Listening to a good breakup album is a dangerous act: if consumed at the wrong time, it can kill your joy, resurrect painful flashbacks, re-break your heart, reduce you to a puddle of misery. But breakup songs also make up a huge portion of the most beautiful songs ever written. They help us process our pain; they serve as crucial substitutes for reckless acts. They make us feel less alone.

Last week, Kacey Musgraves, one of the great modern practitioners of the breakup song (see: “Space Cowboy”) released her fourth album, “Star-Crossed,” accompanied by a film of the same name. Musgraves filed for divorce from musician Ruston Kelly a year ago, and she’s billed the album as a “tragedy in three parts”; its 15-song arc chronicles an epic love story that ultimately ends in disaster.
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“Star-Crossed” got us in our feelings and thinking about our personal favorite break-up albums. Of course, there are the undeniable universal choices, like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Joni Mitchell’s Blue Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak. But these are the ones that come, for us, from a more personal place; that bring back memories too embarrassing to share in public. In lieu of broadcasting those, here are the albums that guided us through those overcast days; that can still make us think someone is chopping onions in the next room.—Andrew R. Chow

Phoebe Bridgers, Stranger in the Alps

Bridgers received an onslaught of attention and acclaim for last year’s tremendously sad Punisher. Her 2017 album, Stranger in the Alps, makes Punisher sound like a cheerful day at the beach. Over quietly lapping electric guitars and droning strings, Bridgers sings of drowning, of graveyards and ghosts, of being emotionally tormented and breaking another’s heart. I listened to that album on repeat that year, as if dunking my head in a lake over and over again to purify myself. The most famous song is “Motion Sickness,” which ossifies her real-life dalliance with Ryan Adams. But often the most agonizing lyrics are the vaguest ones, allowing the listener to effortlessly project her heartbreak onto their own: “Do you feel ashamed,” she asks on “Scott Street,” “when you hear my name?”—A.R.C.

Kris Kristofferson, Kristofferson

Despite his slapstick name, Kris Kristofferson has long been a standard bearer for misery. While he’s penned breakup classics for other artists, like Johnny Cash and Ray Price, he sounds just as good singing them himself on his debut album, released in 1970—and particularly on the now-classic “Sunday Mornin Comin’ Down,” which recounts a two-beer breakfast. The rest of the album flits in and out of despair and acceptance, each track offering a different tonic for a different stage in the grieving process. “There’s no need to watch the bridges that we’re burning,” he sings on “For the Good Times.” “Make believe you love me one more time.”—A.R.C.

Robert Pete Williams, Free Again

Few can give voice to solitude quite like bluesmen. One of my favorite blues records was recorded in 1962 by Williams, a Louisianan guitarist who spent years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary before getting released. On Free Again, Williams’ slide guitar is wonderfully punchy and textural, and he takes on his hardships with equal parts despair and humor, especially on the song “I’ve Grown So Ugly.”—A.R.C.

Sampha, Process

While many other songs of sadness are shrouded in minimalism, Sampha opts for bombast on his 2017 album Process, giving his sadness a frantic, epic quality, especially on the hyper-visceral “Blood on Me.” Few modern voice boxes sound as desperate as his—especially when he strains toward his upper register to plead for the return of a loved one who has disappeared. Halfway through the album, however, Sampha swears off other people entirely, sighing resignedly: “No one knows me like the piano.” Listening to the hollow plinks that surround him, it’s hard not to agree.—A.R.C.

Beck, Sea Change

Despite being mostly known as the abstract and sarcastic alternative rapper-guy for most of the ‘90s, Beck can write a damn fine heartfelt tune. However, the 12 tracks that make up 2002’s Sea Change are on another level and anyone who has ever listened to this album post-breakup knows exactly what I’m talking about. Written during an introspective period shortly following the end of a nine-year relationship with his then–fiancée, these songs evoke a sense of somber melancholia that feels truly genuine and could only be written by someone going through it. Musically, Beck teamed up with frequent collaborator Nigel Godrich to create a sound that falls somewhere between a Nick Drake album and Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson. It has huge sweeping orchestral arrangements throughout, but never loses its sense of intimacy. It’s a sad album that digs deep into those feelings of unexpected change and loss, but it also beautifully conveys that we’re not alone in these feelings. If anything, it affirms we’re alive and others have felt this too. That might be true of most breakup albums, but in 2002 this one hit me right in my 15-year-old heart.—Chris Grasinger.

Converge, Jane Doe

Not only is Converge’s 2001 masterpiece Jane Doe the ultimate ‘epic handshake’ between metal and hardcore, it’s also a very sincere response to the anger and sadness that comes along with a relationship deteriorating. Vocalist Jacob Bannon’s breakup woes are at the center of this album both in the lyrics and in the emotional performance he gives throughout. While admittedly most of my go-to breakup albums tend to lean towards melancholy and sentimentality, Bannon’s brutally honest and raw energy is as effective as any slowed down ballad could ever be. Jane Doe is one massive boundary-pushing explosion of riffs and emotion that set a new high-water mark for heavy music. It’s no surprise that this band and this album means so much to so many.—C.G.

The Cure, Disintegration

There’s a decadent, melodramatic side to heartbreak—especially when you’re young enough that the feeling is a novel one—and no one captures it better than goth rock’s most romantic stadium act. Brazenly maximalistic in its shimmering orchestral passages and frontman Robert Smith’s moaning tenor, as well as in the dilated runtimes of individual songs, Disintegration (1989) luxuriates in loneliness, longing, betrayal, degradation. “Pictures of You” packs a particularly devastating punch, as photos of a lost love send the singer down a spiral of reminiscence and regret. “If only I’d thought of the right words,” Smith croons, “I could’ve held onto your heart.” Who among us can honestly say that we’ve never been tortured by the very same thought?—Judy Berman

Liz Phair, Exile in Guyville

Is indie legend Liz Phair’s debut album about breaking up with a man, a music scene, rock ‘n’ roll machismo or the patriarchy at large? Yes. I mean, why pick just one? In 18 tracks conceived as a response to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, the young singer-songwriter appropriated their bluesy, libidinous jangle to stare down the guitar bros of early-’90s Chicago, put one-night stands and rude roommates on notice and out-perv those who would objectify her. Decades of willful misreadings notwithstanding, at its core the record is about renegotiating your relationships—to art, to work and, yes, to love—on your own terms. “I felt like it was really important to want overtly and to lust and to be able to own my own sexuality,” Phair has said. “I was scared to do it, but I felt like it was important to take the territory back for myself.” In other words, as she so memorably drawls on the album opener: “I keep standing 6’1’’/ Instead of 5’2’’/ And I loved my life/ And I hated you.” Declarations of independence don’t get much bolder.—J.B.

Of Montreal, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Breakups can change a person, but it’s rare to see a transformation as literal as the one that takes place on this 2007 album by Of Montreal. Inspired by real events, side 1 renders the dissolution of a marriage in the same sort of upbeat, neon-hued psych-pop that made the Athens, Georgia, act an indie sensation in the late ‘90s and early aughts. “I spent the winter with my nose buried in a book/ While trying to restructure my character,” confesses frontman and songwriter Kevin Barnes, “because it had become vile to its creator.” Side 2 sends Barnes into the twisty, noisy gyre of a 12-minute track called “The Past Is a Grotesque Animal.” He comes out a truly different character—one who’s swaggering, gender-fluid, dedicated to the funk and ready to break hearts anew.—J.B.

The Mountain Goats, Get Lonely

In their almost 30-year run, The Mountain Goats have released a number of themed albums that deal with everything from a group of methamphetamine addict friends to Dungeons & Dragons. But frontman John Darnielle’s signature frenzied, authoritative voice took a decidedly doleful turn with their 2006 release Get Lonely, an album about the direct aftermath of a dissolved relationship. In stark contrast to 2002’s Tallahassee, which gleefully explored a volatile marriage imploding under its own dramatic weight, Get Lonely drips no poison and brooks no resentment. Instead, it sits with the emptiness that lingers after a break up: the absence of company, the awkwardness of lost routines and the persistent echoes of things left unsaid. With a then-uncharacteristic softness, Darnielle sings about taking long solo walks down highway shoulders, accidentally making coffee for two and feeling compelled to drink it all, the stunned shock of seeing the ex on a crosstown bus, and feverishly scanning for distractions. In the 15 years since it came out, and after many, many listens, I often think about Pitchfork’s review that followed its release. The writer Tom Breihan had told Darnielle he was still wrapping his head around Get Lonely. Darnielle, perhaps jokingly, asked if Breihan had a significant other and reportedly said, “I hope she leaves you. Then you’ll understand it.”—Peter Allen Clark

Taylor Swift, Red

The problem with TV these days, as everyone knows, is that there’s too much of it. By the time you clear out last month’s backlog of binges, another truckload of content has piled up at your doorstep. Streaming services and to a lesser extent traditional networks will maintain that wearying momentum throughout the fall, with a huge variety of new and old programming.

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In September alone, HBO rebooted Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage; Showtime countered with a crime drama, American Rust, that sounds like Jeff Daniels of Easttown (but unfortunately isn’t); Apple unveils an elaborate Isaac Asimov adaptation, Foundation; and PBS has Ken Burns’ Muhammad Ali. FX has frontloaded B.J. Novak’s provocative anthology The Premise, an ambitious reconsideration of cult comic-book series Y: The Last Man and a long-awaited season of American Crime Story that takes on the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Also this fall, Disney+ continues its run of Marvel and Star Wars spinoffs. Many buzzy series—including HBO’s delightfully excruciating Murdochian satire Succession—are due back after lengthy COVID-related hiatuses. America’s favorite fictional serial killer Dexter is, for reasons known only to the network execs who greenlighted his comeback, on the prowl again.

This abundance of shiny new shows makes it easy to overlook what’s missing from the upcoming season’s primetime schedule—namely, NBC’s venerable Thursday-night comedy block. Anchored in the 1980s by Cheers and The Cosby Show, then Friends, Seinfeld and Frasier in the ’90s, the lineup more than earned its “Must See TV” branding throughout the late 20th century. Even as appointment viewing waned in subsequent decades, it remained an oasis for smart, imaginative sitcoms: The Office, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, Community and, in a last gasp of greatness, The Good Place and Superstore. That legacy has ended, as the network just last night aired the series finale of long-running cop sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Come October, NBC will devote Thursday nights to Law & Order spinoffs, driving scripted comedy off the primetime schedule entirely.

Other Big 5 broadcasters seem to be losing faith in comedy series as well. The CW belongs to superheroes, Archie Comics and B-grade nonfiction programming now. While Fox’s Sunday adult-animation block is still going strong, there isn’t a single live-action sitcom on its fall schedule. ABC has carved out Wednesdays for family comedies, but the only “new” title is a Wonder Years reboot. CBS seems like a relative haven for the genre, until you realize that one mega-producer, The Big Bang Theory bard Chuck Lorre, has a hand in four out of its six fall sitcoms. Among the Emmy nominees for Outstanding Comedy Series, only one—ABC’s black-ish, whose eighth and final season is expected to premiere in 2022—hails from a broadcast network.

Scripted comedy isn’t going anywhere. Cable channels and streaming services are bursting with great examples, as multimedia conglomerates like NBCUniversal shift new projects from creators with cult followings (Mike Schur’s Rutherford Falls, Tina Fey’s Girls5eva), to platforms such as Peacock, where they might pay for themselves in subscription dollars. But watching Hacks or Ted Lasso or Never Have I Ever at your own pace isn’t the same experience as ducking into Cheers or Central Perk every Thursday evening and reliving the highlights of each episode at the watercooler Friday morning with people you knew had tuned in last night.

I’ve been frustrated for a while by a growing sense that free, linear TV is devolving into nothing more than a way of filling time between commercials or, worse, an endless advertisement for the streaming subscription service operated by each broadcaster’s corporate parent. But beyond that, there’s something depressing about having to bid farewell to the precise kind of network comedy we’ve lost. Since the Cheers era, most of NBC’s best and most beloved sitcoms have centered on groups of unrelated adults—people who share a workplace or hangout, community college students or dead souls damned to a hell designed by a demon with the avuncular charm of Ted Danson.

Unlike most family comedies, which date back to the dawn of television and now predominate among the last surviving network sitcoms, with their interchangeable living-room sets and preordained generational hierarchies, the typical Must-See TV show threw together characters from all walks of life. Superstore put a white business-school dropout (Ben Feldman) to work at a big-box store under the supervision of a Honduran-American mom (America Ferrera) who chose supporting her young family over college; the larger cast of characters represents a broad range of racial, sexual, class and religious identities, as well as disability and immigration statuses. A similarly diverse cohort of fresh-faced high school grads, stay-at-home moms, oddballs and con artists in need of mid-career credentials form a study group in Community.

Though their chief purpose was to make us laugh, these sitcoms were premised on the idea that people from very different backgrounds, with very different beliefs, could get along. Even the most homogenous among them thrived on friendly banter between adults with divergent, sometimes ill-informed worldviews; think paleontologist Ross arguing evolution with space cadet Phoebe on Friends. These shows’ vast, often demographically diverse audiences all found something to chuckle about—because they didn’t take themselves or each other too seriously.

The network comedy is, from a business perspective, a casualty of the streaming revolution. But its death is also emblematic of a culture that has become so politically, socially and generationally fragmented, with heightened sensitivities on all sides, that large swathes of the American public can’t even agree on what’s funny anymore. With that in mind, as we feast on all that pay-TV has to offer, let’s also pour one out for the kind of show that got tens of millions of us to gather in our living rooms at the same time each week, to laugh at the same jokes.

