Art Scraps features by Bo Anderson and Kathleen Harper, photos courtesy of Juneau Douglas City Museum
The Juneau-Douglas City Museum is gearing up for Gallery Walk tonight, featuring the opening of a new exhibition, “Art Scraps.”
Museum Director Beth Weigel said the annual downtown celebration will include a trolley stop at the Capitol, making it easy for visitors to drop into the museum and explore the new show by Juneau artists Bo Anderson and Kathleen Harper.
“It’s just so fun and whimsical.” She said, “There’s lots of pieces for sale, and it’s just going to be a super fun exhibit and opportunity at the City Museum.”
Anderson and Harper, partners in life as well as in art, said the exhibit grew out of both artists’ shared love of repurposing found materials.
“I will have piles of random things sitting in my house and go, what if I did this, with this material, and turn it into something completely different and new.” Said Harper.
Anderson and Harper met at Perseverance Theater.
“We met 21 years ago, Kathleen was a props master and a stage manager, and I was a young carpenter,” Anderson said.
Bo Anderson is known for his works that gained a local following through the museum’s free little art gallery.
“He was very famous in our free little art gallery for a long time. He kind of took that on as one of his passions during covid.” said Weigel, “So people have come to know his little sketches.”
The museum will also serve as a drop-off site for the Southeast Alaska Food Bank during Gallery Walk. Visitors are encouraged to bring canned goods and other nonperishable items.
“We’ve got some milk crates there, and you can bring in cans of food.” Weigel said, “It’ll be easy just to carry that along in your purse on the trolley when you come up and drop that into the containers, and then we send that off to the Southeast Alaska Food Bank, because everybody’s wanting to make sure that we get everybody fed this holiday season.”
Along with Art Scraps, both artists will lead workshops in December. Anderson will host a drop-in “sketch with Bo” session on Dec. 6, and Harper will teach participants how to craft roses from coffee filters on Dec. 20.
Gallery Walk festivities at the museum run from 4:30 to 7 p.m. tonight.
Parking will also be easier in the downtown core this evening, paid parking downtown will not be enforced and enforcement will end at 3 p.m. for the evening.
On-street parking will not be limited to two hours, and free parking will be offered at the Shopper’s Lot, the North Franklin Lot, the Downtown Transportation Center Garage, the Marine Parking Garage, the Whittier Lot and the South Franklin Docks & Harbors lots.
A commercial bowpicker is seen headed out of the Cordova harbor for a salmon fishing opener in June 2024 (Photo by Corinne Smith)
One of Alaska’s smallest telecommunications companies is about to provide a critical backup for the entire state.
On Wednesday, Cordova Telecom Cooperative and GCI announced a partnership to lay an undersea fiber optic cable from Juneau to Cordova and a second cable from Cordova to Seward.
When open for service in fall 2027, the two cables will provide high-speed internet to small communities in Prince William Sound and northern Southeast Alaska.
The development matters to the rest of the state as well, because when combined, they will provide a route for internet traffic between the Railbelt and Outside. Currently, four undersea cables through the Gulf of Alaska are the principal routes for internet and phone traffic between Alaska and the rest of the world.
Matanuska Telecom Association opened the state’s first overland fiber connection in 2020 as an alternative, and the new route will give the state another redundant option, said Cordova Telecom CEO Jeremiah Beckett.
“With what we’ve built out, scalability wise, we could put all the current Alaska traffic on our network if needed,” Beckett said.
This map, provided by Cordova Telecom Cooperative, shows the route of the proposed FISH in SEAK cable that will come online in fall 2027. Cordova’s existing fiber route is shown in green. (Image courtesy Cordova Telecom Cooperative)
While satellite internet services like Starlink have transformed life in rural Alaska, ground-based fiber internet remains the backbone of worldwide telecommunications, delivering service faster and in volumes that satellites can’t provide.
“It’s kind of like rural communities that don’t have the ferry,” Beckett said. “Places without fiber don’t have the same access that folks with fiber do. So this is really to help connect those rural areas and give them the same access to the digital economy and marketplace as the rest of the world.”
