In the 1978 remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” the great Donald Sutherland (who died yesterday at 88) plays Matthew Bennell, a San Francisco health inspector. He’s a bureaucrat, but one with a sense of humor and who never forgets that he, like the restaurant owners he visits, is only human.

Bennell’s faith in the system is such that when his colleague Elizabeth (Brooke Adams) starts sensing that the people around them are changing in disturbing ways, his first impulse is to suggest she see a therapist. By the time he does wake up to reality, it’s far too late to avoid to avoid assimilation into the alien collective

Align contributor Lou Perez spent the pandemic with his wife in Brooklyn Heights; it is also when they had their first child. Now a father of two living in New Jersey, Perez looks back on his old neighborhood with nostalgia — and the uncanny sense that it, too, has been taken over by pod people. How else to explain the pervasive Trump derangement or the proliferation of “anti-racist” bakeries?

A time-tested way of jolting the public out of groupthink is street art, and there’s no more dedicated practitioner on the right than the artist known as Sabo. He recently plastered his provocative fake ads all over downtown Los Angeles ahead of the big Biden fundraiser; we’re proud to share some exclusive photos of his work.

Despite the usual denials, Biden’s appearance at the fundraiser provided yet more evidence that he is in serious cognitive decline. As someone whose father died from Alzheimer’s, I wish him and his family nothing but the best.

Nonetheless, I can’t help but take the image of our president “frozen” on that stage as a potent symbol of our current leadership, locked in place by a sclerotic ideology and utterly unresponsive to the people it purports to serve.

Thank you, as always, for supporting Align.

Best,

Matt Himes, Align managing editor