We know that President Donald Trump appreciates the finer points of a masculine physique.

He’s told rally audiences repeatedly in recent weeks about the primo posteriors of Republicans running for office. He’s praised their good looks, straight from “central casting.”

“I looked at his ass and then I looked at his legs,” Trump said of U.S. Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio. “I said his ass — it’s like a pile of muscle.”

“Rick Jackson’s a very handsome, distinguished, beautiful-looking guy,” he opined about the Florida gubernatorial candidate. 

I was concerned when news came Thursday that Trump had canceled a Saturday rally in Salina. Think of all the missed opportunities to ogle the glorious glutes of Kansas candidates! Surely they had good looks to spare.

But my worries were assuaged when Trump reconsidered and decided to visit Kansas on Sunday instead. Hopefully, we can hear his tributes to the macho men of the Sunflower State’s GOP. Allow me to offer a few pointers. As a gay man, I obviously have opinions about the attractiveness of various menfolk, but I have made a practice of keeping such opinions to myself.

The president has shown me a new way. (And thanks to photographer Thad Allton for capturing these stunning shots of top Republicans at Vice President JD Vance’s recent Topeka appearance.)

Look at this silver fox! U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall has a beautifully blended mane, mixing light and dark shades. Move lower on his face and you’ll glimpse blindingly white choppers. Some might say they’re a bit too much, but just as Marshall took a bite out of all the low-income Kansans he sued for not paying their medical bills, he’ll take a bite out of liberal priorities in Washington, D.C.

You might want to watch for his skin tone, though. In a recent Fox News appearance, Marshall appeared to be emulating the president’s pumpkin-hued face. We all know how attractive that is, of course, but we don’t want Marshall to just be a copycat.

What a meaty mountain of a man!

U.S. Rep. Derek Schmidt‘s campaign website declares that he’s “standing tall for Kansans,” and the towering 2nd District congressman has the height to spare. Schmidt served three terms as Kansas attorney general, but he fell short in challenging Gov. Laura Kelly’s reelection bid four years ago. No worries — the prettiest face doesn’t always win in the popularity contest.

Schmidt faces a surprisingly competitive race this year from Democrat Don Coover, but perhaps he has the standing to persuade voters.

Just look at that jawline! Kris Kobach might have lost his bid for U.S. Senate against Marshall back in 2020. He might have lost his bid for the Kansas governor’s race against Kelly back in 2018. But he hasn’t lost his bid for the squarest face of any Kansas politician.

If any single Kansas Republican could be described as being built out of LEGO bricks, that politician is Kris Kobach. Those sharp edges complement his sharp approach to immigration and crime. They don’t necessarily reflect the sharpest legal mind, though.

He also really likes guns, so look for his pin-up calendar any day now.

We’ve saved the dreamiest for last.

Republican Senate President Ty Masterson is a vision of well-oiled brilliance. First off, look at that pompadour. It’s a pompadour that says: “It doesn’t matter how much I do at my Wichita State University ‘GoCreate’ director job, my style sense gets me through.”

Second, look at that snazzy suit. Always well-tailored, Masterson has been a vision on two legs at the Kansas Statehouse for years. If the polling is to be believed, he might soon bring that incendiary hotness to Cedar Crest.

I kid, of course.

Trump, 80, may enjoy verbally caressing the highs and lows of younger candidates’ bodies (as well as the derriere of Trinidad-born rapper Nicki Minaj). Kansas has been blessed with a bountiful harvest of buff hopefuls. But does any of that really serve our cities and towns and farms? Do external qualities represent who’s best to guide us all into the future?

I think we all know the answer.

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. His first book, “Opinionated: Kansas Journalists Who Proved Why Commentary Matters — Then and Now,” was published in September 2026 by the University Press of Kansas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

"Its James Talarico. Can you please please please please pretty pretty please rush in even just $1?"

"Who's working to elect James Talarico? Marxists."

"Wow! Wow! Wow! Mark Kelly just made a HUGE announcement!"

"We asked Ben Verlander, MLB analyst and former Tigers prospect, to record a quick video about the election this Tuesday, November 3rd."

"See which of your friends or family members have voted in the past and remind them to vote this year."

If any of these messages sound familiar, it's likely because they're part of the massive stream of text messages flooding your phone leading up to the US midterm elections on Tuesday. The scal …

Read the full story at The Verge.