Mehdi Rajabian is considered a dangerous criminal In Iran: he’s been arrested several times, spent months in solitary confinement, and is closely monitored by the government while under house arrest. His offense? Creating music with female vocalists.

“In Iran, women can’t sing and it’s prohibited,” Rajabian explains over text message. “Prison and prohibition have caused Iranian artists to be afraid to be [on] my album, and I say they are right.”

But fear hasn’t stopped Rajabian, 31, from moving forward: This week, his second album, Coup of Gods, arrives on streaming services Friday with appearances from two female American singers, despite the fact that the Iranian government has repeatedly warned him not to release it for the past two years. Although the album may land him back in jail, Rajabian believes it is his moral and artistic duty to release it. “My opinion is that an artist must be a protester through all his or her body,” he says. “I believe in the freedom of music and the flag of freedom of music will be seen above the skies. This is the motivation to keep going.”
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Music in Iran has been tightly controlled since the country’s 1979 Revolution, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini banned broadcast music and said it caused people to be “inactive and frivolous.” Since then, government entities like the Ministry of Islamic Guidance have laid out strict rules about music based on their interpretations of religious texts. While these rules are not explicitly codified, they are enforced by bureaucrats who often crack down harder on women than men. Pop music is censored; women can’t sing alone in front of non-related male spectators; dances are deemed amoral. Two years ago, the country’s Education Minister alleged that circulating videos of Iranian schoolchildren recreating a dance challenge were part of a “political plot” designed “to create anxiety among the people.”

“Very few of these rules are written down in law; much of it is arbitrary and arbitrarily enforced. So you could simply be denied a permit if you are caught producing music that violates the state’s rules or prosecuted,” Jasmin Ramsey, communications director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, wrote in an email.

Rajabian has been the target of similar accusations for more than a decade. In 2007, he created the company Barg Music as a portal for distributing underground and alternative Iranian music. Six years later, he was arrested and accused of propaganda against the regime, blasphemy and illegal music activity. Barg Music’s records were confiscated and the office was sealed.

Upon his arrest, Rajabian was taken to Evin Prison, one of the country’s most notorious prisons, former detainees of which have reported experiencing torture, 24-hour interrogations, threats of dismemberment and being forced to eat dirt. Rajabian says he was held in solitary confinement for three months, which was brutally difficult but inspired him as a composer. “When you close your eyes for three months and you only hear sound, you just understand what the power of sound means,” he says.

Rajabian ended up back at Evin in 2016 for the online distribution of underground music, spending another two years there and only getting released after undergoing a hunger strike alongside his imprisoned brother, the filmmaker Hossein Rajabian, in order to get outside treatment for health issues. Rajabian says the treatment he received in Evin, combined with the hunger strike, greatly weakened him physically, impaired his eyesight and left him unable to play an instrument.

But Rajabian had started composing music in his head in prison and was determined to finish it. With no Iranian musicians willing to participate on the project for fear of retribution, Rajabian reached out to musicians around the world, including from the Middle East, Russia, Argentina as well as the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra.

One of those musicians was the American singer Aubrey Johnson, who Rajabian messaged on Instagram after finding her work online. Johnson would send audio files of herself improvising over Whatsapp; Rajabian would give her feedback and suggestions, and she would re-record her parts and send them back. “It was very much a trial and error collaboration—a totally new way of making music for me,” she says.

Johnson says the project took on even more of a personal meaning for her when she started teaching an Iranian student at the Berklee College of Music. “She told me she had never sung in public as a soloist her whole life. She’s basically had to risk her and her family’s safety in order to do this thing that she loves,” Johnson says. “I think making great music is a great form of protest—and I couldn’t be happier to be involved in something like this.”

Rajabian compiled clips from Johnson and others around the world while sitting on the floor of a secret basement in Sari, Iran. Using the music workstation Cubase, he weaved together the many disparate influences—including Western strings as well as Iranian instruments like the duduk and the tombak—to create an album he hopes will be unequivocally global in its nature. “I was able to remove accent, location and time from my album,” he says. “The way it’s adjusted you can’t find any geographical location.” Of the album’s title, Rajabian says that it “maybe prophesizes a coup on a specific day, or a specific time.”

That statement will surely not be endearing to Iranian officials, who have been threatening Rajabian with reimprisonment for months. Rajabian says he still has a suspended three-year sentence that he may be asked to serve at any time. When asked if he was scared of being arrested again, Rajabian replied, referring to his weakened physical condition and meager surroundings: “No, it doesn’t really matter to me anymore. You saw my situation. It could not be more astounding.”

Rajabian’s spirit has been lifted by the involvement of Harvey Mason Jr., the president and CEO of the Recording Academy, the body that hosts the Grammy Awards. Earlier this year, Rajabian wrote an email to Mason Jr. detailing everything he had been through and his hopes for his new album. “It was such a crazy story. He told me what he was working on and ultimately sent me the music. When I heard it, I was really excited: I was impressed at the craftsmanship and the creativity that went into the record,” Mason Jr. says.

Mason Jr. mastered the album and is releasing it through his label, HundredUp; there will be no formal connection between the album and the Recording Academy itself. But Rajabian hopes that the album’s proximity to the Grammys through Mason Jr. might even be able to impact his legal situation. “I am currently banned from leaving Iran,” he says. “This year I am going to try my luck for the Grammy Award, if I am a candidate for this award, surely my lawyers in Iran will follow up on my banned exit.” Mason Jr. declined to comment on Rajabian’s Grammy aspirations.

Regardless what happens with any awards, Rajabian intends for the album to convey that “no power can stop the freedom of music, even at the cost of my life… Now this is either my success or my complete destruction.”

In the grand scheme of Christian forgiveness, maybe it’s a nice idea to try to reclaim the honor, or at least the humanity, of the late evangelist TV personality Tammy Faye Bakker, one-half of the 1980s prayer-and-praise power couple Jim and Tammy Bakker. That’s the goal, apparently, of Michael Showalter’s cartoonishly sincere biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye, in which Jessica Chastain plays the chirpy entertaingelist as a sympathetic country sweet-pea, largely a victim of her husband’s ambition and an only semi-willing accomplice in the greed and corruption that eventually brought the couple to ruin—and also robbed countless regular working people of their hard-earned money.
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In the 1980s, Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker, husband-and-wife chipmunks united in the service of the Lord, ruled the Christian-television airwaves with their cheesy but unapologetically celebratory show, designed to fund their ever-growing PTL Club operation. Folksy, apple-faced Jim spread the word of God like margarine, greasing the wheels to entice the folks at home to call in with their donations. Tammy Faye, with her helium speaking voice and peppy gospel-tune belting—not to mention her clown-on-the-town makeup, which became more garish and extreme as the duo became richer—was lively and sugary and fun to mock. Of all the ’80s TV evangelists—among them Pat Robertson and Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell, both of whom played roles in the Bakkers’ rise and fall—Jim and Tammy Faye seemed the most benign, if you could apply that word to any peddler of rigid religious ideologies who’s also in love with the almighty dollar.

These two certainly seem harmless at the start of The Eyes of Tammy Faye. The movie follows the Bakkers’ pious trail from their meet-cute in Bible college, through the early years of their marriage, in which they took to the road as traveling preachers, to their first taste of success, as the hosts of a TV show that used puppets to teach kids about God’s love. Andrew Garfield plays Jim Bakker as an aw-shucks charmer who’s honest about his moneymaking goals: he’s convinced the Lord doesn’t want him to be poor, though it turns out that Tammy Faye is the one who comes up with the puppet idea, a hint that everything they built might have begun with her.

Chastain plays Tammy Faye with a feral eagerness that’s poignant until it turns grating. In the movie’s early scenes, she’s a saucy seductress, a good girl who wants to have fun—within the bounds of holy matrimony, of course. Her eyes are wide and unblinking, like a doll’s; her skin is brushed with porcelain innocence. This is a far cry from the older Tammy Faye we see in the movie’s preamble, who reveals to an unseen makeup artist that her harsh eyebrows and lipliner are tattooed on, and her black-dagger eyelash fringe is non-negotiable: It’s her trademark, she insists, and people wouldn’t know her without it.

But even though Chastain has clearly studied Tammy Faye’s mannerisms and vocal tics and runs through them admirably, the movie’s candy-colored varnish seems to have waterproofed it against anything so messy as real feeling—or judicious assessment. Tammy Faye suffers all manner of hardships and rejections: Jim loses interest in her sexually and engages in dalliances with both men and women (though the movie is cryptically unspecific about the former, perhaps for legal reasons). He becomes consumed with making money for his expanding empire—Garfield plays the older, graying version of Jim as a half conniving, half distracted striver. Meanwhile, the increasingly miserable Tammy Faye succumbs to an almost-affair with Nashville record producer Gary Paxton (Mark Wystrach), gets hooked on Ativan and is eventually coerced into making a tearful confession of her sins on television.

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This is potentially moving dramatic stuff—or at least bracing melodramatic stuff—but Showalter’s dramatization has a glazed, glassy-eyed surface, like a Pee-wee Herman movie without any of Paul Rubens’ surreptitiously sophisticated kindergarten wit. The Eyes of Tammy Faye was adapted by writer Abe Sylvia from Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s 2000 documentary of the same name, which was anchored by interviews with the fallen Tammy Faye that painted her as a rather sweet, remorseful soul. (She died in 2007.) And to the degree that fairness matters, Showalter (director of 2017’s The Big Sick) is fair to Tammy Faye, dramatizing her heartfelt 1985 interview with pastor and AIDS patient Steve Pieters (played by Randy Havens)—significant because in doing so, she not only courted the wrath of Falwell, an increasingly powerful conservative evangelist bully (played, with creepy accuracy, by Vincent D’Onofrio), but also risked alienating millions of hardcore Bible thumpers who sincerely believed AIDS was God’s way of wiping homosexuals off the face of His earth.

But mostly, Showalter’s movie wavers between parody and pathos, never certain where it wants to land. And no matter what you think about the real Tammy Faye—and no matter how much pity you might feel for her after the Bakkers’ kingdom crashed around her—she was still culpable in bilking PTL Club “partners,” as donors were called, out of millions. (The movie shows her buying multiple fur coats, for herself and for others. She never asks where the money is coming from.) What’s more, she was also a complicit cog in the politically ambitious Evangelical machine of the 1980s, whose influence over American government spreads its ugly shadow to this day. A great movie can make you feel empathy for a seemingly unredeemable character. But The Eyes of Tammy Faye succeeds only in presenting its subject as a camp curiosity, a one-woman pep rally for the Lord in linebacker shoulder pads, misunderstood and in need of redemption. She seemed more human back in the old days, when we were allowed to make fun of her and didn’t have to apologize for it—in the days before she became her own mini-church of the almighty eyelash.

To criticize Cry Macho—Clint Eastwood’s 39th or 40th movie as a director, depending on how you’re counting—is like picking on a cave painting because a buffalo’s legs aren’t portrayed realistically, to decry today’s sunset because yesterday’s was redder, to announce loudly that water just isn’t wet enough. The picture is so purely Eastwood—with all the good and bad that implies—it’s as if it had been drawn from his veins. Eastwood, 91, also stars, playing a seen-it-all rodeo rider and horse trainer, Mike Milo, who forges an unlikely friendship with a 13-year-old kid, Rafo (Eduardo Minett), teaching him a few lessons about masculinity along the way. (Hint: Being a man is not about being macho.)
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The story is almost embarrassingly simple. But the picture slides by pleasantly enough like a stream in a Budd Boetticher movie, a calm place to take off your boots and set a spell as you reflect on the true meaning of manhood, the necessity of overcoming hidden heartache and the pleasures of finally, in your sunset years, succumbing to the love of a good woman. The plot, set in 1979, goes something like this: Mike’s old boss, rancher and rodeo owner Howard (Dwight Yoakam, always a welcome presence), is concerned that his son, Rafo—a boy he’s never really known, the result of a one-night stand—is being abused. He sends Mike to Mexico City, where Rafo lives with his mother; his instructions are to retrieve the boy, luring him with promises of his own horse and other fun stuff. A fistful of dollars in his pocket, Mike—who once had a family himself, now long gone—heads across the border. Rafo’s mother, Leta (Fernanda Urrejola), is a rich sex nymphomaniac who lives in a lavish house. (You can’t make this stuff up.) She tells Mike her son is no good—he’s a thief, and spends his nights at the cockfights—before appearing in a silky boudoir outfit, the better to lure Mike into her bed. (Somehow, you knew this was coming.)

Stalwart Mike resists. Besides, he’s already located Rafo—and met the boy’s prize rooster, a flinty, handsome creature named Macho—and senses that the kid isn’t as tough as he thinks he is. The two set off on a desert odyssey that involves stolen vehicles, some lessons in training wild horses, and pleasant days and evenings spent in a café owned by a kind, observant, gorgeous middle-aged widow named Marta (Natalia Traven). The sparks between Mike and Marta fly, or at least skitter toward one another with resolute, shuffleboard-style jauntiness.

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Shot by Ben Davis, Cry Macho has a handsome, muted sheen: Its vistas of dusty purple clouds and ochre desert plains evoke warm winds and the slow passage of time. The material itself—written by Nick Schenck and N. Richard Nash—has some age to it: Eastwood first became aware of it some 40 years ago, and it bounced around Hollywood for decades with no luck, until Eastwood remembered it and sought to bring it to life.

