne” is rated R for language and a sexual reference. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes. In theaters now.

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Top House Republican rips Omar as ‘complete fraud’ amid financial disclosure controversy

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Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn., sharply criticized “Squad” Rep. Ilhan Omar as a “complete fraud” on Saturday, while discussing her criticism of fraud investigations and scrutiny over a major discrepancy in her financial disclosures.

“Not only should her accountant be fired, but that girl should be fired and she does not deserve to be in Congress,” Emmer told “The Big Weekend Show.”

“Quite frankly, if she is discovered to be involved in any of this fraud personally, that she benefited from it, even by her actions of promoting it and trying to resist investigations, she should be held accountable to the fullest extent,” he added.

Emmer’s remarks specifically zeroed in on the controversy surrounding Omar’s financial disclosures, which recently drew scrutiny after a filing appeared to dramatically overstate her net worth.

TOM EMMER CALLS FOR TIM WALZ, KEITH ELLISON TO ‘SERVE JAIL TIME’ IF FRAUD COVERUP ALLEGATIONS ARE TRUE

Omar’s office has denied that she is a millionaire and blamed the discrepancy on a major accounting error after a congressional financial disclosure listed her assets as high as $30 million, prompting questions from Republicans and a congressional watchdog.

An amended filing reviewed by The Wall Street Journal shows Omar and her husband’s assets were between $18,004 and $95,000, a sharp drop from an earlier disclosure that estimated their holdings between $6 million and $30 million.

“The amended disclosure confirms what we’ve said all along: The congresswoman is not a millionaire,” Omar spokesperson Jacklyn Rogers told the Journal, adding that the filing was corrected “as soon as the discrepancy was identified.”

ILHAN OMAR’S OFFICE SAYS SHE’S ‘NOT A MILLIONAIRE’ AFTER $30M FILING REVISED TO UNDER $100K: REPORT

Fox News Digital previously reached out to Omar’s office for additional comment on the matter but did not hear back.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., similarly criticized Omar during an appearance Sunday, telling “Fox & Friends Weekend” that he has been pushing the House Ethics Committee to investigate the matter.

“We’re not supposed to do that [investigate it] on the Oversight Committee, but because she’s a person of interest in the Somali fraud, I’ve been trying to get that,” Comer said.

“Now that this financial disclosure form has been changed, I think the Ethics Committee has a lot of questions for her, and we’re going to continue to push them to make sure that she has to answer them.”

Fox News’ Michael Dorgan contributed to this report.

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Cancer tied to woman’s vaping habit since age 15 as she’s now given just months to live

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A young woman who started vaping at the age of 15 has been given just 18 months to live — after being diagnosed with lung cancer in her early 20s. 

Kayley Boda, 22, of Manchester, in the United Kingdom, was engaging in heavy vaping on a regular basis when she started coughing up a brown substance with “grainy bits” in it in January 2025, news agency SWNS reported. 

The retail assistant said doctors turned her away eight times, telling her she had a chest infection — until she began coughing up blood.    

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After seven biopsies, Boda was diagnosed with lung cancer. She underwent surgery to remove the lower lobe of her right lung, as well as chemotherapy — and in February 2026, got the all-clear, the same source reported.

Two months later, though, doctors said the cancer had come back in the pleural lining. Now she’s been given 18 months to live.

The young woman has now issued a warning to others to be aware of the dangers of vaping.

Boda said she smoked a bit as a young teenager. She took up vaping after that. 

Then, “a few months after I switched from reusable vapes to disposable ones, I started coughing up brown, grainy mucus,” as SWNS reported.

TOURISTS MAY FACE STEEP FINES AND JAIL TIME FOR VAPES AT THIS VACATION HOT SPOT

“Doctors turned me away eight times with a chest infection…. Then I started coughing up blood, so they did an X-ray and found a shadow on my lung,” she added.