I was only 17 when I moved out of my folks' house. I was ready to leave—desperate to leave—and landed in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood in the early '90s. This was back when apartments there were still big and cheap and the whole neighborhood had recently transformed into a haven for artists and musicians and weirdos. It was, in that moment, a perfect place. Sure there were pretty regular gunshots at Duks Red Hots down the street and the park itself was something you walked past quickly at night, but it felt like a place that was ours. (Of course, it was someone else's first, and the displacement that we brought to the neighborhood would be echoed by wealth displacing us years later, but that's a different story for a different day).

Knowing that you had to leave home and knowing what you were doing once you got out are very different things. I was so young, still a child really, and there was so much I did not know. My art school roommates and I were all too young and too broke to go out much, so we stayed home most nights, sitting on a crusty old hand-me-down couch and watched fuzzy reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation on Channel 50.

When news of the death of Patrick Stewart—who I probably don't need to tell you played Captain Jean Luc Picard on the show—hit yesterday, I was instantly flooded with memories of being 17 and trying to figure out how to walk in the world and it made me realize just how interlinked those memories are with The Next Generation.

You never totally know where the lessons you learn might come from, but definitely for me, impossibly young and on my own, a lot of them came from this kinda corny low-budget show that claimed to be about space exploration, but was really about seeking knowledge and helping where you can and about possibility and kindness and wrestling with what it meant to be a person trying to do all those things and not always succeeding.

It was a deeply human show and a lot of that was thanks to Patrick Stewart, a Shakespearean actor who came from a fucked up home and found refuge, and himself, in the arts (a story that, looking back on it now, feels familiar). Stewart brought so much more to the role than the material—especially early on—warranted and, in the process, elevated the whole show to his level.

I was never a Trekkie, and beyond Deep Space Nine I didn't continue to follow the voyages of the Starship Enterprise or the many other Starships that followed. But that part of my life—that inflection point where you move from a child to an adult—is so intertwined with Captain Picard saying "Make it so" that it's hard to untangle the two. And maybe I don't want to.

Because The Next Generation offered a glimpse of a future that was better than the world we lived in then and certainly the world we live in now. It offered a vision of a world that was less cruel and more equitable, a world where people weren't struggling to survive and instead worked to better each other's place in it. It was, of course, a fictional world but it was a good fiction to believe in as I sorted out how to navigate the world outside my apartment.

I miss its optimism.

Or maybe I miss my own.

I've written before about how unrelentingly negative the internet feels now. It is, of course, a reflection of an era that is, itself, unrelentingly negative. We live at a time when cynicism reigns, where burnout is rampant, and where disengaging feels like the only option.

We live at a time where we are constantly questioning what is right in front of us. Where gaslighting is prevalent, and where insisting that the things that you see are the things that are there is harder than it looks.

In thinking about all this after hearing the news of his death last night, I was brought back to what I think is the finest episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Chain of Command," a two-parter that sees Stewart's Jean Luc Picard taken prisoner, interrogated, and tortured by the Cardassians, a race of militaristic lizard-like fascists.

During the interrogation, Picard's Cardassian handler asks him how many lights are shining in front of him. Squinting, Picard responds that there are four. The Cardassian insists that there are five lights, and tortures him.

Every time, endlessly, the same question—how many lights—elicits the same answer—four—and the beatings continue until, finally, Picard seems well and truly broken.

In the hands of a less accomplished actor, the inexpensive sets, syndicated TV lighting, and reptillian makeup might have made the torture feel less visceral, but Stewart made you truly feel his spirit breaking. Skinny and weak, wearing a torn tunic that hung off his body, he is asked one last time: How many lights. Picard is gasping, blinking, you can feel his confused, tortured, anguish.

It feels like it takes forever before he finally screams, "There! Are! Four! Lights!"

I've thought of that scene so many times over the years, as those in power try to insist that what we see right in front of us isn't what is happening. It was a story that is as resonant now as it was then, when I began to see the home I left in a new light. The exhaustion that comes with insisting that reality is, in fact, reality and the punishment that can come from standing by that insistence is very, very real. Then, now, forever.

We have all lived through so much—I'm reminded that one year ago was when ICE was at its worst right around me—and it would be so easy, so simple, to just fall for it all. It would be so easy to give up, to give in, and to admit that there are five lights.

But of course I can't, you can't, none of us can. No matter how hard it gets—and whatever the results of the election on Tuesday it's going to get harder—we can never forget the lesson that Patrick Stewart taught us: There are four lights.

There are four lights.

There.

Are.

Four.

Lights.

GREAT BEND — A class action usury lawsuit filed Thursday accuses U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall and his former Great Bend medical practice of routinely charging patients illegal interest rates on unpaid medical debt.