And through it all, he pokes along with admirable energy. In his long and fertile career, Eastwood has sometimes been a great director and often just an O.K. one. But in recent years, movies like The Mule and Gran Torino have brought us some unexpected riches of crankiness. In these pictures, Eastwood no longer tries to hide his age, because he knows he no longer can. He confronts the indignities of old age with a surly, comforting growl. In Cry Macho, he’s slim and straight as a rod, and his every movement says, “Don’t worry about me, kid.” Damned if it doesn’t feel like a blessing—because who wants to have to worry about eternal legend Clint Eastwood?

I do wonder what 91-year-old actress could—or would—cast herself in a movie where she finds redemption and tender love with a man at least 30 years younger than she. The idea seems unimaginable, maybe partly because most spry 91-year-old women have a lot more on their minds than the pursuit of younger men—too many museums to go to, operas to attend, mahjongg games to play. But if Eastwood can get away with his old-dude fantasies, or even almost get away with them, why not? Sometimes a man has to believe he’s still got it, that the attractive younger señora wants nothing more than, for the rest of his days, to hold him close in a charming café lit by ultra-symbolic sunset. If this fantasy means so much to a man, it’s an act of kindness to let him have it.

The baby was delivered with no complications.

On Friday, Lil Nas X, who has been flaunting a baby bump on social media for weeks as an absurdist metaphor for his impending album release, finally dropped his debut album, Montero. Over the last year, Lil Nas has proved he’s no one-hit wonder riding the memory of “Old Town Road”: his two recent singles “Montero (Call My Be Your Name)” and “Industry Baby” were both huge hits, generating hundreds of millions of streams and dominating multiple news cycles for their provocative and explicitly queer videos.
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Montero contains both of those songs as well as 13 others, many of which have been floating around the internet for months (with Lil Nas often posting snippets of them himself). The album shows him reflecting on his troubled familial past, slipping into different musical styles and teaming up with some very famous friends, including Megan Thee Stallion and Elton John. Here are the main takeaways from the album.

Read More: Historians Decode the Religious Symbolism and Queer Iconography of Lil Nas X’s ‘Montero’ Video

Montero is far from a rap album

While Lil Nas X is often categorized as a rapper, outright rapping makes up a small minority of Montero; it’s clearly not Lil Nas’ mission to match the lyrical prowess of his namesake. Instead, the artist operates near the center of pop music as we know it in 2021: big melodies encased in big hip-hop beats, slippery guitars, sentimental ballads, plenty of homages to ’80s and ’90s rock music. The album is buoyed by some of the most successful producers working in the pop/rap space: Take a Daytrip (Dua Lipa’s “Good In Bed”), Nick Mira (Juice WRLD’s “Lucid Dreams”), Carter Lang (Swae Lee & Post Malone’s “Sunflower”).

Lil Nas has also prioritized improving his voice, which was at times shaky and cautious on his latest release 7 EP. Lessons with Kuk Harrell—the vocal producer who has worked with Beyoncé, Rihanna and Celine Dion—have molded Lil Nas into a powerful and malleable singer, especially on the despondent ballad “Void” (admittedly, he gets a little help from autotune).

Meanwhile, Lil Nas has also improved as a rapper: he crisply delivers a rapid-fire, DaBaby-esque flow on “Dollar Sign Slime,” nearly matching Megan Thee Stallion bar for bar over the song’s triumphant fanfare. (More on her later.)

The lyrics are hugely autobiographical

While “Old Town Road” was a Western fantasy, the lyrics on Montero hit much closer to home, and reveal parts of Lil Nas’ troubled pre-fame past that he has sometimes been reticent to talk about in public. “2018 I was in my sister’s house all summer, songs wasn’t doing numbers, whole life was going under,” he sings on “Dead Right Now.” In that song, he sings that he would have committed suicide if he hadn’t made it and grapples with his mother’s addictions: “Told me she’d be clean, but I’m knowin’ that her ass is a deceiver.”

In other parts of the album, he sings about waking up on the floor on top of a deflated air mattress; of being self-conscious about the size of his lips. Forgiveness, reinvention and finding home are recurring themes: “I’ve done things in my past I’m sorry for, so please don’t hold me/ Old people in my life should know that I am not the old me,” he sings on “Don’t Want It.”

What’s the next big hit?

As a former member of a stan army, Lil Nas is native to a culture that cares fiercely about numbers—a culture in which inherent value can be derived from streams, views and topping the charts, as if music were a sporting event. And while the album already contains two huge hits in ”Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” and “Industry Baby,” there are other contenders on here that seem predestined for countless radio spins and TikTok reposts.

The most obvious potential hit here is “That’s What I Want,” whose music video was released in conjunction with the album. “That’s What I Want” is an upbeat pop song that shares a tempo, chord progression structure and bittersweetness with one of this year’s biggest hits: The Kid Laroi’s “Stay.” “That’s What I Want” has already been employed in 15,000 videos on TikTok even without a major push from Lil Nas himself; don’t be surprised if its soaring singalong chorus is ubiquitous in a month or two. Nearly as catchy is the more hip-hop-oriented “Scoop,” featuring an expectedly sassy and quippy verse from Doja Cat.

The guest appearances on Montero are excellent

Speaking of Doja Cat: she’s one of five shrewdly-chosen features on the album, alongside Jack Harlow, Elton John (who lays down some tasty piano licks on “One Of Me”), Megan Thee Stallion and Miley Cyrus. These are the best lines from each of the rappers:

Jack Harlow (“Industry Baby”): “Say your time is coming soon, but just like Oklahoma, Mine is coming Sooner”

The delayed rhyme—and the way that “Oklahoma” is out of sync with the previous rhyme scheme—makes the punchline hit even harder.

Doja Cat (“Scoop”): “All them rehearsals got me tight, look at thе payoff/ And now my body look like something you’d eat cakе off”

I still don’t really understand what this means—is she saying her body looks like a platter?—but it makes for a great visual.

Megan Thee Stallion (“Dollar Sign Slime”): “Damn, watchin’ me gotta turn you on/ I should have my own category in porn”

Self-explanatory. But really, Megan’s verse is stuffed to the brim with hilarious one-liners. The irony is that Megan presents fairly seriously in her public persona but has some of the funniest bars out there, while Nas, who is funnier than virtually every comedian on social media, turns mostly serious when his words have to rhyme.

@lilnasx♬ industry baby by lil nas x – lil nas x

Lil Nas X has grown tremendously as a songwriter

Despite its stylistic diversity, Montero still operates within a fairly narrow pop confines: while his music videos and online persona are confrontational, the music itself is conservative. But Lil Nas has grown tremendously as a songwriter since 7 EP, on which many of the songs relied too heavily on one idea or riff. He now adopts pre-choruses, choruses and interludes; he develops lyrical and musical ideas through songs, and pays much more attention to musical micro-details instead of simply rapping over Ableton loops repeated ad nauseum. Convincingly-delivered torch ballads like “Void” and “Am I Dreaming” make it clear that there’s so much more talent here beyond memes or shock value; that he could host a Vegas residency in 20 years just singing his heart out over a live band.

Yes, this record is very gay

Nas has made his sexuality front and center of his recent videos and performances, and on Montero he continues to proudly flaunt his queerness. “Ain’t talkin’ guns when I ask where your dick at,” he says on “Scoop.” On “That’s What I Want,” he professes to needing a “boy who can cuddle with me all night.” It’s clear that the onslaught of criticism and homophobia he’s faced over the last year have had little power to silence his freedom of expression. All in all, Montero is the work of an unbound, creative and well-connected 22-year-old who kicked open the industry doors two years ago and has no intention of vacating his top spot anytime soon.

Norm Macdonald was responsible for some of the worst punchlines in Hollywood history.

“There are times when Bob has something on his mind—when he wears a hat!” the comedian proclaimed stone-faced at Comedy Central’s Roast of Bob Saget in 2008, as Saget, his target, chuckled with clear confusion and discomfort. As the room grew quiet, unmoved by the joke, Macdonald decided not to move past the clear dud, but instead to double down: “No thoughts at all—JUST A HAT!”

But it was exactly this type of delivery and commitment that made Macdonald, who died on Tuesday after a long, private battle with cancer, one of the most unique and irreplaceable voices in modern comedy. Macdonald thrived on the edge of convention and in moments of silence and discomfort; through his unique approach, he weaved the dumbest punchlines into comedic masterclasses. And while other comics turned their desire to provoke into an excuse to bully or punch down, Macdonald’s transgressions were usually more conceptual: he thumbed his nose at the art form of the joke itself.
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From “Weekend Update” to icon status

Norm Macdonald joined Saturday Night Live in 1993—his Burt Reynolds impression on the recurring Celebrity Jeopardy sketches was unforgettable—and later became the anchorman of “Weekend Update,” developing a reputation as a sardonic livewire liable to veer dangerously off script. (At the ESPYs in 1998, his joke about O.J. Simpson left its target, Charles Woodson, shaking his head in disgust as if he had been tackled on the football field.) Though he would lend his voice to or make cameos in many movies throughout his career, the one he co-wrote and starred in, 1998’s Dirty Work directed by Saget, bombed. He was fired from SNL that same year, allegedly due to his repeated jokes about O.J. Simpson, who was friends with an NBC executive.

But somehow, his failures led to much greater success. “I got demoted at SNL, and then I got sort of hot,” Macdonald told Rolling Stone in 1999. “Then the movie didn’t happen, and then I got really hot.”

After that point, Macdonald became one of the most respected and beloved comics to younger generations, primarily through stand-up sets and late-night appearances. There are unspoken rules for comedians appearing on late night shows: be succinct and amiable, play nice with the other guests, plug your movie, keep it moving. One of Macdonald’s comedic inheritors, the fellow Canadian Nathan Fielder, recently skewered those conventions on an episode of Nathan For You.

But Macdonald was working in that space first, gleefully undermining hosts at every turn and egging on confrontation, a mischievous smile preceding every provocation. “In all sincerity, I know you don’t like to hear these things and emotions—you’re like Nixon,” he said straight to David Letterman’s face. At a daytime appearance with the Lonely Island, he said to the trio, with a glint in his eye: “I call them [Andy] Samberg and the other couple of fellas.”

His most frequent sparring partner was Conan O’Brien. Over more than two decades, Macdonald came on O’Brien’s show regularly to tell story after incoherent story, to O’Brien’s mock chagrin (and underlying delight). In 1997, he completely derailed a now-infamous interview with Melrose Place star Courtney Thorne-Smith, mocking her career trajectory and her new movie Chairman of the Board: “I bet the ‘Board’ is spelled ‘B-O-R-E-D,’” he exclaimed, causing Thorne-Smith to cover her face and O’Brien to jump out of his chair.

A singular style encapsulated by one cheesy joke

One of the most famous, and funniest segments Macdonald ever had on O’Brien’s show came in 2017. Over four bumbling minutes, Macdonald weaves a story, now referred to as “the moth joke,” about a depressed Russian moth at a podiatrist’s office, delivering each increasingly dark line with a mixture of eloquence and awkward, halting cadences; he steamrolls unperturbed over every one of O’Brien’s interjections. When he finally arrives at the punchline, it is as obvious and juvenile as can be—but his ability to build tension, to keep the audience wrapped around his finger, to place himself deeply within his own absurdist story, and his exultant delivery of a punchline he himself knew was cheesy all contributed toward making the joke an all-timer.

Macdonald was a man of his time; he made plenty of racially-based and gender-based jokes that would be considered offensive by today’s standards. Off-color comments he made in 2018 while promoting his new show made it clear that he was out-of-step with the current comedic moment. But his impact on the next generation is immeasurable. Colin Jost has said he modeled his “Weekend Update” persona after Macdonald’s; Seth Rogen also said he “ripped off his delivery” at the start of his career.

It’s easy for comedians to try to be scandalous and undermine conventions—but much harder to make such unfunny material so hilarious. After a particularly groan-inducing punchline on Conan in 2014, Andy Richter scolded him: “It’s like somebody saying, ‘I gotta show you something,’ and then they take you on a four mile hike to show you a dog turd.” But the overflowing laughter of the trio told a different story. Many have tried to replicate his cringey success—but there will never be another Norm Macdonald.

The vibration of my phone nudged me awake. It was Sunday morning, and I was sleeping in after a late night out with my girlfriends.

I rolled over, thinking it was likely my mother shaming me for not meeting her at church, but the phone buzzed again and I reluctantly opened it. It was not my mom, but a friend who had tagged me in a Facebook post that read:

This one rocks. Tarana Burke look. Me too. Predators are everywhere. Work, home, houses of worship, you name it.

—

If all the women who I know who have been sexually assaulted or harassed wrote “me too” as a status . . . and all the women they know . . . we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.

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I grabbed the phone off its charger in a panic and read the message again more carefully, thinking that the friend who posted it had written the entire thing. I was so confused about why she would do so without consulting me first. I’d been doing the work of bringing empathy into the fight against sexual violence for many years now using this language.

I sent her a private message thanking her for tagging me and explaining that I had been working hard to relaunch my website and broaden the work around “me too,” and that I didn’t want to diminish it by creating a simple hashtag in response to the recent news stories. I had, of course, seen the media coverage of the Hollywood mogul who had been exposed as a serial predator of women. I read the stories of the actors who had courageously come forward to talk about the horrific things they suffered at this man’s hands, and I had watched as the unfolding conversation reverberated across social media. Other than these women being survivors of sexual violence, none of what was happening in Hollywood felt related to the work I had been entrenched in within my own community for so many years. Seeing “me too,” the phrase I had built that work and purpose around, used by people outside of that community, was jarring.

