In America, we still like to pretend we don’t operate within an Old World-style class system. (Should you continue to labor under that delusion in the year of our lord 2023, we suggest you try taking a commercial airline flight some time.) Anyone can rise above their station, one bootstrap-tug …
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It will not surprise anybody that the centerpiece of Cat Person — an adaptation of the viral New Yorker short story by Kristen Roupenian, the literary lit-fuse that launched a million response articles and the sun’s-surface–hot ticket at Sundance — is a sex scene. It is as inevitable as the …
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Way back in the before times of 2019 — pre-pandemic, but after the world was already experiencing real Old Testament-type stuff, like human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria, Trump — readers may have come across a news item. There was a new Ghostbusters movie on the way. …
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Midway through the second episode of Apple TV+’s sci-fi epic Foundation, mathematician Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) visits the laundry facilities on the spaceship carrying him and his followers to a far corner of the galaxy. Hari has developed the new science of “psycho-history,” predicting the future through statistical analysis, and …
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“Work,” one of her employers tells Alex, the heroine of Netflix’s fantastic new limited series Maid, “is the one thing you can count on. Everything else is fragile.” It’s an apt sentiment for both Alex (Margaret Qualley) and Maid itself, a limited series about the value — financial and psychological …
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We are born, we live, and we die. Before we can get on that particular merry-go-round, however, we must first be interviewed. The interrogator is tall, quiet, fastidious, well-dressed. Small granny spectacles perch on his nose as he asks questions of those who sit before him. And when he’s not …
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Meet Paul McCartney: the ultimate Beatles geek. The excellent new Hulu documentary series McCartney 3, 2, 1 gets up close with the most legendary of rock stars, alone in the studio with Rick Rubin, telling stories and listening deep to the Beatles. It’s a fascinating thrill just to listen with …
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At some point, you’ve probably made fun of one of those cheesy sitcoms about an oafish man with a beautiful, impossibly patient wife. That’s because those kinds of sitcoms have been around for our entire lives, going back practically to the start of television itself. Some of these shows have …
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“Our music is about representation. It’s about being heard,” explains Saira (Sarah Kameela Impey), the lead singer of the band that gives the new Peacock import comedy We Are Lady Parts its title. Saira’s explanation for why she plays music is a fairly trite one out of context — what …
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We begin at the beginning: It’s a lovely, late spring day in Smalltown USA. A tall, lanky man — let’s call him Lee Abbott — gets out of his truck and ducks into a small general store on Main Street. He walks through the aisles, past a shelf full of …
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