File this under something that should have been self-evident: When it came time for the artist known as Cher to finish her memoir, she discovered she had too much material. Where to even begin? Decades before Madonna had reinventions and Taylor Swift had eras, Cher had comebacks—triumphs over decline in which she’d reemerge stronger, shinier, and more resolute than ever. “It’s a thousand times harder to come back than to become,” she writes in the first volume of her autobiography, titled—naturally—Cher. And yet something in her soul seems to always relish the challenge. A walking, singing eye roll, Cher has never met an obstacle without theatrically raising a middle finger. Consider the gown she wore to present at the Academy Awards in 1986 after having been snubbed for her performance in Peter Bogdanovich’s Mask: the cobwebbed, midsection-baring, black sequined supervillainess outfit that became known as her fuck the Oscars dress. Radiantly moody, she glowered her way right into awards-show history.

But much of that later timeline is for the second volume, supposedly arriving next year. Cher, which documents the four decades between her birth, in 1946, and the start of her serious acting career, in 1980, is concerned with the essentials: where she came from, who she is, all the incidents that helped her become one of music’s most indelible mononyms. I guarantee that, as you read, you’ll be able to conjure the sound of her voice in your mind, velvety and sonorous. (“You couldn't tell who was singing the baritone parts,” The New York Times noted in 1988 about “I Got You, Babe,” her duet with Sonny Bono, “but you had the disturbing feeling that it probably wasn't Sonny.”) And likely her face, too: her doll-like features, sphinxlike smile, and black, black hair. More than anything, though, Cher has come to stand for a brassy, strutting kind of survival over the years, and on this front, her memoir is awash in insight and rich in details.

Cher is a bracing read, peppered with caustic quips and self-effacing anecdotes, but fundamentally frank. This, you might agree, is no moment for nostalgia. (She does not—forgive the cheap gag—actually want to turn back time.) “Ours was a sad, strange story of Southern folk coming from nothing and carving out a life after the Great Depression,” Cher writes. “It wasn’t pretty and it was never easy … Resilience is in my DNA.” Her grandmother was 12 years old when she became pregnant with Cher’s mother, Jackie Jean; her grandfather Roy was a baker’s assistant turned bootlegger who beat his new wife, made his daughter sing for pennies on top of the bars he’d drink at, and once tried to murder both his children by leaving the gas stove on. For much of Cher’s infancy—she was born Cheryl Sarkisian but changed her name in 1978—she was raised by nuns, after her father abandoned her 20-year-old mother. Later, her mother, who had a muted acting career, cycled through seven or eight husbands and two illegal abortions that almost killed her. Although Jackie was a talented performer and luminously beautiful, “my mom missed out on several major acting roles because she refused to sleep with men who promised her a break,” Cher notes. The stepfather who was kindest to young Cher was also a nasty drunk, to the point where, even now, “I still can’t stand the sound of a belt coming out of pant loops.”

From early childhood, Cher was a dynamo—singing perpetually into a hairbrush, dancing around the house, and peeing her pants during a screening of Dumbo rather than miss any of the movie. She dreamed of being a star, and, less conventionally, of discovering a cure for polio. (“When Jonas Salk invented a vaccine, I was so pissed off,” she writes.) Because of her mother’s erratic relationships, she moved constantly, all over the country. By 15, she was living in Los Angeles, where she recounts being leered at by Telly Savalas in a photographer’s studio and spending a wild night or two with Warren Beatty. At 16, she met the man who’d become her partner in all senses of the word: a divorced, charming, slightly squirelly 27-year-old named Sonny Bono. “He liked that I was quirky and nonjudgmental,” Cher writes. “I liked that he was funny and different. He was a grown-up without being too grown up, and I was a sixteen-year-old lying about my age.” Their relationship was platonic at first—when she found herself homeless, she moved in with him, the pair sleeping in twin beds next to each other like characters in a 1950s sitcom. One day, he kissed her, and that was that.