Read More: TIME’s Person of the Year 2017: The Silence Breakers

My friend was confused too. She explained that she hadn’t created the original post or the hashtag; she was simply reposting it and giving me credit because she knew I had long been doing this work using that phrase. My heart dropped at the thought of inviting people to open up and share their experience with sexual violence online without a way to help them process it. I knew it could lead to emotional crisis in the absence of caring, empathetic environments. This would be a disaster if it went viral.

Then she told me it was already all over the internet.

With just a few clicks on my laptop, hundreds of thousands of tweets flooded my screen. I scrolled down and down and down, each hashtag feeling like a needle pricking my skin. Some of the tweets had pictures attached, some were full of emojis, and others used every last one of the allotted 180 characters. And they all said #metoo.

I picked up my cell and frantically dialed one of my best friends, who knew exactly what to say. “Just take a step back and breathe.”

I listened to her reassure me that whatever was happening was not the end of the world and could likely be solved. I walked her through my morning, explaining that the hashtag was on both Twitter and Facebook, but not significantly in our community—meaning Black folks—on either platform. The tears I was fighting back started streaming down my face as I thought about how this had ballooned so quickly.

“This can’t happen,” I said through my tears. “Not like this! Y’all know if these white women start using this hashtag, and it gets popular, they will never believe that a Black woman in her forties from the Bronx has been building a movement for the same purposes, using those exact words, for years now. It will be over.”

I was in full meltdown mode, so my friend delivered some straight talk. “Listen, you know everybody, and everybody that knows you knows that ‘me too’ is yours. We’ve been watching you do the work for years. In this day and age, you gotta pull out receipts. So—pull out your receipts! Put them out there and let them know this already existed.”

She was right. It had been a little over 11 years since I had been living and working in Selma, Ala., and had started using the phrase “me too” as a way for survivors to connect with each other and to make a declaration to the world. I had gone all over the country—any and everywhere folks would allow me space—talking about how the exchange of empathy between survivors of sexual violence could be a tool to empower us toward healing and into action. I reassured myself that I had conducted enough workshops, participated in enough panels and given out enough T-shirts and stickers to earn the right to say that this work, and the phrase that encapsulated it, was mine. And I did know a lot of people. My long and varied background in social justice work, arts and culture and journalism had afforded me a collection of friends and associates across multiple fields who I knew would stand up for me if I asked.

Read More: Meet the Woman Who Started #MeToo 10 Years Ago

I pulled myself together and went searching through my phone. I remembered a video my cousin took of me a few years earlier. I was giving a speech at the 2014 Philadelphia March to End Rape Culture explaining what the “me too” movement was and why folks should join us in furthering the work. I was wearing a black tee that had the words “me too” printed in bold, bright pink lettering. It was our signature shirt.

I watched the video again and took a deep breath. It felt like the “receipt” I needed. I drafted a message to go with the video and posted it to all my social media pages.

It has been amazing watching all of the pushback against Harvey Weinstein and in support of his accusers over the last week. In particular, today I have watched women on social media disclose their stories using the hashtag #metoo. It made my heart swell to see women using this idea—one that we call “empowerment through empathy”—to not only show the world how widespread and pervasive sexual violence is, but also to let other survivors know they are not alone. The point of the work we’ve done over the last decade with the ‘me too’ movement is to let women, particularly young women of color, know that they are not alone—it’s a movement. It’s beyond a hashtag. It’s the start of a larger conversation and a movement for radical community healing. Join us.

And then I waited. Without exaggeration, next to giving birth, this felt like the longest night of my life. I had an outpouring of support from friends and chosen family, all familiar with the work I’d been doing and how much of myself I’d put into it. But despite the support, my fear lingered about everything I’d worked toward coming crashing down around me.

My post and video were being shared widely, and in my speech I had talked about how tired and scared I was that my work would be co-opted. That was how I felt watching this hashtag galvanize social media. I shared my anxieties in a group chat I had with several others who are “in the work.” I talked about how overwhelmed I was, how I needed time to craft a proper response and get my website and talking points together. I told them that I felt hopeless because I couldn’t move at the speed of the internet. I had toyed with the idea of walking away from this work because it was so hard—and maybe this moment was a sign that I should give up. I had been trying in vain to amplify it for years, with zero resources and little support, and I was now going to have to fight a viral hashtag that probably wouldn’t be connected to the origins of the work at all. I was dejected.

At this point I knew little of how the hashtag had started. I had no idea that the actor Alyssa Milano had sent out the first tweet. I didn’t know the full extent of the responses, and I didn’t know if my attempt to insert myself by posting an old speech was shifting the conversation at all.

Then, about an hour into my scrolling, I came across a tweet that just said #metoo with a link attached. The link led to the woman’s personal blog where she had posted, in great detail, the story of her sexual assault in college. She wrote about how it wasn’t until she saw all the #metoo posts that she felt she could tell the story publicly and be embraced and supported. She wrote of the shame she had been carrying for years, and how the burden of her trauma kept her from living a full life. She wrote that witnessing the sheer number of people boldly saying #metoo online had made her feel less alone.

So many people had pulled these memories from the pits of their stomachs and the recesses of their minds. They came forward not knowing what would come next, but feeling far too compelled by the promise of community to let the moment pass them by. They hoped, for the first time, that they might feel less alone by sharing. Here was a woman feeling less alone because she had found a place to be seen.

Read More: ‘Our Pain Is Never Prioritized.’ #MeToo Founder Tarana Burke Says We Must Listen to ‘Untold’ Stories of Minority Women

Her post landed on my spirit like life lessons often do: hard, fast and with aching discomfort. I sat up in bed, tears flooding my eyes again. This time I cried for the anonymous woman. I cried for the sheer volume of tweets I had seen that day. I cried because, though I was exhausted, I knew exactly what was coming.

My assignment is always plain and clear once it is revealed. I am hardwired to respond to injustice. It doesn’t always sit well with me, but I’ve learned the hard way not to ignore it. It’s the same wiring that led to the creation of the “me too” movement. It’s what kept me working with children in the Deep South, even when it required the kind of sacrifices that others might walk away from. And it’s why I have always had a “community job” in addition to any actual paying job. From the moment I understood that organizing was the work that had to be done to respond to injustice, I knew I wanted to do it in service of my community. That realization—clear as a bell—came to me as a young teenager, and that bell rang again for me that night.

“What are you doing, Tarana?” I asked myself. I had spent the whole day wringing my hands and pulling my hair out trying to figure out how to save “my work.” It took a story from a stranger for me to realize that my work was happening right in front of me. After deciding all those years ago that I wanted a life in service of community, in this moment I had to decide: Was I going to be who I said I was?

Back in 2005 when I started working on “me too,” it was so difficult to get people on board. Activists, organizers, youth workers, social justice warriors, and the like would agree that it was necessary work, and congratulated me for taking it on, but they still wouldn’t do much to support or further our efforts. What motivated me to continue were the little Black and Brown girls who trusted us with their secrets, their pain, their shame, their worries, their anger, their fears and their hopes.

I fell asleep with that on my mind and woke the next morning with a different fire. I didn’t know who, if anyone, would listen, but it was clear that I had to share my vision for this movement with the world. It was clear that all the folks who were using the #metoo hashtag, and all the Hollywood actors who came forward with their allegations, needed the same thing that the little Black girls in Selma needed—space to be seen and heard. They needed empathy and compassion and a path to healing. I wanted to be a part of making sure they had what they needed.

Excerpted from UNBOUND by Tarana Burke. Copyright © 2021 by Tarana Burke. Reprinted with permission from Flatiron Books. All rights reserved.

American writers Patricia Lockwood, Richard Powers and Maggie Shipstead have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious literary honors in the English-speaking world.

Lockwood, also known for her poetry, was shortlisted for her debut novel No One is Talking About This, while Pulitzer Prize winner and previous Booker nominee Powers secured a spot on the list for Bewilderment. ​​Shipstead was shortlisted for her third novel, Great Circle. The Booker Prize was opened up to writers outside of the U.K. in 2014, as long as their submissions are in English.
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The winner, who will take home $69,257 (£50,000) and earn international acclaim, will be announced on Nov. 2.

Led by historian Maya Jasanoff, the judges said the global scope of the shortlisted books, in both their authors and settings, felt “transporting in a year where so many of us have been confined to our homes.”

Three of the novels deal with race. British-Somali writer Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men, reimagining the life of the British-Somali man wrongfully convicted and executed for murder in 1950s Wales, while South African writer Damon Galgut’s The Promise follows the lives of a white family in post-apartheid South Africa. Anuk Arudpragasam’s “hypnotic” novel, A Passage North, follows a Tamil survivor of the Sri Lankan civil war as he revisits the trauma endured by his grandmother’s carer.

Appropriate for fiction published during a global pandemic, each of the six “immersive stories” deals with “pertinently poignant” issues of life and death, the judges said. Bewilderment and No One is Talking About This, for example, grapple with the intersections of grief and crises in the age of technology.

Read more: The 34 Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2021

Intertwining time periods are a common stylistic theme among the shortlisted books. Shipstead’s Great Circle parallels the life of a missing female pilot in the 1950s with a 21st century actress starring in a film about the aviator. Arudpragasam’s A Passage North overlays the protagonist’s present day return to his home country with memories of a traumatic past.

During a livestream the judges from across the world, including twice Booker-shortlisted novelist Chigozie Obioma and former Archbishop Rowan Williams, described the intensity of whittling down long-listed 158 books to just six during a pandemic. “This has been a year for reading, unlike any other,” said 2021 chair Jasanoff. The “acutely introspective” nature of the shortlisted novels is “reflective of the experience of reading in lockdown,” she said.

Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro was among the long-listed nominees not to make the cut with his novel Klara and the Sun, drawing surprise among some onlookers. The British author’s The Remains of the Day won the award in 1989.

Last year’s Booker Prize winner for fiction was Douglas Stuart, for his debut novel Shuggie Bain, about a young boy growing up in poverty in 1980s Glasgow. Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl Woman Other and Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments were joint winners in 2019.

Everyone has the tea leaves; no one has the actual tea. Will the movies come back this autumn? Will they ever come back at all?

The answer is…that no one has the answer. There’s little wisdom to be had, and any wisdom out there is hardly conventional. What we do know is that the fall 2021 movie release calendar is unlike anything we’ve seen in years: more varied, more exciting, more studded with actors we really want to see. Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya jet into the future for Denis Villeneuve’s earnest and vivid adaptation of Frank Herbert’s supposedly unfilmable sci-fi epic Dune; Adam Driver and Lady Gaga swan through Ridley Scott’s juicy-looking House of Gucci (just one of three movies Driver stars in this fall, two of them directed by Scott); Oscar-winning Nomadland director Chloé Zhao tries her hand at the superhero genre with Eternals, starring Salma Hayak and Angelina Jolie. There’s more, like the long-delayed Bond thriller No Time to Die, as well as the wild Cannes Palme d’Or winner Titane, which redefines the notion of what makes a car sexy. And the early fall festivals—Venice, Toronto and Telluride—poured even more jewels on the treasure pile, like Pedro Almodóvar’s ardent melodrama Parallel Mothers, Paul Schrader’s serrated redemption romance The Card Counter and Jane Campion’s gorgeous and perceptive western The Power of the Dog.
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The big question is whether people will rush to see these movies in theaters or, their curiosity piqued, just wait until they’re available to stream. (Dune will have a dual release in theaters and on HBO Max.) Until a few months ago, everyone thought that movie fans—vaccinated ones, that is—would flock to theaters for big-ticket comedies and comic-book movies but would be more likely to watch more adult-oriented movies via streaming. That has proved to be only sort of true. Box-office returns for Black Widow, released simultaneously in theaters and via streaming, were disappointing. But the Ryan Reynolds comedy Free Guy and the Aretha Franklin biopic Respect—both launched only in theaters before being made available via streaming—lured a respectable number of moviegoers from their pandemic-era lairs.

And still, it all means nothing, especially with valid fears about the Delta variant swirling around us: this may not be the fall we return to theaters. So for now, it may be helpful to concentrate less on the question of “Will moviegoers return?” and more on “Do moviegoers want to return?” Because, in the end, whenever it truly is safe to venture back into theaters, that question will hinge on the desire of human beings—that is, potential ticket buyers—for a specific experience.

People who want to go back to the movies really want to go back; their idea of what movies can and should be hinges on a vision writ large in their imagination. Other, more indifferent viewers are happy to welcome the new delivery methods, depending on what’s most convenient for them. Either way, studios will find ways to make money off their products—and evidence suggests that most of them don’t care where or how you watch, as long as they make their money.

Everyone who continues to declare that movies watched big, with an audience, are over should stop to think about what this future, if it happens, will really mean. Already, even after just a year and a half of enforced (or semi-enforced) pandemic-era at-home viewing, the streaming pipeline is half clogged with products half-heartedly masquerading as movies: For every Netflix-backed Scorsese project, there are multiple Christmas Prince or Kissing Booth entries, a generic action picture like Extraction or a limp drama like The Last Thing He Wanted—a whole raft of movies that that end up being something almost nobody remembers having watched. That’s not to say movies in the latter group aren’t enjoyable on some level. And plenty of unmemorable, low-budget fare found its way to movie screens long before streaming existed. But even those who’ve happily given up on the idea of ever going back to the movies should ask themselves if this mishmash selection is really what they want.