Despite their advantages, fiber-optic cables can be vulnerable.
“Up north, it’s ice scouring … and in our area, it’s typically ship anchors and earthquakes,” Beckett said.
Alaskans have become intimately familiar with the consequences of broken cables in recent years.
Northern and northwest Alaska are particularly familiar: Quintillion’s fiber-optic cable has been severed three times in two years. The latest break wasn’t fixed for more than seven months because sea ice precluded repairs. That caused widespread problems in areas served by the cable.
In March, a break in a subsea cable left the Alaska Legislature to do business on paper for a day and knocked out both cellphone and internet service for much of Juneau. Juneau had alternatives; a temporary fix was in place within days.
Adding a backup fiber route reduces the odds of blackouts like those. Currently, Cordova is served by a single undersea fiber line through Prince William Sound to Valdez.
When the project is complete, internet and phone traffic will have three possible routes: north, west, and east.
The two cables will cost roughly $88 million combined, according to figures provided by Beckett, and the project is principally funded through two federal grants. Cordova Telecom is paying for part of the project, as is GCI, which will be what Beckett calls an “anchor tenant and partner.”
“It was a good matchup for both of our long-term goals,” he said.
In a prepared statement, GCI senior vice president Billy Wailand praised the plan, which is formally known as Fiber Internet Serving Homes in Southeast Alaska, or FISH in SEAK.
“Critical state services require network diversity,” he said. “GCI turned up the first subsea cable to Alaska in 1999 and landed a second diverse fiber in 2008. We are thrilled to partner with CTC on its FISH in SEAK project, which includes a next-generation cable that ensures Alaska and its capital city continue to benefit from the newest technologies and adds another crucial layer of redundancy to the network.”
Communities along the cable route will see huge changes, Beckett said. Residents of Pelican on Chichagof Island in Southeast Alaska, who use boardwalks instead of roads and four-wheelers instead of cars, will be able to get fiber internet access directly to their homes.
The island village of Chenega in Prince William Sound, which has about 50 year-round residents, likewise will have new access to fiber internet.
Alaska’s Lost Coast, between Glacier Bay and Yakutat, could be dotted with cellphone towers.
Beckett, who grew up in Cordova, returned to the town with his spouse 12 years ago, “basically when Cordova got its subsea fiber,” he said. “We were both teleworkers, and that created the opportunity for us to move back to Alaska, essentially.”
Since then, he’s seen internet service improve and has become head of his local telecom, which has just 20 employees.
Because it’s a cooperative, it’s run as a nonprofit, he said. That means the telecom’s goal is to deliver faster service and low rates, not necessarily generate a profit.
In Yakutat, “a few years ago, you couldn’t get cell service anywhere,” Beckett said.
“We’ve upgraded the cell service there to 4G and outside of the fishermen complaining because their wives can get hold of them, it was a huge boost for the community,” he said.
“If someone gets hurt, they can call the paramedics and not have to drive 20 miles before they get to service. … It’s giving people reasons to think about moving home, because it’s one less inhibitor to be back in Alaska,” Beckett said.
“Yakutat actually got a new clinic a couple years ago, and then with this, I think they’re going to see some good growth. Everyone likes core services, right?”
Americans tend to look to the Constitution to assess whether the nation is living up to its founding principles when navigating major social and political issues.
But it is the declaration, signed on July 4, 1776, that declares the nation’s credo, that “all men are created equal.”
Throughout history, Americans have turned to the declaration for guidance about what the nation should stand for.
As a historian of the United States and the coordinator for the University of Richmond’s Forging a New Nation initiative, which commemorates the Declaration of Independence’s 250th anniversary, I have been thinking a lot about this phenomenon.
Particularly during times of social and political upheaval, Americans have sought out the Declaration of Independence when they wanted to remedy contemporary problems and create new visions for the country’s future. Many of the nation’s greatest leaders have praised and memorialized its rhetoric and ideas in the promotion of their own.
In his 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Frederick Douglass, the formerly enslaved abolitionist, used the declaration to set a standard for American society. As a Black American, Douglass insisted he was “not included within the pale” who enjoyed the “inalienable rights” articulated in the declaration.