If Cher’s early life is a Steinbeckian saga of grim endurance, her life with Bono is a volatile scrapbook of life in 20th-century entertainment. Thanks to Bono’s connections with Phil Spector, she became a singer, performing backing vocals on the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.” When Cher and Bono formed a duo and became wildly famous in 1965 with “I Got You, Babe,” the American musical establishment initially deemed her too outré in her bell bottoms and furs, and then—as the sexual revolution and rock music caught fire—too square. In her first flush of fame, the recently widowed Jackie Kennedy requested that Sonny & Cher perform for a private dinner party in New York. The fashion editor Diana Vreeland had Cher photographed for Vogue. At a party in his hotel suite, Salvador Dalí explained to her that an ornamental fish she was admiring was actually a vibrator. (“I couldn’t drop that fish fast enough.”) Having entrusted all the financial details of their partnership to Bono, she was stunned when he revealed that they owed hundreds of thousands in back taxes, right as their musical success was stalling.

[Read: What Madonna knows]

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were,” Marcel Proust declared in In Search of Lost Time. Show-business memoirs can be gritty—Al Pacino’s Sonny Boy recounts a similarly bleak childhood—but I’m hard pressed to think of another celebrity author so insistent on dispensing with rose-tinted reminiscences. Cher wants you to know that for most people—and absolutely for most women—the 20th century was no cakewalk. She loved Bono, and is the first to admit how enchanting their dynamic could be. But the partner she describes was controlling, vengeful (he reportedly burned her tennis clothes after he saw her talking to another man), and shockingly callous. When she left him, she discovered that her contract was one of “involuntary servitude”—he owned 95 percent of a company called Cher Enterprises, of which she was an employee who never received a paycheck. (His lawyer owned the other 5 percent.) Their divorce was finalized in 1975, a year or so after women were granted the right to apply for credit cards in their own names.

Promoting her book, Cher told CBS Sunday Morning, “I didn’t want to give information, ’cause you could go to Wikipedia [for that]. I just wanted to tell stories.” And she does, but in a form that can’t help doubling as a broader history—an account of all the things women have suffered through (casting couches, financial ruin, humiliating public scrutiny) and fought for (authority over their own bodies). Unlike her mother, Cher was, via carefully coded language, offered a legal abortion in her doctor’s office in 1975, during a period when her life was in flux. (Her second husband, the musician Gregory Allman, was addicted to heroin and had deserted her; she was about to return to work on her CBS variety show, also titled Cher.) “I needed to be at work on Monday,” she remembers. “I needed to be singing and dancing. I had a child, mother, and sister to take care of. I knew I had to make a choice, and I knew what it was. It made it harder that I didn’t have Gregory to talk to about it, but I made my decision and I was so grateful to my doctor’s compassion for giving me one.” (Cher and Bono's son, Chaz Bono, had been born in 1969. By 1976, Cher and Allman had reconciled, and Cher gave birth to Elijah Blue Allman.)

Gratitude. Compassion. Choice. What is resilience reliant on if not all three? We have to wait for book two for Cher’s account of her ups and downs in the ’80s and ’90s—her new acting career, her Best Actress Oscar for Moonstruck, her turn to infomercials for income after a severe bout of chronic fatigue syndrome, her auto-tuned path with “Believe” to one of the best-selling pop singles of all time. But in Cher, she offers a persuasive, wry, rousing account of what made her, and what she was able to make in turn. “I’ve always thought that whether you get a break or not is purely down to luck,” she writes, adding, “These were the key moments that changed my luck.” But that read of things understates her sheer force of will—her outright refusal, as with the Oscars dress, to ever be counted out.

For Lucca Baila’s third birthday, his mother, Morgan, knew that he didn’t want balloons or cake or streamers. He wanted Lamb Chop, a stuffed-animal version of the white-and-red puppet from a popular 1960s TV show, and he wanted lots of them. Morgan, a 32-year-old from New York, bought eight small Lamb Chops and turned her apartment into a DIY–Lamb Chop station. Guests got to work on creating custom Lambys, decorating the toys with hats and scarves from Christmas-themed doll kits.

Lucca, a fluffy brown mop of a dog, was then presented with new versions of the toy, one by one. No matter how many times a new Lamb Chop appeared in front of him, his reaction was the same: bouncing, hardwood-floor-scuttling excitement as he accepted each into his mouth and collected them in a pile. Not only did he pose for photos with his new puppet posse, but his “girlfriend”—a jumbo-size Lamb Chop he carries with him everywhere—was also in attendance.