We should also be careful about who is telling us—even indirectly—that streaming is the new and ideal model. Disney, in addition to owning the Marvel and Star Wars franchises, subsumed 20th Century Fox in 2019 and launched its own streaming service, Disney+, just a few months later. Recent executive shakeups at ViacomCBS, owner of Paramount Pictures, suggest the company is shifting away from big theatrical releases and looking to squirt more product through its own streaming service, Paramount+. The companies that used to make big-screen movies now have a great deal invested in feeding you a steady diet of small-screen ones. Why wouldn’t they be working overtime to convince us that it’s better, easier, and cheaper to watch movies at home, now that they see which way the money funnel is pointing? All the better if they can make it look like it was our idea in the first place—that way they can pretend they’re merely offering us a wonderful service (for a price), rather than killing off movies as we know them.

The new system is adequate, if somewhat soul-killing, if you just want to sit on your couch and have something, anything, new to watch every few days. And yes, you’ll still see some terrific movies that way. (Campion’s The Power of the Dog arrives on Netflix in late December, and even though the movie’s glorious vistas deserve an expanse bigger than even most big-screen TVs, the story should be enough to hold you. And among the streaming services, Netflix at least shows some commitment to keeping the theatrical experience alive, as does Amazon.) But I still don’t think the rise of streaming spells the end of big-screen movie watching. We need to think about who has a stake in keeping that experience alive—and increasingly, it’s not the big studios. Movies will be kept alive by people who care about them as artistry first and a means of making big bucks second. Streaming just may become the major delivery system for what we used to think of as big-studio theatrical releases. But smaller, smarter films aimed at grown-ups may be the ones that save the movies.

There are always people who want to feel that they’re plugged into the larger world, who want to be able to see the smaller or non-Hollywood movies they read about—films by Pedro Almodóvar or Pablo Larraín or Claire Denis—on the big screen. Admittedly, there are going to be places in the country, and the world, where that’s just not possible. But is there a chance that the streaming revolution might strengthen, rather than chip away at, people’s desire to see a certain kind of movie on the big screen? There’s a certain type of person—you know who you are—who doesn’t want to spend even one more minute cooped up at home. We don’t know how many of those people there are, but our pandemic experience may end up being a good thing for cities and towns that already have art-house cinemas. And is it possible that the new world awaiting us—one we can’t yet step out into, safely—might actually be hospitable to a new wave of smaller, independent movie theaters, designed to serve all of those who have never stopped caring about movies? Stranger things have happened: in music, vinyl has been kept alive by boutique enthusiasts of all ages, while CDs—though still beloved by some—are as quaint as gramophone records.

In the end, it’s too convenient to point to the pandemic as the single biggest factor in shifting moviegoing habits. More realistically, our months—now stretching into more than a year—of semi-confinement merely exacerbated or accelerated changes that were already under way. But however we got here, and wherever we’re going, we should treat this abundant autumn as a blessing, a reward for having survived a trying time. The future of movies is unwritten—but let’s get through this harvest, a rich one, before we chisel the epitaph.

I have been working as an actor for many years. But never before in my work—at least not until April 2021, when I was filming the seventh episode of Reservation Dogs—have I had an out-of-body experience or cried out involuntarily. This time, my body took over. I was shaking, adrenaline coursing through my body as all my nightmares of losing loved ones were unearthed to haunt me anew.

The reason for my visceral reaction: never in my career as an actor, or in my experience as a viewer of TV and film, have I experienced a work of popular culture that addresses suicide among Indigenous peoples with the care and directness that Reservation Dogs does.
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Suicide has affected every Indigenous community on Turtle Island and countless Native families. According to the Centers for Disease Control, Native American people have the highest rates of suicide of any racial/ethnic group in the United States. And in Canada, First Nations people living on and off reserve, Métis and Inuit, die by suicide at a higher rate than non-Indigenous people—in some cases, upwards of 33 times higher.

But these statistics are not just numbers to us; they represent our real friends and family members, each one with an entire community struggling alongside them, and grieving for them, after they’ve departed. We may hear these numbers in mainstream news reporting , but we rarely encounter the lives of our Indigenous kin who died by suicide. We rarely witness the aftermath, the friends they’ve left behind. And that is exactly what is explored in the heartbreaking and heartwarming seventh episode of Reservation Dogs, a show that I have the privilege to be a part of, playing the character Elora Danan.

The series, created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, takes place on a reservation in Oklahoma where Elora and her three closest friends live. Throughout the episodes, these friends continually reminisce about the fifth member of their group and best friend Daniel, who tragically passed away one year earlier. In episode seven, titled “California Dreamin’,” we finally learn what happened to him: he died by suicide, and it was Elora who found him.

This topic isn’t merely a storyline. It’s one of the first times Indigenous people have had an opportunity to collectively mourn and heal in a mainstream production. Everyone behind Reservation Dogs, all of the key creatives and cast members, have deeply personal elements of ourselves baked into this episode—and I am no exception.

Suicide is something that’s plagued my own rez and crept far too close to my family. Countless cousins and community members have been lost to it, leaving our families in shambles. Growing up, I nearly lost someone I love profoundly. Words fail to describe the despair and anguish of having a suicidal loved one. I thank creator every day that I still have those closest to me around. But not all of our kin have been so fortunate. Daniel as a character was inspired by a real person, and in filming this episode, he was treated as such.

Our incredible showrunner Sterlin Harjo shared his heart with us, and the story of his family, trusting us with this episode. And Tazbah Chavez, the gifted writer and first-time television director, infused the story with her upbringing and experiences while painstakingly crafting this piece.

Filming this episode of Reservation Dogs challenged me like no other role has. Tazbah worked intimately with me and Dalton Cramer, who plays Daniel beautifully in heartbreaking flashbacks. In preparation for the scene in which Elora finds Daniel’s body, Tazbah explained to me exactly how we would shoot it. Creatives behind Rez Dogs pulled inspiration from, and made a nod to, our executive producer Taika’s film, Jojo Rabbit, where Jojo finds his mother’s body, and the audience pieces together her identity by the shoes on her feet.

Ensuring that we didn’t capture graphic imagery was paramount—for communities that have experienced so much trauma, it’s crucial to avoid triggering or re-traumatizing viewers, as we endeavor to depict the issue with humanity and empathy. Tazbah walked me through the mechanics, where Dalton was rigged up on a crane lift system—but I made the decision not to enter the space or to look at him propped up on the rig before she called “action.” I wanted to have my initial reaction captured on film, and that first reaction was what made it into the episode.

I only noticed afterward that my inner forearms were scraped and bruised from trying to lift Dalton’s legs with all my strength. I’m by no means a method actor, but filming that scene felt frighteningly real for me that day.

I was left breathless, but I finished the scene only to be met by a huge support system on set. The production lowered Dalton down between each take, and he embraced me. I desperately needed that time to hold him, to physically feel that he was O.K. We also had a Muskogee elder, Wotko, hold an opening and closing ceremony on set for all cast and crew, to ensure we created a space to reach the depths we needed to, and that we didn’t carry those feelings with us long after wrap. We filmed this poignant scene enveloped by sage smoke and community.

Daniel is more than just a character in a fictional story. To us, he is real, and he is continually made real through our stories and the longing for our loved ones. This episode was steeped in each of our experiences, and we all came together to treat this subject matter, this story, and this reality for so many Indigenous people with the utmost care and respect.

Reservation Dogs is, first and foremost, a comedy series; our people have used humor as a coping mechanism and means of survival since 1492. But my greatest hope for “California Dreamin’,” and for this entire series, is that it can open doors for conversations between Indigenous families and communities around how we can support our struggling loved ones, remember those we’ve lost, and collectively heal as we look toward the future.

If you or someone you know may be contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. In emergencies, call 911 or seek care from a local hospital or mental-health provider.

Devery Jacobs was born in Kahnawà:ke Mohawk territory and is an award-winning actor and filmmaker. Jacobs is mainly known for her performances in Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013), Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (2019-20) and her leading role in Taika Waititi’s hit FX series Reservation Dogs (2021).

(NEW YORK) — Billie Eilish went full glam in a huge peach ball gown at the pandemic-delayed Met Gala on Monday night, while fellow host of the evening Amanda Gorman was breathtaking in cobalt blue custom Vera Wang with a diamond laurel wreath in her hair.

Rihanna, ever the Met Gala queen, showed up late in a huge black Balenciaga look and hat accompanied by A$ap Rocky in a multicolored quilted coat from ERL. She wore over 267 carats of Bulgari diamonds, including two choker necklaces.

Co-host Timothée Chalamet raced onto Fifth Avenue to take selfies with fans before walking up the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for his entrance after a marching band and gymnast Nia Dennis kicked off the long-awaited evening. Last year’s gala was canceled due to the pandemic.
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This year’s official theme of the fundraiser for the museum’s Costume Institute was “American Independence,” leaving plenty of room for interpretation. Just ask Lil Nas X, who did a Lady Gaga-esque strip tease on the carpet in gold Versace, from cape to armor to embellished jumpsuit.

Eilish, the belle of the ball, wore Oscar de la Renta. She told Vogue: “It was time for this. I feel like I’ve grown so much over the last few years.”

Chalamet had Converse sneakers on his feet but Cartier diamonds on his look. Chalamet called his outfit, including Rick Owens sweatpants, “a bit of everything,” just like America. Alfonso Navas, the fashion editor for Esquire, lauded his fashion choices as a “a smart play on the theme by interpreting American icons in sportwear.”

Gorman’s dress, which included more than 3,000 hand-sewn crystals, was made to evoke a starry night sky. She told Vogue she felt like Lady Liberty, reimagined. Her crown, the star poet said, was a nod to publishing. Another of the hosts, Naomi Osaka, wanted to celebrate all her cultures — Japan, Haitian and the U.S. — and picked a Louis Vuitton gown designed in collaboration with her sister, Mari Osaka. It was a swirly blue, aqua and purple print with long black ruffle sleeves and a wide red sash.

If this gala produced a trend, it’s huge statement sleeves, with some stars and stripes thrown in. There was a smattering of red, as in the red, white and blue of the American flag. Karlie Kloss wore red Carolina Herrera with huge ruffles at the neck and sleeves. Jennifer Hudson also chose red sans sleeves.

Also in red: Ella Emhoff, the daughter of the country’s second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, and Vice President Kamala Harris. She wore a bodysuit and high-shine trousers by Stella McCartney with a sheer top and a crystal design in all the right places. She wore Adidas by McCartney embellished in red and made partially of a recycled material derived from ocean plastic.

The gala, drawing standouts in fashion, TV, film, sports, tech and beyond, included tiny but mighty Olympian Simone Biles in an 88-pound Area embroidered gown of silver with a top adorned in a firework burst pattern and a huge train carried up the museum steps by six men. The gown was a collaboration with Athleta.

Ralph Lauren dressed Jennifer Lopez in a faux fur wrap with a dark brown crystal and beaded look in her signature plunge at the neck and high slit, a wide-brimmed Western-style hat on her head. She and Ben Affleck smooched with masks on days after their red carpet coming out in Venice.

Dan Levy took the party’s theme to the extreme in a blue confection from Loewe. It had, according to the brand, “printed leg of mutton sleeves” on a polo shirt with an applique of two men kissing.

Yara Shahidi wore silver custom Dior complete with a light hood. She said she was inspired by Josephine Baker. Harris Reed, in collaboration with Dolce & Gabbana, put Iman in a huge golden feathered head piece and equally adorned skirt of crinoline with a jacquard bustier.

Blake Newby, the style and beauty editor for Essence, called Iman’s look “both massive and angelic.”

Gala overseer Anna Wintour arrived early with a wave to the crowd accompanied by her pregnant daughter, Bee, in a floral design with ruffles at the neck.

Along with oh-so-many jumpsuits, there were plenty of classic red carpet looks and a wave of gold, the latter including a Peter Dundas look worn by Mary J. Blige. It plunged to the belly button and beyond at the front and back.

MJ Rodriguez, the “Pose” star and first transgender performer to pick up an Emmy nomination in a major acting category, wore an old glam, black-and-white corseted look from Thom Browne. The designer called it a modern-day twist on classic American sportswear. She attended the gala with purpose.

“Not a lot of trans girls like myself get this opportunity,” she said. “The human condition is what I’m here for.”

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez showed up in a Brother Vellies by Aurora James gown of white with a message splashed in red across the back: “Tax the Rich.”

“It’s really about having a real conversation about fairness and equity in our system, and I think this conversation is particularly relevant as we debate the budget and reconciliation bill,” she said.

The evening had its share of what-the-heck moments, like a couple of horse heads on dresses and a green-haired Frank Ocean carrying a fake baby with a green face to match. Thom Browne gave the walking fashion statement Erykah Badu an extra-tall top hat with a bulky black look, a bunch of crystals and chunky bling around her neck.

Her purse was a black leather dachshund.

The fashion girls represented, Gigi Hadid in classic white Prada fresh from a slew of runway walks at New York Fashion Week, and Kendall Jenner in glittery, revealing silver by Givenchy. Jenner’s look was inspired by “My Fair Lady.”

The entrance of Jenner’s older sister, Kim Kardashian West, caused a stir as fans wondered whether her estranged husband Kanye was the masked man at her side. It was none other than Demna Gvasalia, the creative director for Balenciaga who created her get-up: A black face covering worn with a T-shirt dress, catsuit and boots.

Newby told the AP the easiest and most obvious ways to stay true to the evening’s theme is by wearing American designers. Many of the greats, including Michael Kors, showed up, along with smaller brands.

“Black American designers had their moment,” she said, noting looks by Christopher John Rogers, Aliette and Sergio Hudson.

Lorde wore a custom upcycled gown with detailed beadwork and embroidery by Emily Bode, a New York designer who repurposes fabrics and garments for her menswear line.

“Her exquisite gown may have done more to make the case that upcycled fashion can be fabulous than a hundred sustainability summits,” said Erik Maza, style features director for Town & Country.