Nonetheless, the “great principles of the Declaration” gave Douglass hope and cause for optimism. He predicted that the “glorious hour” would soon arrive when all Americans would be defined “by equal birth.”
Conceived in liberty
A photo by Mathew Brady of Abraham Lincoln – center, bareheaded – giving the Gettysburg Address in 1863. Bettman/Getty Images
Abraham Lincoln denounced the decision and countered by defining a more capacious view of American freedom based on the declaration.
Lincoln told one audience that Thomas Jefferson and the signers of the declaration “set up a standard maxim for free society,” which they “intended to include all men” and to be “constantly looked to, constantly labored for.”
Their goal, Lincoln said, was “augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”
As civil war ravaged the country and claimed thousands of American lives, Lincoln again drew on the declaration to articulate a vision for the country as president.
The nation, he said, was undergoing a “new birth of freedom” as it waged war on slavery and defended its government against domestic rebellion.
Self-evident truth
Seventy years later, the declaration provided inspiration for President Franklin D. Roosevelt as he steered the nation through a crippling economic depression and the run-up to a world war. Roosevelt advocated for building America’s first social safety net by drawing on the declaration.
Reflecting Roosevelt’s aims, the 1936 Democratic Party platform illustrated this rhetorical strategy, borrowing from the declaration at its very beginning: “We hold this truth to be self evident – that government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens.”
During his 1944 State of the Union Address, Roosevelt said the nation was built on the rights embedded in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But, he argued, “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”
All created equal
In his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King Jr. drew on the declaration to define America’s promises to all its citizens.
Amid the political and social upheaval of the 1960s, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. drew directly and self-consciously on the declaration.
In his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, King defined an America that “guaranteed unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to its citizens.
Though the nation had “defaulted on this promissory note insofar as its citizens of color are concerned,” King said, the declaration still offered him hope: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.”
With the declaration’s anniversary coming up at a time when so much about contemporary society and politics are being contested, Americans may well return once again to this founding document to define themselves as a people and a nation.
Graeme Mack does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal meet voters to go door-knocking in Jackson Heights on Sept. 14, 2025.Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images
Accounts of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for New York City mayor have highlighted both his online presence and his ground game.
Mamdani won the general election with 50.4% of the vote, a larger share than was predicted by most polls, and his get-out-the-vote campaign has received some of the credit. Mamdani claims that his campaign had over 100,000 volunteers knocking on doors across New York City.
This focus on on-the-ground mobilization stands out given the increasing attention devoted to online campaigning over the past 15 years.
Particularly during that time period, online platforms have been a major focus of political campaigns and campaign research. Targeted advertising and new media strategies are increasingly viewed as central to campaign success. So is coverage of the campaign by legacy and social media more generally.
Moreover, solid empirical evidence of the effectiveness of door-to-door canvassing is limited. Recent work finds very few effects of in-person canvassing, except in very specific circumstances. One recent paper suggests that door-to-door canvassing by the candidate can make a difference to election outcomes. But in a race in New York City, it is not likely that Mamdani himself was able to reach enough voters to make a difference.
How much did Mamdani’s ground game contribute to his victory? As a political communication scholar, I know that assessing the impact of different methods used by political campaigns is difficult – in part because political campaigns include multiple lines of communication.
‘Hybrid’ campaigns
No campaign exists in isolation — nearly every candidate’s campaign occurs alongside opposing candidates’ campaigns. The effects of one campaign are often masked by the countering effects of the other.
The size of a campaign on one platform also tends to be correlated with the size of that candidate’s campaign on other platforms. When television advertising increases alongside social media advertising and door-to-door canvassing, identifying the effects of any single platform can be difficult.
Clever research designs are in some instances able to identify effects. These generally find that the impact of not just door-knocking but also ads and online advertising can be relatively limited.
In the modern technological environment, the impact of any single aspect of a campaign may be especially difficult to assess. Campaigning increasingly occurs in what researchers have called a “hybrid media” environment. Campaigns are waged in person, on the news and across multiple social media.