The lawsuit was filed in Barton County District Court in the final days of a bitter race between the incumbent Republican and Democrat Adam Hamilton, a Methodist minister from Johnson County. The race could determine the balance of power in the U.S. Senate.

The New York Times in September reported Marshall sued 700 of his patients for unpaid medical bills when he was an OB-GYN. In 81 cases, patients were arrested for missing court dates.

One of those arrested patients, Meischa Zimmerman, appeared in a TV ad for Hamilton and now is the lead plaintiff in the class action lawsuit.

The lawsuit alleges Marshall and his practice, Heartland Regional OBGYN, routinely subjected patients — many of them low-income, uninsured, or underinsured mothers — to a “callous and predatory” debt-collection scheme with illegal interest rates. He frequently assesses 18% annual interest, which exceeds Kansas’ statutory limit of 15%.

Zimmerman, an obstetrics patient of Marshall’s in 2009, said the practice sued her over a $3,596 bill for the delivery of her child, plus an 18% annual interest rate. According to the court filing, debt collection efforts linked to the usurious debt led to her arrest on three separate occasions.

Ellinwood attorney Kent Roth said the lawsuit stems from predatory billing against economically vulnerable patients.

“Obviously, I think a jury will place a dollar value on our complaint over charging 18% usury rate on medical debt, but I will let the legal document speak for itself,” Roth said.

He is serving as local counsel on the lawsuit, alongside lead counsel Edward F. Haber and Ian J. McLoughlin of the Boston firm Shapiro Haber & Urmy.

Marshall was contacted for a statement and declined to comment, referring questions to his communications team. The staff members didn’t immediately respond to emails sent Thursday night.

Earlier this week, 750 medical professionals in Kansas signed a letter expressing their concern with Marshall’s debt collection practices.

Thursday’s court filing asserts four causes of action: Common law usury, violating K.S.A 16-207, which caps allowable interest at 15% per annum; unjust enrichment by unlawfully retaining collected interest above statutory limits; breach of the Implied Covenant of Good Faith and Fair Dealing: Enforcing contractual provisions to collect excessive interest rates without disclosure; and breach of fiduciary duty by failing to act in the best interest of patients and failing to disclose the assessed interest exceeded state caps.

The lawsuit says many of Marshall’s patients didn’t have health insurance or had insurance with high deductibles and co-pays that did not pay all the amounts Marshall charged them. Many were reported as having “to decide between paying medical bills or buying groceries.”

The lawsuit cites reporting from the New York Times story, as well as Kansas City Star reporting that no other regional medical practices charged comparable interest rates.

Addressing potential statute of limitations issues, the complaint states the filing deadline was paused due to “fraudulent concealment” by the defendants, as patients only discovered the illegal nature of the rates through news reports in September and October 2026.

Plaintiffs are seeking class action certification, restitution, damages, and pre- and post-judgment interest to be determined at a jury trial.

Born in El Dorado, Marshall earned his medical degree from the University of Kansas School of Medicine in 1987 and served seven years as a captain in the U.S. Army Reserves. He practiced as an OB-GYN in Great Bend for more than 25 years.

In Congress, Marshall has focused on agricultural and healthcare policy, serving on key Senate committees, including Agriculture, Finance, Budget, and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

Earlier today, we detected evidence of a security incident on AO3. We are still in the early stages of response to this security incident and determining its scope. AO3 will remain down while we continue investigating and addressing what has been found so far. However, we want to make some things clear:

First, no AO3 data has been deleted. All your works, bookmarks, kudos, etc., are safe.

Second, while we currently don’t believe that the user database was stolen, we are also unable to rule it out. The AO3 database contains account information that may include your username, email address, IP address, and a hashed version of your password.

We use industry-standard techniques for storing passwords in a scrambled form that cannot easily be reversed. Even so, no hashing method can fully protect a weak or reused password from being cracked. As a precaution, we recommend that you change your passwords on any other sites where you use the same password as on AO3.

AO3 does not collect real names, so none could be exposed. Additionally, our donor information is held in an entirely separate system and is never linked to AO3, so that data has also not been exposed.

We will update everyone as our investigation continues; we may be unable to respond to individual inquiries from users. Please keep an eye on our official outlets for updates. Our next update will be posted when we have further information available.

Our current expectation is that AO3 will be down for a minimum of two weeks; however, it could take up to four weeks. During that time, we may be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state, meaning that not all features will be available and/or the site may be read-only. If we are able to do that, please be aware that we might have to bring the site back down unexpectedly as part of our recovery efforts. We will keep you in the loop for any developments.