There were hair statements as well.

“Geometric bobs also made an appearance with Sophia Roe and Tracee Ellis Ross showing off very avant garde ’dos, while Yara Shahidi and Kaia Gerber channeled old Hollywood glam with deep waves,” Newby said.

After 18 months in sweats, it was “clear that celebrities were beyond thrilled to give it their all,” said Sara Tan, beauty director for a millennial-focused lifestyle site Refinery29.com.

They did in clothes, but also accessories and beauty, she said, noting Gorman’s sparkly jewels across her face and Eilish’s short, curled bob and classic winged liner in a definite ode to Marilyn Monroe.

Eilish, Gorman, Iman and AOC were the night’s best dressed for Refinery29’s fashion director Irina Grechko.

“Not only did Gorman wear an American designer, Vera Wang, but she also nailed the ‘American Independence’ dress code with a book-shaped clutch that read ‘Give Us Your Tired’ in reference to the Emma Lazarus poem featured on the base of the Statue of Liberty.

The gala, which raises money for the museum’s Costume Institute, was pushed last year from its traditional May berth and morphed this year into a two-part affair marking the institute’s 75th anniversary. It coincides with the opening of “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion,” the first of a two-part exhibition at the Met’s Anna Wintour Costume Center.

Organizers invited 400 guests, less than the number that usually attend.

(LOS ANGELES) — Britney Spears announced her engagement Sunday to her boyfriend Sam Asghari with an exuberant post displaying a diamond ring engraved with the word “lioness.”

The news comes days after her father filed to end the court conservatorship that has controlled the singer’s life and money for 13 years.

She wrote “I can’t (expletive) believe it!” with an Instagram video post where she winks, kisses a smiling Asghari on the cheek and answers “yes!” when he asks if she likes the ring.

Asghari posted his own photo of Spears showing her ring finger to the camera.

The four-carat diamond ring is engraved inside the band with “lioness” because it’s his nickname for her, the company Forever Diamonds NY said in a statement.

The couple met on the set of the “Slumber Party” music video in 2016.

The singer told a judge in June she wanted to marry Asghari and have a baby with him during an impassioned plea to end the conservatorship, but said she hadn’t been allowed to remove an intrauterine device for birth control or even drive with him.

Legally, Spears can get married, but the conservatorship must approve it as with other major life decisions.

Spears was previously married to Kevin Federline, with whom she shares two sons, ages 14 and 15. She was briefly married to childhood friend Jason Alexander in 2004.

In 2016, my doctor, Kelly Baek, a no-nonsense reproductive endocrinologist in L.A., gave it to me straight: “Your best chance for a healthy baby would be surrogacy.”

I had been through an adenomyosis diagnosis and more miscarriages than I could confidently count, and all I could do was nod. I was not ready to do that. I wanted the experience of being pregnant. To watch my body expand and shift to accommodate this miracle inside me. I also wanted the experience of being publicly pregnant. I would shake off the distrust society has for women who, for whatever reason—by choice or by nature—do not have babies. I had paid the cost of that for years, and I wanted something for it.
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I held out for a year after Dr. Baek suggested surrogacy, and instead chose to endure more IVF cycles and losses. Everyone comes to the decision differently. Near the end of that year—that hopeful and hopeless year—I had a new plan to take Lupron, which basically quiets the adenomyosis. Dr. Baek told me I would have a 30% chance of bringing a baby to term. But the side effects of Lupron can be intense: you’re basically throwing your body into early menopause and you can break bones very easily.

It was something my husband said that changed my mind. I told him I wanted to try the drug. Dwayne was quiet, then said, “You’ve done enough.”

Read More: Why We Shouldn’t Be Afraid to Talk About Our Miscarriages

There was a desperation dripping off him that I couldn’t ignore. A desperation of wanting things to be right with us.

In 2013, before we were married, Dwyane had a baby with another woman. It should go without saying that we were not in a good place at the time that child was conceived. But we were doing much better when he finally told me about the pregnancy. To say I was devastated is to pick a word on a low shelf for convenience. There are people—strangers I will never meet—who have been upset that I have not previously talked about that trauma. I have not had words, and even after untold amounts of therapy I am not sure I have them now.

“You’ve done enough,” he said.

I looked at D with an instantaneous white-hot rage. I was fighting with my husband about what was best for my body? Did he really think that surrogacy and a baby was our chance to set it right? To rebalance? I said coolly, “You’re going to be the voice of reason now? Really?”

He looked me in the eye. “As much as we want this baby, I want you,” he said slowly. “We’ve lost too much in our relationship for me to be okay with encouraging you to do one more thing to your body and your soul.”

I read those words now and hear them again. I didn’t receive this as concern at the time. It sounded like an acknowledgment of failure. Because at that point I would have sold my soul to get out of the endless cycle of loss. What was the going rate for souls? What was mine worth, anyway? The experience of Dwyane having a baby so easily—while I was unable to—left my soul not just broken into pieces, but shattered into fine dust scattering in the wind. We gathered what we could to slowly remake me into something new. There was no way to disguise where I’d been glued back together.

Clearly, my feelings weren’t originating from a healthy place. So much of what made the decision so difficult was that if I didn’t submit to a surrogacy, then I was convinced I needed to let Dwyane go. Even if he didn’t want to, I had to let him find someone who could give him what he wanted.

But I loved him. Each day, he had worked to be forgiven, and I had chosen to do so. And part of this journey of making peace with our love is also making peace with ourselves. I had come to accept that without that awful collision in our lives—this Big Bang moment in our relationship that set our galaxy as we knew it—we wouldn’t have become the individuals we wanted to be. The me of today would not have stayed with him, but would I be who I am now without that pain? I remember a small voice in my heart telling myself to leave, but my fear of public humiliation was so great that I didn’t take my own advice.

In the aftermath, I invested so much time in making peace between us that I gave myself absolutely no self-care. And now there I was, still putting my life second to some shared mission. Why was I so willing to risk myself for a chance? If there was another way for me to bring my baby into the world, and have my health, why was it so hard for me to make peace with that?

For weeks, I went down a rabbit hole of books, surrogacy message boards and conversations with our fertility agency. At the top of the surrogate food chain were married, white, American women who have their own kids. The belief is that if they are married, they have a built-in support system, and if they have more than one child, there’s proof they can do the job. On the message boards, people can be anonymous, so they rank surrogates by race. I got the sense a lot of white families-to-be were more comfortable with brown people as surrogates—Latina and South Asian—who were often classified as “breeders.” Now, I am Black, and I am used to hearing how people speak of women of color, but this was some Handmaid’s Tale sh-t.

We chose the most ethical agency we could find, and answered most of their questions about prerequisites with “We don’t care.” Religion, active lifestyle, diet. Two months later, in early December, we were presented with a surrogate who seemed to check all the boxes. We were introduced over the phone, but the conversation was made awkward by the fact that we couldn’t reveal our identities to protect the anonymity of both parties. She said all the right things about how she experienced the gift of life having her own kids, and wanted to give this gift to others. But I was cautious, wondering if people were prepped to say that.

After she was cleared by Dr. Baek, we agreed to meet in person in her office. As I got dressed that morning, I realized this was like the best and worst blind date ever. I wondered what outfit said, “I’m grateful, but I’m also not a loser. And I’m not some actress, you know, farming out her responsibilities.” This woman and her husband had the power to look at me and say, “Ennh . . .” I needed her to like me and accept me. Accept us, since I was also standing in for Dwyane, who was in the middle of the season. I was very aware that the surrogate and her husband didn’t know we were Black.

I got there early. Dr. Baek put me in a small office, and the liaison from our agency arrived. “Are you comfortable?” she asked. I smiled and nodded, unable to put words to the feelings. There had been so much fear and failure, but now there was a vague relief that I was finally here. And something else: anticipation. I had not let myself have that for so long that I had difficulty recognizing it.

The door opened. Like a blind date, you look everywhere at once, knowing you are being looked at, too. The first thing I noticed was a nose ring. Oh, I thought, she’s a cool-ass white girl.

And then I noticed her notice me. Her eyebrows shot up. “Oh, ho ho ho,” she said. There was an excitement to her voice, and I smiled. “This is such a trip. I have your book on hold at four different libraries.”

I have never been done wrong by readers. I started laughing, and we hugged. “So, I guess now I can get a copy, huh?” she joked.

“Yeah,” I said, meaning yes to everything. Her name was Natalie, and when her husband came in I saw they matched. Free spirits with an aura of goodness to them. They had an easy rapport and were affectionate with each other. I hadn’t known that would be so important to me, knowing that she had a partner in this. I called D and put him on speaker, and as they directed their attention to the phone, I looked up at them. You’re those people, I thought. You really want to help others.

When we got the positive pregnancy test in March 2018, my first thought was, “Wow. Sh-t. This is really happening.” The due date was Thanksgiving.

We’d even begun to pick out names. When I was in my 20s and thought my life was going to be a little different, I’d begun keeping lists of baby names. There was one name I saw at the end credits of a TV show or movie: Tavia. That would be pretty, I thought, with a K. Kavia. That name made it onto every hopeful list I kept. Dwyane knew the list by heart, too, and we both felt it. This hope, this starburst, was her.

Near the end of the first trimester, we all returned to Dr. Baek’s office, this time with Dwyane, for the first 4-D ultrasound. Two couples crowded into a room built for one, awkward in our affection for each other, yet still feeling like strangers. This was the first time Dwyane had met Natalie and her husband in person, and our hugs were those of people who did not know each other but had survived something as a unit. She was showing me her stomach, turning to the side, cupping the weight of my own maternal ineptitude. This growing bump that everyone thought I wanted to see was now a visual manifestation of my failure. I smiled, wanting to show I—we—were so happy and grateful. But part of me felt more worthless.

Natalie lay down for Dr. Baek to pass the ultrasound wand over the bump. “There she is,” she said. And she was. There. Here. This very clear little baby in there. Her big-ass head, her spine, her little heart pumping, pumping, pumping. Determined to live. It was suddenly incredibly real. Dwyane took my hand, and there was so much happiness on his face, I lost it. My cry was a choke stopped up in my throat, tears streaming down.

It was grief. I’d had so many miscarriages. I say the following with the caveat that I am steadfast in being pro-choice. I was on a fertility journey at 44. The smallest cell was weighted with the expectation of life. A zygote was a baby, just on potential alone. When one of my eggs was examined, that was a baby. When Dwyane got a sperm analysis, that was a baby. Every swimmer was our baby. But when I miscarried in the first trimester, I never thought I had lost a baby baby. I had never let it count. Looking at the screen, I understood how many potential babies I had lost. That’s why I was crying. A floodgate of grief and sorrow overcame me, threatened to drown me.

I saw my husband so happy, and I was not a part of it. I felt a chasm widening between us. I was embarrassed to be crying so much, but everyone was looking at me with smiles and nods. They thought these were tears of gratitude. The awe of witnessing the start of life. I was reliving death. Of course I was grateful, it would be impossible not to be. But what I was grateful for was that this life might be spared. That this heartbeat might continue, beat strong for decades, long after my own stopped. So many had stopped inside me.

I allowed the misreading of my tears. Crying showed that I was a good mom. My first performance in competitive mothering. Nailed it.

I was on the other side of the world from my daughter when I began to let myself look forward to her arrival. We were in Beijing on business for Dwyane and brought friends with us. It was the end of July, the five-month mark we had never made it to. Dwyane’s confidence was something to behold and envy. He was so certain she was going to make it that we told our friends. After my first miscarriage, I had never ever told people when we were expecting. Even this felt dangerous. The words were out of my mouth to my friends and I thought, What the f–k did I just do?

Dwyane broke out whiskey and cigars, and he announced that he wanted to get a tattoo of her name—we’d decided it would be Kaavia James—on his shoulders that night, written where his Heat jersey would cover it. I was terrified of the permanency. As he sat before me with his shirt off, I placed my hands where her name would be, and kissed the top of his head. I thought of something he would sometimes say to himself and to others: “My belief is stronger than your doubt.” He usually said this when he was counted out after an injury, or walking away from a deal everyone thought he was crazy to turn away. But this was different. I didn’t know if his belief was strong enough for both of us.

Read More: ‘We Had to Shut Up and Listen.’ What Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade Learned About Equality From Their Daughter Zaya

Then, a week after my late-October birthday, I was on my way to the gym before work. It was 11 a.m., and I’d been on the set late the night before. My phone rang. I looked down and saw Natalie’s name.

“My water broke,” she said.

“Hunh?”

I had Kaavia James’s due date in my mind as set. She would be here at Thanksgiving. I was just getting used to it being November.

“I’m headed to the hospital now,” she said. “Okay!” I said. “Okay.”

I called D. He was in Miami, and in the first few weeks of his final NBA season. He’d had a plane on standby for just this moment, and called the pilot right away. I called my mom in Arizona, and she got on the first flight. What happened next—more phone calls, a trip home for my pre-packed bag, booking a hotel room near the hospital—happened fast. My mom got there before Dwyane. D arrived, followed by the baby nurse and her crew.

And then Natalie proceeded to go into labor for 38 hours—so long that Kaavia James was in danger. The doctor had to do an emergency C-section because the umbilical cord had become tied around Kaav’s ankle. Now that I am Kaavia James’s mother, I know that she tied it herself because she was simply over it.

I definitely didn’t know how C-sections work. Turns out it’s all kinds of rough. But it was fast, and suddenly the doctor was holding her up for our wide-eyed gaze.

“Oh my God,” I said. The room was festive almost, people saying over and over, “Congratulations.” Just as quick, the doctor placed her on a little exam table and asked her name.