“They told me they were 99% sure, [since I was] so young, that it wasn’t cancer, so not to worry about it. When I got the results back, and they told me it was lung cancer, it felt so surreal.”

Boda said she was “very naive” before her diagnosis and thought that “something like this would never happen to me.”

She said that she had surgery to remove half of her right lung.

“After the surgery, I started chemo and I had a terrible reaction to it. I couldn’t lift my head up. I was throwing up blood. I was urinating blood. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep.”

VACATION HOT SPOT CRACKS DOWN ON VAPING WITH JAIL THREATS AND HEFTY FINES

She said that when she got the “all clear [in Feb. 2026], it felt amazing, but just two months later I was told the cancer had come back, and I have 18 months to live.”

She added, “I’m 22. This isn’t meant to happen to somebody my age.”

She blames her cancer on vaping, she said.  

“My symptoms started a few months after I started disposable vapes, and there’s no lung cancer in my family,” she said. “I haven’t vaped for three months, I’ve made my partner stop, I’ve made my mom stop, I’m urging all my friends to stop. Stay off the vapes,” she continued, “because they will catch up with you.”  

She said she’d been using reusable vapes since the age of 15 and began using disposable vapes a few months before her cancer symptoms started.

DISPOSABLE VAPES MORE TOXIC AND CARCINOGENIC THAN CIGARETTES, STUDY SHOWS

In November 2024, when she developed a rash all over her body, doctors said it could have been due to shingles, chicken pox or scabies, she told SWNS.    

“I got treated for all three, and nothing worked,” Boda said. “It got to the point where I was cutting myself from scratching so hard.” 

A few months after that, she began coughing up a dark brown mucus, with “grainy bits, the consistency of sugar, in it,” she said. When the coughing continued, she visited the doctor’s office, but was told it could be scarring from pneumonia or a chest infection, she also said.    

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It wasn’t until March 2025 that she began coughing up bright red blood. At that point, doctors gave her a chest X-ray and told her they’d found a shadow on her lower right lung.    

Over the next four months, she had seven biopsies as doctors took samples from the “shadow.” In August, when she went to get the results, she was told she had stage one lung cancer.

In September 2025, she had surgery to remove the lower lobe of her right lung, and the surrounding lymph nodes. During the surgery, doctors upstaged her cancer from stage one to stage three after finding cancer in six surrounding lymph nodes, she said.  

Following the surgery, Boda was unable to breathe properly and had to learn to walk all over again.  

After finishing chemotherapy in February 2026, Kayley was given the all clear, leaving her feeling elated. 

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However, just a month after that, she began experiencing extreme chest pains and was told by doctors she had a pleural effusion — a build-up of fluid in the lungs. She had the fluid removed, but when doctors tested it, they discovered her cancer had returned to the pleural lining of her lungs, giving her 18 months to live.  

“The oncologist said this is so rare, and usually something they see in patients that are 80 years old,” she said, as SWNS reported.  

Boda claimed that doctors were unable to pin her cancer to a specific cause — but told her that smoking and vaping definitely didn’t help.

Since her diagnosis, she has stopped and is urging others to stop, too.    

She’s hoping to raise the thousands of dollars needed for treatment to try to prolong her life, she said.  

Last year, Fox News Digital reported on the case of a Pennsylvania woman, 26, who said she vaped for just one year before her lungs collapsed. She was 22 when she took up the habit, she said in an interview. 

“Everybody warned me about it, but I didn’t listen — I wish that I did,” she said.

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Dr. David Campbell, clinical director and program director at Recover Together Bend in Oregon, told Fox News Digital at that time that signs of collapsed lungs include sharp chest or shoulder pain, shortness of breath and difficulty breathing.

Lung issues are just one of the many health issues linked to vaping, he warned. The habit can also increase the risk of heart disease and stroke, as well as exposure to harmful heavy metals.

Melissa Rudy of Fox News Digital contributed reporting. 