Each of these platforms comes with different advantages and disadvantages. Each also prioritizes different kinds of information.
Plainly stating your policy platform may work for coverage of a campaign stop on the evening news. But if you want that policy to go viral on TikTok, then you may need to add a dance – or an influencer.
Find volunteers online, send them knocking
Candidates have increasingly recognized the need to tailor messages for different communication platforms, such as television ads, Facebook posts and TikToks, building hybrid campaigns that attempt to spread a message across multiple, different spaces.
This interactivity across platforms has been especially evident in postelection assessments of the Mamdani campaign. His social media campaign was adept at producing the kinds of content that attract attention online. That campaign also appears to have been able to convert online engagement into real-world activism, including door-to-door canvassing.
There have been growing concerns among academics and campaign organizers about “slacktivism” — activism that amounts to one or two clicks online but nothing more. One worry is that a quick online endorsement may in some instances give people a sense that they have done their share and limit more active forms of engagement. The Mamdani campaign appears to have overcome this problem, at least in part.
But 100,000 people knocking on doors probably does not happen without the success of an online campaign. Finding and mobilizing campaigners was one important focus of Mamdani’s engagement online, after all.
Do it yourself − then repeat on socials
In-person campaigning by Mamdani, on the street and in the taxi line, is almost certainly made more effective through circulation on Instagram and TikTok.
Using mass media to broadcast campaign stops is not new, of course.
The construction of campaign stops that produce good social media content is becoming more common, however. The ways in which campaigns unfold in person are increasingly intertwined with the way they unfold online.
In this way, the Mamdani campaign may have been a textbook example of a modern hybrid campaign and an illustration of the coevolution of digital and on-the-ground campaigning.
To be clear, the success of the Mamdani campaign is probably not about his online presence or his ground game, but both at the same time.
Stuart Soroka research has been funded from the National Science Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Reducing the visibility of polarizing content in social media feeds can measurably lower partisan animosity. To come up with this finding, my colleagues and I developed a method that let us alter the ranking of people’s feeds, previously something only the social media companies could do.
Reranking social media feeds to reduce exposure to posts expressing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity affected people’s emotions and their views of people with opposing political views.
I’m a computer scientist who studies social computing, artificial intelligence and the web. Because only social media platforms can modify their algorithms, we developed and released an open-source web tool that allowed us to rerank the feeds of consenting participants on X, formerly Twitter, in real time.
Drawing on social science theory, we used a large language model to identify posts likely to polarize people, such as those advocating political violence or calling for the imprisonment of members of the opposing party. These posts were not removed; they were simply ranked lower, requiring users to scroll further to see them. This reduced the number of those posts users saw.
We ran this experiment for 10 days in the weeks before the 2024 U.S. presidential election. We found that reducing exposure to polarizing content measurably improved participants’ feelings toward people from the opposing party and reduced their negative emotions while scrolling their feed. Importantly, these effects were similar across political affiliations, suggesting that the intervention benefits users regardless of their political party.
This ‘60 Minutes’ segment covers how divisive social media posts get more traction than neutral posts.
Why it matters
A common misconception is that people must choose between two extremes: engagement-based algorithms or purely chronological feeds. In reality, there is a wide spectrum of intermediate approaches depending on what they are optimized to do.
Feed algorithms are typically optimized to capture your attention, and as a result, they have a significant impact on your attitudes, moods and perceptions of others. For this reason, there is an urgent need for frameworks that enable independent researchers to test new approaches under realistic conditions.
Our work offers a path forward, showing how researchers can study and prototype alternative algorithms at scale, and it demonstrates that, thanks to large language models, platforms finally have the technical means to detect polarizing content that can affect their users’ democratic attitudes.
What other research is being done in this field
Testing the impact of alternative feed algorithms on live platforms is difficult, and such studies have only recently increased in number.
For instance, a recent collaboration between academics and Meta found that changing the algorithmic feed to a chronological one was not sufficient to show an impact on polarization. A related effort, the Prosocial Ranking Challenge led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, explores ranking alternatives across multiple platforms to promote beneficial social outcomes.