“Kaavia,” I said, my voice a choke.

This baby, given a name written on a wish list for decades, then tattooed on her father’s shoulders. She was loved even as an idea. My body seized in a full release of every emotion. Relief, anxiety, terror, joy, resentment, disbelief, gratitude . . . and also, disconnection. I had hoped that the second I saw her, there would be a moment of locking in. I looked over at Natalie and her husband. There was a stillness to them. I looked at Kaavia James on the table, and then back at them. It took all of us to create her, so I wanted to share this time with them.

The nurses took Kaav to the newborn nursery. Dwyane, my mom and I all reassembled in a hospital room, waiting for them to weigh Kaav and clean her up. I put on a surgical gown for modesty so I could do skin-to-skin bonding with her. My mother and D were crying, our surrogate was crying, our baby nurses were crying, and I was a mess. Then the door opened and Kaavia James was brought into our lives.

So much time has passed. So many firsts. Yet the question lingers in my mind: I will always wonder if Kaav would love me more if I had carried her. Would our bond be even tighter? I will never know what it would have been like to carry this rockstar inside me. When they say having a child is like having your heart outside your body, that’s all I know. We met as strangers, the sound of my voice and my heartbeat foreign to her. It’s a pain that has dimmed but remains present in my fears that I was not, and never will be, enough.

And Dwyane leaves me with another riddle that has no answer. I can never know if my failure to carry a child put a ceiling on the love my husband has for me. Yes, I am Baby Mama number three, a label that is supposed to be an insult. But is the injury not that label but instead the asterisk next to my name in the record? The asterisk denotes that the achievement is in question. “She didn’t really earn the title.”

If I am telling the fullness of our stories, of our three lives together, I must tell the truths I live with. And I have learned that you can be honest and loving at the same time.

Adapted from You Got Anything Stronger? by Gabrielle Union. Copyright © 2021 by Gabrielle Union. Reprinted by permission of Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

LuLaRich, a four-part Amazon docuseries chronicling the chaotic journey of the multilevel marketing company LuLaRoe, reveals details as wild as the patterns on the company’s signature “buttery soft” leggings. Structured like other MLMs in that it relies on independent retailers to sell its products, LuLaRoe was founded in 2013 by Mark and DeAnne Stidham to offer what turned out to be, for many, an impossible dream: the chance for mothers to earn enough money to support their families without leaving their children at home. The company grew at a rapid clip—by 2016 it sold a reported $1.8 billion in clothing. But by the following year, a “corporate tornado” blew through that success, as LuLaRich recounts.
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Filmmakers Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason, the team behind Hulu’s Fyre Fraud, take viewers through the company’s story with a quick pace underlined by a darkly comedic streak. The Stidhams agreed to an interview with the filmmakers, and their tales of supposedly wanting to create a company that empowered women, interspersed with the accounts from former LuLaRoe retailers and employees who say they were both personally and financially ruined by the company, paint a picture of desperation on many sides. Here’s what to know about LuLaRich and the company that inspired the series.

Read More: Pandemic Schemes: How Multilevel Marketing Distributors Are Using the Internet—and the Coronavirus—to Grow Their Businesses

What led to ‘catastrophic growth’ at LuLaRoe?

Good timing was a huge part of LuLaRoe’s almost too swift success: it grew popular as Facebook permitted users to livestream videos in 2015, which allowed LuLaRoe retailers to livestream their clothing sales. The freedom to use social media to sell coincided with the height of the #girlboss era and a darker aspect of life in the U.S.—families dealing with high childcare costs with no guaranteed paid parental leave policies were seeking easier ways to make money. For mothers who were pushed out of the workforce or needed extra income, or women encouraged to pursue a side hustle in order to always be earning, you couldn’t beat the allure of LuLaRoe: make money through fashion without even leaving the house.

“I was a mom to two kids and I was on low-income assistance. I wanted to be able to go to the store and swipe my card and not wonder if it was going to be declined,” LuLaRoe consultant Jill Drehmer tells the filmmakers. “And LuLaRoe said you can make full-time income on part-time work.”

But the wealth promised by LuLaRoe did not extend to everyone who joined the company. Those who joined early on, like Drehmer, prospered and rose in the LuLaRoe ranks, earning privileges such as cruises and bonuses. Others, however, share in the series that LuLaRoe took over and tanked their lives.

Mark and DeAnne Stidham, who throughout the series claim no wrongdoing and stick to putting forth a positive impression of LuLaRoe, do admit that things grew out of their hands too quickly. “This business was a runaway train from even the founders,” Nason told Variety. There’s no doubt LuLaRoe found high demand among people who wanted to be a part of the company. At the same time, the series shows, the Stidhams were staffing their headquarters with employees—including their own family members in executive level positions—who would end up not being qualified to handle such “catastrophic growth,” as Mark calls it.

From a ‘good in the beginning’ MLM to a cult-like company

The financial burden of becoming a LuLaRoe retailer added up before officially joining the company. In order to set up a business under LuLaRoe, prospective retailers had to find funds for the hefty startup cost—at least $5,000 and up to about $10,000 for clothing items that they would then attempt to sell to others, while also recruiting new retailers (the cost to join has since dropped to $499). For women looking to LuLaRoe as a new way to earn money, it was often a stretch. But the company’s ethos persuaded many to do whatever they could to join.

In the series, Mark and DeAnne Stidham claim they did not ask people to incur debt to start their businesses with LuLaRoe. Former employees and retailers interviewed in the series, however, say the couple would heavily imply the opposite. They tell the filmmakers that the advice they received ranged from being convinced to spread out the startup costs over multiple credit cards (putting the joining fee on a credit card is a common way to get started with MLMs) to being told to sell their breast milk to NICUs in need in order to afford more LuLaRoe inventory.

As the company grew rapidly, those who joined LuLaRoe in its early days found success, making tens of thousands of dollars both by selling LuLaRoe pieces and by signing up new recruits (creating a “downline”)—and earning a share of their profits. Like with many other MLM-structured organizations, for those who joined later on, the chance to make as much money dwindled, making it much more challenging for those retailers to come out of debt.

Beyond LuLaRoe’s attractions as an MLM, the series reveals even darker sides of the company. Among other details, top retailers allege that they were pushed by the Stidhams to have weight loss surgery to conform to their idealized image of what women should look like. They had to wear LuLaRoe clothing. There was a religious slant to things—Mark Stidham, who was raised in the Mormon Church, would quote the Book of Mormon at company events.

What began as a way to offer women financial independence ended up being a trap. Retailers allege they were pressured to “retire their husbands,” or earn enough money so their spouses wouldn’t have to work. Those husbands were then meant to join LuLaRoe, taking over operations from their wives. Eventually, it became clear that LuLaRoe was pushing forth a very specific idea of what “empowered” women and families should look like: heterosexual, with the man in charge—and everyone wearing patterned clothes.

The consequences, as we see by the series’ fourth and final episode, were real for the people who joined LuLaRoe with hopes of actually making money. Instead, multiple former retailers ended up with a deluge of debt, their marriages and families broken apart.

LuLaRoe falls apart but continues to operate

The magic was not going to last forever at LuLaRoe—despite its growth into a company that threw glitzy events and invited stars like Katy Perry and Kelly Clarkson to perform. As with its auspicious start, many converging factors led to rocky times at the clothing company. Crucially, the quality of LuLaRoe’s clothing took a dive, tearing easily or displaying strange prints in inopportune places. Retailers share that items in their inventory would arrive damp and moldy. As the complaints added up, the Stidhams responded by telling sellers to stop “whining.” Eventually, many retailers fell off and the company began facing dozens of lawsuits.

In 2019, the state of Washington filed a consumer protection lawsuit against LuLaRoe, alleging that the company “made unfair and deceptive misrepresentations regarding the profitability of being an independent retailer.” The company paid $4.75 million in 2021 to settle the case.

The glamour of its heyday is gone, but LuLaRoe persists, albeit on a pared-down scale. The startup costs for retailers have shrunk and the company is now required to be more transparent “to avoid future deception,” according to the terms of its lawsuit in Washington. But the dream it tries to sell—and the factors that bring women to companies like LuLaRoe—remain. As Mark Stidham says in the final episode, “There is still, right this minute as we sit here talking, a huge opportunity to sell clothing to women in America.”

American Rust opens with a montage of small-town denizens taking their morning drugs. In the first shot of the Showtime crime drama, protagonist Del Harris—a psychologically fragile police chief played by Jeff Daniels—crushes two prescription pills with a mortar and pestle, weighs the resulting powder on a digital scale, flicks just the right amount of it into his coffee, then hesitates before finally swallowing a third pill. Meanwhile, Del’s love interest Grace Poe (Maura Tierney) takes a break from sewing beads onto a wedding dress at Gelsey Dressmakers to pop over-the-counter painkillers. Grace’s adult son Billy (Alex Neustaedter) starts the day with a tallboy of PBR on the porch of the Poes’ shabby home. His buddy Isaac English (David Alvarez) pesters Isaac’s disabled father Henry (Bill Camp) into taking a sleeping pill. “Free drugs is free drugs,” Grace drawls, between drags of a bad bummed cigarette. Welcome to Buell, Penn.
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The point, like so many things in the show, is obvious: we have entered a place so desperate and depressing, locals can’t get through a day without medicating themselves. For anyone who managed to miss it, there’s a scene a few episodes later where a medical examiner documents a homicide autopsy at the bottom of a chart where every single other entry lists the cause of death as drug overdose. American Rust, which premieres on Sept. 12, sounds a lot like HBO’s recent hit Mare of Easttown on paper. Both cast famous actors as cops investigating murders in small, working-class Pennsylvania communities where everybody knows everybody. The difference is that Mare highlighted the specificity of its setting and characters, while Rust merely reproduces the grim clichés that abound in prestige-branded portraits of rural America.

Adapted from Philipp Meyer’s acclaimed debut novel, the show translates the book’s rich stream-of-consciousness prose into a flat, run-of-the-mill murder mystery, casting Daniels as the most generic detective antihero you can imagine. Haunted by his years on the Pittsburgh police force and, before that, his experience in the Gulf War, Del has deep thoughts to share about the root causes of violence: “Maybe that’s just what men do,” he says. “I don’t know. But it’s definitely what young men do.” (Never mind that, if he’s supposed to be the same age as the actor playing him, he would’ve been in his mid-30s by the time he reached the Persian Gulf.)

When he finds a dead body in the town’s disused steel mill, and immediately recognizes the victim, it isn’t hard to see how his insights into machismo might inform his investigation. Arrested six months earlier following a street fight and, thanks to Del’s intervention, sentenced to probation, former high-school football star Billy might be implicated in this act of violence as well. He and Isaac—a gifted young man who’s so frustrated by his inability to escape this place that, early in the show, he casually attempts suicide—certainly seem to be keeping a big secret.

As in Mare, the murder functions mostly as a way into the daily life of Buell’s universally unhappy residents. Billy carries a torch for Isaac’s older sister Lee (Julia Mayorga), his high-school sweetheart and this story’s obligatory young person who escaped; in the premiere, she calls her dad from an immaculate New York apartment to tell him she’s married a law-school classmate the family has never met. Tormented by constant hand pain, Grace narrowly escapes losing her home thanks to the quasi-legal sabotage of a foreclosure auction by the two men in her life—Del and her actual husband, the transient, philandering Virgil (Mark Pellegrino). In her ample spare time, she’s trying to organize Gelsey’s workers. Walking tropes are everywhere, from the pregnant bride marrying a guy named Jimbo to the guy brainwashed by cable news to hate Mexicans despite having fathered kids with a Mexican-American woman.

It’s not that characters and situations like the ones depicted here don’t exist in real Rust Belt towns. What pushes the show into the same misery-porn territory as Hillbilly Elegy is the impression executive producer, writer and showrunner Dan Futterman (The Looming Tower) creates that every stereotypical horror of rural life is happening to every person in every corner of Buell at all times. Rust doesn’t seem aware that people who are struggling might not feel sad 24 hours a day. Not even Daniels, Tierney and Camp—all great, as usual—can breathe much vitality into these underwritten sadsacks. In one scene, Del describes a hallway as smelling like “the opposite of happiness.” Did the shooting scripts get doused in the same cologne?

Mare was no full-throated celebration of Easttown, nor would such a cheery tone have been appropriate to the material, but it did give due consideration to the benefits of making your home among old friends and extended family (even if they turned out to be harboring a horrible secret or two). And, crucially, the show had something novel to say about the roles women end up playing in communities that take male rage as a given. American Rust never approaches that level of insight in the three (out of nine) episodes sent to critics, and nothing about its expository dialogue or unimaginative character backstories suggests that such profundity will be forthcoming. This is America! the show keeps shouting. And maybe, in a limited sense, that’s true. But it’s an America we’ve seen, through the same haze of Hollywood pity, too many times before.

We’re finally returning to the Matrix. The first trailer for The Matrix Resurrections, the much anticipated fourth entry in the seminal series, dropped on Thursday, and in classic Matrix fashion, it raises more questions than it offers answers. All the better that the plot remain a mystery before the film’s premiere in December.

What we do know is that Resurrections parallels the original Matrix film in many ways. In the trailer, we find out that Keanu Reeves‘ Neo and Carrie-Anne Moss’ Trinity are back inside the Matrix. Considering that both of these characters died in the third film, why they are still alive or whether these are even the same characters we met back in 1999 is up for debate. More curious still, Neo and Trinity both seem to have aged, while other characters in the film look to be younger versions of the characters we met in the original trilogy.
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If this is the same Neo from the original trilogy, he seems to have forgotten that he is the chosen one. He will need to journey back down the rabbit hole again. To that end, it looks like we will get new riffs on the iconic red pill/blue pill scene and the dojo scene, among other nods to the original film.