Ask any random dog owner and there’s a good chance they’ll tell you: Lamb Chop is their dog’s favorite toy. They’ll say it with the confidence of having heard it directly from the dog itself. After witnessing my sister’s dog’s dedication to the toy, I spoke with more than 10 dog owners, all of whom were quick to send me pictures, videos, and anecdotes about their own dogs’ seemingly inexplicable Lamby love. One person told me she routinely finds Lamb Chops that her dog has stolen from other dogs’ homes. Another said that her labradoodle has three Lamb Chops but shows particular fondness for the original one, which she’s had for more than five years. This adoration is also a common subject on social media. “Why is no one talking about the dog cult?” the content creator Meredith Lynch asks her followers in a TikTok video before pointing to an image of Lamb Chop. “And this is their leader.”

The numbers seem to prove Lamb Chop’s dominance: According to data shared with me by the pet superstore Chewy, Lamb Chop is the site’s most popular plush dog toy and its second-most-popular dog toy of any kind. Thousands of customers have the toy on autoship. More than 20 iterations of Lamb Chop exist, including Tie-Dye Lamb Chop, Nautical Lamb Chop, and Rainbow Lamb Chop. Stores sell small-size Lamb Chops (six inches), medium-size Lamb Chops (10.5 inches), and jumbo-size Lamb Chops (24 inches)—not to mention Lamb Chop dog costumes, Lamb Chop dog beds, and Lamb Chop food bowls.

The dog market offers thousands of dog toys; Lamb Chop is the only one that many owners seem to treat with the same obligatoriness as they do a collar and leash. My big question is: Why? In pop-cultural terms, Lamb Chop is something of a has-been—she hasn’t been a major presence in the human-entertainment universe for years. In fact, some owners told me they had no knowledge of Lamb Chop ever being anything other than a dog toy. What makes pet owners so sure that buying not just one Lamb Chop but multiple Lamb Chops is money well spent? And is it really possible that dogs, which can be big or small, playful or shy, hunters or herders, could nevertheless share a preference for the exact same plush toy?

For many years, before she featured prominently in pet stores, Lamb Chop was better known on the hands of Shari Lewis, the red-headed puppeteer and ventriloquist. In 1956, the duo made a guest appearance on the children’s CBS series Captain Kangaroo, and eventually, they starred in two TV programs, The Shari Lewis Show in the ’60s and Lamb Chop’s Play-Along in the ’90s. After Lewis’s death in 1998, her daughter, Mallory, took over puppet duties. But Mallory told me that she was not responsible for Lamb Chop’s leap from children’s entertainer to dog’s best friend. The media company Dreamworks owns the Lamb Chop trademark, and the commodification of Lamb Chop seems to have begun sometime after 2008, when Dreamworks offered Lamb Chop’s image to the pet-toy supplier Multipet.

Dog toys, Lamb-ish or not, are necessities. “Playing with toys on their own fulfills dogs’ need to do things like chew, find food, tug … all of which are normal behaviors,” Zazie Todd, the author of Wag: The Science of Making Your Dog Happy, told me in an email. And dogs can have favorite toys, Todd said, depending on their favorite activities—dogs with more energy may prefer to chase a ball, whereas puppies just starting to grow teeth may become attached to a chew toy.

[Read: Dogs are entering a new wave of domestication]

Lamb Chop, incidentally, can fulfill many biological needs for many different kinds of dogs: Big dogs can get big Lambys, and small dogs can get smaller ones. Dogs who prefer to cuddle their toys can find in Lamby a soft companion, and dogs who prefer to destroy them can make quick work of the plushie. Plus, Lamb Chop resembles an animal, which can be enticing—dogs used to hunt. Some dogs, likely with “softer” prey drives, may enjoy simply carrying around Lamb Chop, Christopher Blazina, a psychologist and a co-editor of The Psychology of the Human-Animal Bond, told me. (Sometimes, they carry Lamb Chop to their humans.) Other dogs, such as huskies, malamutes, and terriers, have been bred for their high prey drives and may treat their Lamby more ferociously. Either way, no dog is excluded from the club.