At the same time, the progress in large language model development enables richer ways to model how people think, feel and interact with others. We are seeing growing interest in giving users more control, allowing people to decide what principles should guide what they see in their feeds – for example the Alexandria library of pluralistic values and the Bonsai feed reranking system. Social media platforms, including Bluesky and X, are heading this way, as well.
What’s next
This study represents our first step toward designing algorithms that are aware of their potential social impact. Many questions remain open.
We plan to investigate the long-term effects of these interventions and test new ranking objectives to address other risks to online well-being, such as mental health and life satisfaction. Future work will explore how to balance multiple goals, such as cultural context, personal values and user control, to create online spaces that better support healthy social and civic interaction.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
This research was partially supported by a Hoffman-Yee grant from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
News reports about a U.S. military attack on a boat in the Caribbean allegedly carrying drugs have raised critical questions about the military campaign against drug smugglers being carried out by the Trump administration in that region.
Among them: whether Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth or others face criminal liability for any of the attacks. Those attacks killed people alleged to have been involved in illegal narcotics trafficking.
But as a military law scholar who spent 20 years as a lawyer and judge in the U.S. Air Force, I know that there aren’t enough facts known yet to determine who is responsible for what. There are five investigative mechanisms that could be used to determine the facts and whether there is criminal liability on the part of both senior civilian officials and military members involved in the now extensively reported second strike on the suspected drug boat that resulted in the deaths of civilians.
There are two caveats to this analysis. The first is that the Constitution says a person is to be presumed innocent before being proved guilty. The second is that the story from the White House and the Pentagon has changed over time.
Navy Adm. Frank Bradley, center, arrives for a closed-door classified meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill on Dec. 4, 2025. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Congressional committees investigate
The first investigative mechanism is the Congress itself.
Multiple committees examined the country’s lack of preparedness preceding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and other military installations in 1941.
But congressional investigations can be highly political. Even during the My Lai investigation, at least one member of the House, Mendel Rivers, a South Carolina Democrat who was at that time chairman of the Committee on Armed Services, attempted to shield officers in the chain of command. There is little reason to believe that a current investigation, conducted by a dramatically polarized Congress, will be free of partisan politics.
Attorney general investigates
A second means of investigating is for the U.S. attorney general to preliminarily conclude that crimes have been committed and to convene a grand jury to investigate. A federal grand jury is a constitutional body consisting of ordinary adult citizens. Its operations are governed by the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, and its role is to investigate whether there is probable cause to determine that a person has violated the criminal laws.
No member of the president’s administration is immune from the criminal laws of the country, with the exception of the president himself when he has acted in the capacity of president or commander in chief. The Supreme Court in 2024 determined that the president is mostly immune from prosecution under criminal law.
But I believe this type of investigation is unlikely. That’s because members of the administration have argued that their actions were legal and that the men killed in the second strike were continuing in their mission and posed a threat.
It is possible that during a congressional investigation one or more witnesses will be accused of lying under oath or accused of contempt.
Congress has the authority to hold individuals in contempt and fine and sentence them, but this is rare. Usually, Congress forwards the claim to the attorney general. Contempt of Congress is a federal misdemeanor offense, meaning a person cannot be sentenced to more than a year. Again, I believe it is unlikely that the attorney general would pursue a contempt charge in a federal court from these events.
Inspector general investigates
The Department of Defense’s inspector general can investigate allegations of wrongdoing in the department, and this includes the secretary. In the past, inspectors general have discovered criminal activity, written a publicly releasable report, and then a senior official was prosecuted.
The military can investigate its civilian members but cannot prosecute them. The Uniform Code of Military Justice does not apply to civilians. That includes the president and secretary of defense, even though they are at the pinnacle of the chain of command.
International courts investigate
Finally, an investigation could be mounted through international law as enforced by courts outside of the United States.
The Reagan administration’s response was that because other nations had disregarded the court, so too would the United States. No American official was ever held to account for the mining of Nicaragua’s main port or for the arming of rebels that led to the deaths of Nicaraguans.