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How Trump panic broke the Democratic Party and fueled endless crisis politics

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Since 2016, Democrats have increasingly asked voters to rally not around a compelling vision of America’s future, but around fear of what happens if Donald Trump returns. Every election is cast as the final firewall before catastrophe. Democracy is on the ballot. Institutions are under siege. The country cannot survive another Trump term. Some of those warnings may be sincerely felt, and some may even be justified. But when politics becomes an endless sequence of alarms, something deeper begins to erode: a political party can forget how to talk about anything beyond the emergency itself.

In my work as a psychotherapist, I often see what happens when people organize their lives around preventing old pain from recurring. Their thinking narrows into vigilance, avoidance, and threat management. Instead of moving toward the life they want, they become consumed with making sure the worst thing never happens again. It’s a pattern I explore more broadly in my forthcoming book, Therapy Nation, and it offers a useful lens for understanding what has happened to Democratic politics.

For a decade now, the Democratic Party’s most emotionally coherent message has often been less about what kind of country it wants to build than what catastrophe must be prevented. That urgency has been politically useful. It unified some moderates, progressives, and uneasy independents who agreed on little except the need to stop Trump. But every election framed primarily as catastrophe prevention carries a hidden psychological cost: it trains voters to experience politics as permanent emergency management. A party can sound endlessly clear about the danger it sees while remaining frustratingly vague about the future it wants to create. Alarm can drive turnout, but it is far less effective at building durable allegiance.

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Politics can fall into the same trap. For Democrats, 2016 was more than an election loss. It shattered a story many in the party had quietly internalized: that demographic momentum, elite cultural influence, and even the arc of history itself were all moving in their direction. Hillary Clinton’s defeat disrupted a sense of inevitability that had shaped elite political assumptions for years. What followed was understandable. The central strategic question became how to prevent Trump’s return.

In the short term, that worked. Opposition created discipline. It supplied urgency, money, turnout, and a common emotional language for an otherwise unwieldy coalition. But fear is an unstable long-term motivator. Think of the patient who starts exercising only after his doctor warns that he is nearing a heart attack. Panic may get him into the gym, but that motivation often fades once the immediate danger recedes.

By contrast, the person training for a marathon is driven by something more durable: a vision of who he wants to become. The discipline lasts because it is attached to aspiration, identity, and a meaningful future. Political parties are no different. A movement can win moments by telling voters what must be stopped, but it builds lasting identity only by telling them what future is worth creating.

That is where Democrats now appear stuck. Their strongest unifying message too often remains the need to block Trump, defend institutions from him, or prevent a return to the disruption he represents. Those arguments can mobilize in the short run, but they do not answer the deeper democratic question voters eventually ask: what positive national story are you offering? You can see the problem in the way nearly every policy disagreement, court ruling, or election result is now narrated as existential collapse rather than ordinary democratic conflict.

DEMOCRATS ARE MAKING A CRITICAL MISTAKE — AND VOTERS ARE LETTING THEM KNOW

The long-term cost of reactive politics is identity. Fear creates short-term cohesion while postponing hard debates over class, immigration, public safety, economic aspiration, and cultural priorities. Those tensions do not disappear simply because a coalition remains emotionally united against a threat. They remain unresolved beneath the surface, only to return later with greater force. What fear suppresses, it never truly reconciles.

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That is why Democratic identity has felt unstable. When opposition becomes the organizing force, aspiration gets crowded out. Strategy turns defensive. The political imagination narrows. A movement that defines itself mainly by the threat it opposes eventually risks becoming psychologically captive to that threat.

Over time, the cost is fatigue and exhaustion. When politics becomes an endless sequence of alarms, citizens begin to lose faith in the possibility of collective progress itself. Democracy starts to feel less like self-government and more like perpetual triage. Cynicism hardens. Trust erodes.

Voters will rally around danger for a while, but eventually they want something more sustaining: direction, purpose, and a future they can actually see themselves living in. Fear may win elections, but vision builds governing identity.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM JONATHAN ALPERT

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