The animal urge to eat Lamb Chop also partly explains the high sales. According to Chewy, many customers buy more than five Lamb Chops a year. Multiple dog owners have shown me the remnants of well-loved Lambys; one owner, in a valiant attempt at frugality, had even tried repairing the toy, until all that remained was an earless, faceless sack held together by string.

But the pet experts I spoke with suggested another, more profound reason for Lamb Chop’s popularity: Dogs may love Lamb Chop because they think their people love Lamb Chop.

Humans and dogs have spent much of their time on Earth together; evidence of shared burials goes back to at least the Stone Age. For most of this time, the relationship was strictly professional: Dogs hunted and herded in exchange for humans’ care. As both “co-evolved,” though, that work shifted, Blazina told me. Although dogs can still aid humans as service dogs or in tasks such as search-and-rescue missions, the average domestic dog’s job “is to be with us and really to be attuned” to our emotions, he said—and “our job is to be with them in the same way.”

In other words, we can’t know for sure that dogs really love Lamb Chop, but we like to think they do—and that might be enough. When we hand a dog the toy, our face may betray a belief that we’re giving the dog something enjoyable, a belief that’s affirmed when the dog sees our excitement and gets excited too. “It ends up being a kind of positive-feedback loop,” Blazina said, “where they get happy and we get happy and then they get happy and then it just keeps going.”

[Read: Why a dog’s death hits so hard]

The truth is, Lamb Chop may just be tactile evidence of this projection and mirroring. In 2020, the U.K. dog-welfare charity Dogs Trust polled 2,000 dog owners; 75 percent said they wished their dog could talk, and two of the top questions respondents had for their dogs were “Are you happy?” and “How can I make your life happier?” In pursuit of a response, many humans imagine all kinds of narratives—that their pets know they’re being abandoned for a family vacation, for instance, or that they feel personally rejected when someone doesn’t share with them a bit of steak from the table. Some of the theories are rooted in veterinary science; other behaviors may be more coincidental.

Regardless of whether humans or dogs are responsible for the Lamb Chop–shaped bridge between us, what matters is what the toy represents. Last year, when Cory Stieg knew it was time to say goodbye to Mookie, the Australian shepherd she’d had since she was 19, she turned to Lamb Chop. The days before a pet’s death can be some of the most helpless for their humans. For Stieg and her husband, the jumbo-size Lamb Chop they bought for Mookie offered an assurance that, amid his declining health, they could do one last thing to bring him joy. In a video of the moment, Mookie stares in wide-eyed anticipation as Stieg’s husband removes the tag. He uses his remaining energy to reach for the toy as it dangles above him, finally getting hold of it by the belly. Lamb Chop was probably the last thing Mookie saw before passing away. “He quite literally had her on his deathbed,” Stieg told me. Lamb Chop was there at precisely the moment an entire little family needed her—a symbol of dogs and humans’ shared, ancient desire to make each other happy.

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Traditionally, a campaign’s closing argument is supposed to hammer home its main themes. At a rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump did exactly that—by once again fantasizing about violence against his perceived enemies.

Describing how his open-air podium was mostly surrounded by bulletproof glass, the former president noted a gap in that protection, and added: “To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news, and I don’t mind that so much.” And by “fake news,” he meant the members of the press covering his rally.

[Read: The great, disappearing Trump campaign]

The crowd whooped and clapped. Many of Trump’s rallies feature a moment’s hate for the journalists in attendance, whom he blames for, among other things, distorting his message, not praising him enough, reflexively favoring Kamala Harris, fact-checking his statements, noticing empty seats, and reporting that people leave his events early.

But journalists are only some of the many “enemies from within” whom Trump has name-checked at his rallies and on his favored social network, Truth Social. He has suggested that Mark Zuckerberg should face “life in prison” if Facebook’s moderation policies penalize right-wingers. He has suggested using the National Guard or the military against “radical-left lunatics” who disrupt the election. He believes people who criticize the Supreme Court “should be put in jail.” A recent post on Truth Social stated that if he wins on Tuesday, Trump would hunt down “lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials” who had engaged in what he called “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery.” Just last week, he fantasized in public about his Republican critic Liz Cheney facing gunfire, and he previously promoted a post calling for her to face a “televised military tribunal” for treason. In all, NPR found more than 100 examples of Trump threatening to prosecute or persecute his opponents. One of his recent targets was this magazine.