It’s not clear which, if any, of these mechanisms will be used to hold accountable those who ordered and carried out the September 2025 operation in the Caribbean that killed two survivors of an earlier attack. What is clear is that the methods exist to find the facts – and make judgments based on them.
Joshua Kastenberg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Kim Kardashian described betrayal from ex-husband Kanye West as she detailed the 2016 Paris robbery.
Ye accused her of fabricating one of the worst moments of her life.
Earlier this year, Kim testified in Paris, finally getting to face the criminals who altered the course of her life.
She hopes that the people who falsely claimed that she faked her own robbery understand how cruel their lies were.
On ‘The Kardashians,’ Kim Kardashian repeatedly teared up while recalling the trauma of the 2016 Paris Robbery 9 years earlier. (Image Credit: Hulu)
Kim Kardashian has been reliving her harrowing robbery for a decade
The Thursday, December 4 episode of The Kardashians had a mostly somber tome.
Kim Kardashian and her friends and family walked listeners through the trauma and horror of the 2016 robbery.
Armed criminals tied her up and stole about $6 million in jewelry from her along with two phones.
As we previously reported, Kim testified in court his year — nine years after the horrifying crime.
On the stand and, now, on The Kardashians, Kim described how she feared that they would rape and kill her during the course of the crime. She prayed that she would live to see her children again.
‘The Kardashians’ featured throwback footage of Kim Kardashian in Paris prior to the 2016 robbery. (Image Credit: Hulu)
Justice should not take nearly a decade.
But, as Kim pointed out, a series of events took place after the robbers escaped on bicycles.
First, authorities spent years gathering evidence. You wouldn’t want to take criminal scum to trial without the evidence to convict them, after all.
Then, the COVID-19 pandemic and the rush of preparations for the 2024 Paris Olympics ground the wheels of justice to, if not a halt, then a crawl.
But Kim got her chance to detail the events in court. The court heard testimony from other witnesses, and even from the criminals themselves. That felt cathartic for Kim — but also strangely vindicating.
Almost a decade later, Kim Kardashian told the camera how eager she was to face her robbers in court. (Image Credit: Hulu)
Kanye West accused Kim Kardashian of faking her robbery?
“My ex-husband had said, ‘And you faked your robbery for a TV show,’” Kim Kardashian revealed, referring to but not actually naming Kanye West.
She repeatedly teared up, her voice breaking as she recalled her now-disgraced ex claiming that this traumatic moment in her life was a hoax “in front of all these people.”
Kim expressed that Ye’s disbelief felt like a “knife to my heart” because this was not some random conspiracy theorist. This was her husband.
“Just to think that someone wouldn’t believe you,” she remarked.
She lamented that this came from someone “that’s so close to you, that should know you, that should know how much that affected your life — it just really bothered me.”
Like the rest of her family, Khloe Kardashian expressed outrage and disgust at people who accused her sister of fabricating the 2016 robbery. (Image Credit: Hulu)
“You don’t know who I am,” Kim then declared. And her family backed her up.
Kanye was not the only person to make unfounded and unreasonable claims that her robbery was a hoax.
Kim pointed to examples of famous media personalities who made light of this harrowing ordeal — or straight-up claimed that it was false.
“See, guys? It was real,” Kim stated, noting that the robbers themselves and the court all backed up that it had happened.
Unfortunately, some people will not believe simple truths even when the evidence is staring them in the face. Even when the alternatives are unreasonable and absurd. Actually, Kim knows all about that.
On ‘The Kardashians,’ Kim Kardashian likened her ex-husband’s unfounded accusation to a “knife to my heart.” (Image Credit: Hulu)
Why would Ye say such a thing?
Here’s the thing about Kanye West (and Kim Kardashian already knows this): he just says things.
Part of it is that Ye’s unmedicated mental illness makes him susceptible to misinformation and lowers his impulse control. Part of it is that he has chosen to be a bad person. Yes, two things can be true.
Kim has no motive to fake a robbery. Paris police would have discovered it if she had. The robbers would not be speaking about their own crimes if it had been fake.
Also, not to put too fine of a point on it, but have you seen All’s Fair or even heard about it? We don’t need to worry about Kim’s acting skills pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes.
By the sound of it, Robyn Brown is really sick of living alone with Kody Brown.
Not that we can blame her.
On this Sunday’s brand new episode of Sister Wives, a producer will pose an unexpected question in Robyn’s direction:
How would you react if one of the ex-wives wanted to return?
(TLC)
To be clear, as far as we know, none of Kody Brown’s former spouses — Christine, Meri or Janelle — are possibly thinking of coming back to the family.
This was just a theoretical for Robyn to consider.
“I would be very surprised. I don’t want to even answer this because I’m just like …” Robyn responded, trailing off and actually growing emotional over the mere possibility.
“[This is] so making me sad right now,” she went on.
“Because you, like, just open[ed] this little portal of hope and I’m just like, I didn’t even think of that. And now I’m just like, what if? And I’m going down that road.”
Speaking to the confessional camera, Robyn Brown explains polygamist protocols to ‘Sister Wives’ viewers. (Image Credit: TLC)
Yes, hope.
Robyn has never been shy about the fact that she wants to be part of a polygamous family. There was even chatter at some point that she might divorce Kody and look for a better situation.
In a clip posted by Us Weekly from the upcoming episode, an emotional Robyn tries to shake off the idea of any sort of reunion, admitting:
“I can’t. I can’t. I got to move away from that because I’ll fall apart and I can’t be on this set.”
After a few more minutes, Robyn tells the cameras, “Hope is dangerous sometimes,” hinting that even with her dreams of being a united family, she doesn’t want to think about that hypothetical scenario.
Robyn and Kody Brown pose here for a TLC promotional shot. (TLC)
Christine, of course, left Kody in November 2021… she was then followed by Janelle and Meri, all of whom seem VERY happy without their ex in their lives.
Robyn spiritually exchanged vows with Kody in 2010, becoming his fourth wife.
In 2014, Kody divorced Meri so he could legally marry Robyn and adopt her three children from a prior marriage.
All this time later, only Robyn remains.
(TLC)
And while she may sound sentimental over the loss of her sister wives, Robyn doesn’t sound like she misses these women as individuals.
“I think there’s some hurt feelings and misunderstandings and some influencing that’s been happening,” Robyn recently said of Kody no longer being close to his adult kids. “Some pretty intense influencing.”
As you can see, she’s blaming the mothers of those kids for this disconnect.
“I don’t think parents actually completely realize how much little things they say actually influence the way their children think about the other parent,” Robyn added in a confessional. “And in plural marriage, Dad’s not around the same amount as Mom.”
So this holiday season has the potential to be a tough one for the couple’s three kids — after all, it’s the first that they won’t be spending with both parents under one roof.
But while Jessica and her kids might have had a difficult 2025, they’re not letting anything put a damper on their holiday celebrations!
Yes, Jessica shared a rare photo of all three of her children on Thursday.
And she captioned the post with news that the holiday season is in full swing in the Simpson household.
“Christmas time is here! What the month of December brings to my kiddos has always been about the genuine feelings of love, excitement, hope, happiness, grace and pure JOY!” Jess wrote in her caption.
“Wishin’ you and yours all the many blessings this month has to offer y’all’s hearts,” she added.
Jessica Simpson visits SiriusXM Studios for SiriusXM’s Town Hall with Jessica Simpson hosted by Andy Cohen on February 05, 2020 in New York City. (Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images for SiriusXM)
Yes, we think it’s safe to say that spirits out merry and bright among Jess and her brood. And with good reason!
Sure, the year brought about an irreparable rift in her marriage, but insiders say that was a long time coming (and the end of a marriage isn’t always a bad thing, necessarily).
Aside from that unfortunate business, the year was a pretty good one for Jessica.
She marked the occasion with a heartfelt Instagram post that offered words of encouragement to fans who might be struggling with addiction.
Jessica Simpson attends the 37th Annual Footwear News Achievement Awards at Cipriani South Street on November 29, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images)
And that wasn’t Simpson’s only major accomplishment in the past 12 months.