Does this rhetoric matter to voters? It certainly ought to. Persecuting journalists is what autocrats do—and yet Trump’s many boosters on the right, who claim to care deeply about free speech, seem resolutely unmoved. However, his campaign has tried to clean up today’s offending remarks, something that his team rarely bothers to do. (The most recent major example was after the comedian Tony Hinchliffe called Puerto Rico “an island of garbage” while warming up the crowd at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden last weekend.)

Following today’s speech in Lititz, Team Trump is trying to spin his comments as nothing more than tender concern for the welfare of reporters. “President Trump was brilliantly talking about the two assassination attempts on his own life,” Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesperson, wrote in a statement. (Let’s have a moment to enjoy the self-abasement required to write that brilliantly.) He continued:

The President’s statement about protective glass placement has nothing to do with the Media being harmed, or anything else. It was about threats against him that were spurred on by dangerous rhetoric from Democrats. In fact, President Trump was stating that the Media was in danger, in that they were protecting him and, therefore, were in great danger themselves, and should have had a glass protective shield, also. There can be no other interpretation of what was said. He was actually looking out for their welfare, far more than his own!

The word Orwellian is overused, but come on, Steven Cheung. You expect people to believe this crock? That jaunty final exclamation mark gives the entire statement a whiff of sarcasm, and rightly so. Trump plainly meant that, if he were targeted from a nearby rooftop, he would at least draw some small consolation if a blameless camera operator from a local TV station were taken out first.

The rest of Trump’s speech was the usual minestrone of cheap insults, petty grievances, and bizarre digressions. He repeated a claim that he’d previously made on The Joe Rogan Experience—where he said he wanted to be a “whale psychiatrist”—that offshore wind farms are killing whales. He suggested that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House after losing the 2020 election. At times, he appeared to be boring himself, regretting that he had to deliver a stump speech that the audience had probably heard “900 times.”

He took aim at his most-hated Democrats: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was “not a smart girl”; Harris was “lazy as hell”; and Adam Schiff had an “enlarged watermelon head.” He complained about “Barack Hussein Obama” and said that because Obama’s wife had criticized him, “I think we’re gonna start having a little fun with Michelle.” Notably, given his other remarks about the media, he also threatened CBS’s broadcast license because, he contended, the network had deceptively edited one of Harris’s answers in her interview with 60 Minutes. (The network denies the allegation.) For those who dismiss Trump’s threats as merely overblown rhetoric, it should be noted that he has also launched a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS in a part of Texas where the sole federal judge is a Republican.

[Read: Inside the ruthless, restless final days of Trump’s campaign]

Trump’s current mood might be attributable to his stalled momentum in recent polls and a slump in his odds of victory in betting markets. Accordingly, in Lititz, he added a new name to his list of adversaries: J. Ann Selzer, the widely respected Iowa pollster who has a track record of producing surprising results that are borne out on Election Day. Last night, her poll for The Des Moines Register found that Harris was leading by three points in Iowa, a state that Trump won in 2020 by eight. Last year, when Selzer’s poll correctly showed Trump ahead in the state’s Republican primary campaign, he called her a “very powerful” pollster who had delivered a “big beautiful poll.” In Lititz, however, he described Selzer as “one of my enemies” and lumped her together with the media: “The polls are just as corrupt as some of the writers back there.”

The campaign is coming to an unruly close. Trump’s surrogates are going rogue: Elon Musk has said that his drive for government efficiency would cause “temporary hardship”; Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pledged this weekend to remove fluoride from drinking water; and House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that Republicans would “probably” repeal the CHIPS Act, which subsidizes U.S. semiconductor production. None of these is a winning message for the Republicans. (Johnson later said he wouldn’t try to kill the bill.)

But the bigger issue is the candidate himself. The more professional elements of the campaign appear to be losing their grip on Trump, who is tired and bored and restless for revenge. Whatever happens on Tuesday, we can say authoritatively that this has been Trump’s darkest campaign yet.

Lawsuit against 60 Minutes demands $10bn in damages and claims footage was edited.