Fans are already excited by the prospect of returning to many of the most famous moments from the original film. But knowing filmmaker Lana Wachowski, co-creator of the original Matrix trilogy along with Lilly Wachowski, the parallels between the two movies don’t just exist for the sake of fan service. They’re almost certainly making a larger philosophical point. From this trailer alone, it seems Wachowski, who is co-writing and directing Resurrections, is interested in exploring themes like how technology has gained an even greater hold over us since the original trilogy debuted.

Here is everything that we know about Matrix Resurrections so far.

The Matrix Resurrections trailer breakdown

In the trailer, we meet an older Neo, sporting his John Wick haircut, living within the Matrix under the name Thomas Anderson (his name from the first film before he unplugs from the Matrix and becomes Neo). He doesn’t seem to be aware that he is living inside a simulation. He is leading a normal, if depressed, life, seeing a therapist and popping dozens of blue pills (more on those later). He sees a black cat, just as he saw one when he learned about deja vu in the original film.

Neo seems aware that something is amiss, telling the therapist, played by Neil Patrick Harris, “I’ve had dreams that weren’t just dreams.” As he says this, we see a shot of Neo walking along a street with the signature Matrix green coding scrolling along it. We then see flashes of several action shots, including one of Neo being unplugged from the Matrix.

Fans will recall that both Neo and his love Trinity died in the third Matrix film, Matrix Revolutions. Yet somehow they’re both still alive in this trailer. Neo encounters Trinity in a coffee shop, and the two shake hands. Trinity asks if they’ve ever met before. It seems like they have some memory of their past that has been erased.

And here come the pills. Neo is popping blue pills like candy. Even the most casual Matrix fan will recall that in the first movie Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne) offers Neo a blue pill and a red pill. The blue pill would return him to his normal life in the Matrix and help him forget he was living in a simulation. The red pill would take him further down the “rabbit hole,” and reveal the truth of his existence. Neo chooses red. But now he’s popping blue pills. They may be just a symbol of Neo trying to escape his depressing reality (and perhaps a commentary on our reliance on prescription medications) or these may literally be the pills that keep him from remembering what happened when he left the Matrix, whether he knows that’s what they’re doing or not.

We get a shot of a bunch of people in an elevator staring at their phones while Neo stares upwards, obviously disturbed. Wachowski is no doubt nodding to the fact that we are now, more than ever, dependent on machines and technology, far more so than when The Matrix premiered in 1999. And while at the end of the original Matrix trilogy, the humans and machines had come to a tentative peace in their war against one another, the machines may have subtly regained more control than humans have even realized. Thanks, iPhones!

We also get a quick shot of the book Alice in Wonderland, a movie heavily referenced in the first film. In that movie, Morpheus offers to take Neo “down the rabbit hole,” just as Alice started her adventure into a topsy turvy world. White rabbits kept popping up in the movie. In the Resurrection trailer, the song “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane chronicles Alice’s choice between two pills early in her journey—one that would make her big and another that would make her small—a nod to Neo’s own choice between two pills. We also get a reference to Alice in Wonderland’s sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, in the next shot as Neo looks in a mirror and sees what looks to be an older version of himself. Perhaps that’s his future self or true self or someone entirely different? A little bit later in the trailer we see a woman played by Jessica Henwick sporting a rabbit tattoo on her shoulder. A character named Dujour also had a rabbit tattoo in the original movie.

And here’s where things get interesting. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, wearing Morpheus’ signature sunglasses, holds up a red pill and blue pill to Neo and says, “Time to fly.” Obviously, this scene mimics Neo’s fateful choice in the first film? Is Abdul-Mateen playing Morpheus? Is this whole movie a reboot or a sequel or a prequel or none of those things? (More on those questions later.)

Henwick’s character then tells Neo that if he wants the truth, he’s going to have to follow her, and they walk through (you guessed it) a mirror or looking-glass. Then Abdul-Mateen’s character and Neo speak in a dojo, a recreation of another famous scene from the original film in which Reeves intoned, “I know kung fu” in the most Keanu Reeves way possible. This time around, Abdul-Mateen tells Neo that the only thing that matters to him is “still here.” We see a shot of Trinity with the Matrix code running down her face. So, it seems, Trinity is alive and perhaps exists in the Matrix and now Neo has to fight to save her. “You don’t know me,” says Neo, to which Abdul-Mateen’s character replies, “No?” suggesting, again, that he may be Morpheus or a different version of him, someone who does know Neo well. The two fight and Neo creates so much energy with his fists that he creates an explosion.

Now we get a series of action shots, among them: Our first look outside of the Matrix; Jessica Henwick pulling off some very Trinity-esque leaps and bounds within the Matrix; a man pointing a gun at Neo; another man, likely an agent like Agent Smith, taking over a police officer’s body; Trinity plugged into the Matrix; Trinity in that same coffee shop we saw earlier screaming; Abdul-Mateen’s character putting his fingers through a looking-glass and pulling back, scared; Abdul-Mateen’s character and Henwick’s character running up walls and dodging bullets; Neo rerouting a missile with his powers; and Neo and Trinity leaping off a building together, hand in hand.

Finally, we meet a character played by Jonathan Groff. “After all these years, going back to where it all started,” he says to Neo, “back to the Matrix.” It’s unclear at this point if Neo does or does not know the Matrix exists. But Groff has a malevolent grin on his face. He seems to be playing a Mr. Smith-type character, if not Mr. Smith himself. Though a teaser for the movie on WhatIstheMatrix.com shows his mouth shut so he can’t speak in the same way Neo’s was in the original film, perhaps suggesting he’s not the one in control.

What happened at the end of Matrix Revolutions?

The last time we saw Neo, he had sacrificed himself. In the first Matrix, Neo discovers that what he perceives as the real world is actually the Matrix, a space controlled by sentient machines to subdue humans. He breaks out of the Matrix and discovers that he is “the One,” a prophesied powerful figure. But he’s hunted down by Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), a program designed to police humans within the Matrix.

By the third movie, Matrix Revolutions, Agent Smith has grown ultra-powerful by absorbing the other beings and has designs to conquer the Matrix himself. Neo teams up with the machines to defeat Agent Smith and returns to the Matrix for a final showdown. During that fight, Neo sacrifices himself so that both he and Agent Smith will die. In his final moments, we see Neo holding his arms out in a Christ-like formation, light bursting from him.

Neo’s death reboots the Matrix. This has happened before—Neo learns that the Matrix has restarted over and over again. But because Neo created an alliance with the machines, it’s implied that the new world will be a more cooperative and peaceful one. This trailer suggests that may not have been the case. At the end of the movie, when asked whether she believes the peace between machines and humans will last, the Oracle responds, “As long as it can.”

Now, it seems that both Neo and Trinity are back in the Matrix—at one point in the trailer, we see Trinity plugged in. Does that mean that humans don’t have the free will to choose whether to live inside or outside the Matrix after all? Or has Trinity changed her mind about living outside the Matrix—maybe it wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. Or did this version of Trinity never leave the Matrix in the first place?

Is The Matrix Resurrections a prequel, sequel or reboot?

We don’t know, and that’s the fun of it!

When Neo rebooted the Matrix, did he somehow wind up further back in time with younger or parallel-universe versions of Morpheus, Trinity and Agent Smith? Are these totally new characters and people repeating the same actions we know from the first Matrix movie over again? Is Neo even Neo yet or in this film has he not yet discovered that he’s the Chosen One? Or is he taking the blue pills to forget?

This trailer is clearly hiding…something. And fans will have several months to theorize about how Neo wound up back at square one.

How are Neo and Trinity still alive?

It’s unclear. Both died in the third movie, Trinity in a hovercraft explosion and Neo by sacrificing himself in a fight to defeat Agent Smith.

We do know from the second movie, Matrix Reloaded, that Neo was not unique. He was, in fact, a part of the Matrix’s program and the sixth anomaly within the Matrix. So perhaps the Neo we see in the Matrix Resurrection trailer is a seventh, eighth or ninth anomaly.

But the title seems to contradict that theory. The Matrix was a metaphor for many things—die-hards are still debating what, exactly, it all means—but like Superman and Harry Potter and many other popular heroes, Neo is a Christlike figure who must sacrifice himself for the greater good. And then, inevitably, he’s resurrected. So perhaps this is the same version of Neo, brought back to life somehow by the Source. It looks like we’re now seeing that post-resurrection life, but it’s not the happy or simple ending other stories would have us believe it might be.

Where is Morpheus?

The original Trinity played by Carrie-Anne Moss appears in the trailer—but is she real? A memory? A specter? A vision of the future? Our original Morpheus, however, does not. Laurence Fishburne has insisted over and over again that he was not invited back to appear in the fourth Matrix installment, but that hasn’t stopped fans from theorizing that he will make a surprise appearance.

What’s with the pills?

Ah, the red pill and the blue pill, symbols that have lasted literal decades and become common parlance on the Internet to describe all manner of cultural, political and psychological phenomena.

Well, they’re back. According to a teaser video, those pills are called Ontolofloxin. This is likely a reference to Ontology, a branch of philosophy that deals with metaphysics and the nature of being—which is all rather on brand for The Matrix. The fact that Neo is popping these pills suggests that he is having something of a metaphysical crisis.

You wouldn’t be able to tell from watching Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings that Tony Leung took just two weeks to prepare for his fight scenes. In Marvel’s latest superhero film, the acclaimed Hong Kong star moves with ferocity and agility, swiftly dealing blows to his opponents in one artfully choreographed spar after the next. Leung had brought up hand-to-hand combat in an early meeting with director Destin Daniel Cretton. “I asked him, ‘Do I have to fight?’ He said, ‘No, you don’t have to fight, you have the rings so they would do all the CGI,’” Leung recalls. The corners of his eyes crinkle in a smile as he lifts up both forearms, where his character, Wenwu, would wear the 10 all-powerful bands that lend him supernatural strength and immortality.
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It’s noon in Hong Kong as we speak over Zoom, a few days ahead of Shang-Chi’s theatrical release on Sept. 3. “It ended up that I had to do a lot of fight scenes,” Leung says. “Luckily, I did a lot of action movies before in my acting career, so it was not too difficult.”

It takes just a quick glance at Leung’s extensive portfolio, spanning four decades, to see what he’s talking about. Take Hard Boiled, the 1992 Hong Kong film in which Leung plays an undercover cop battling in a hospital shootout with explosions galore. Or Hero, the Chinese wuxia movie released 10 years later, in which he stars as an assassin dueling in acrobatic sword fights. There’s also the 2013 drama The Grandmaster, featuring Leung as the renowned martial artist Ip Man simultaneously facing 10, maybe 20 men in physical combat.

The key distinction with his latest action film is that it marks the 59-year-old actor’s Hollywood debut. In Shang-Chi, Leung’s Wenwu is the leader of the terrorist group Ten Rings and the estranged father of the eponymous superhero (Simu Liu). The movie, which shattered Labor Day weekend records and grossed more than $94 million across its four-day opening despite the persistence of the Delta variant, follows the titular character as he faces off against his father and the 10 rings.

Wenwu is not a typical antagonist, and his layered story is part of what drew Leung to the role. “I think Marvel is trying to take a different approach with this supervillain,” he says in an interview conducted partially in English and partially in Cantonese with the assistance of a translator. “They want to explore the human side, not the evil side of this character.” Stricken with grief after the death of his wife Jiang Li (Fala Chen), Wenwu is bent on restoring unity to his family by any means. He is undoubtedly the main force of opposition to Shang-Chi’s endeavors—but he’s also a tormented dad just trying to do the right thing.

From Hong Kong superstar to Marvel supervillain

In some ways, it’s not surprising that Leung selected this multifaceted character to be his first Hollywood performance. In a 2000 interview, TIME asked the veteran actor if he received movie offers following his Best Actor win for Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love at the Cannes Film Festival earlier that year. “I’ve had some from the U.S. and some from Europe. But the characters on offer are very restrictive and I don’t see why they have to be,” Leung said. “That’s why I prefer to work in Asia. You get more space to act, more roles.”

A household name in Asia, Tony Leung Chiu-wai starred in a number of Hong Kong television serials in the 1980s before regularly playing lead roles on the big screen. Leung is perhaps best known for his performances in Wong’s films, including playing a lovesick police officer who slowly opens his heart again in Chungking Express (1994) and an enamored journalist who reins in his romantic feelings in In the Mood for Love. Beyond those collaborations, Leung has left an indelible mark in Asian cinema through roles like a death-mute photographer in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1989 Taiwanese drama A City of Sadness, an undercover agent in Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s 2002 Hong Kong crime thriller Infernal Affairs—later remade into the Oscar-winning The Departed—and a high-ranking official who is the target of an assassination plot in Ang Lee’s 2007 Lust, Caution. At home in a number of genres, Leung adds depth to his characters through the subtlest changes in his facial expressions. It’s partly why he’s widely regarded as the actor with “eyes that can speak” in Asia. “Every look he gives contains a thousand stories,” Accented Cinema puts it in a recent video essay.

Leung says that one emotion in particular was key to his portrayal of Wenwu. “Anger would be the biggest message through his eyes,” he explains. But it’s not uninhibited rage that viewers see in the eyes of Wenwu. It’s a quiet fury rooted in pain. “From his life experiences, he’s gone through so much and he really became the narcissist that he is,” Leung says. Though Wenwu lived a thousand years thanks to the power of the rings, the actor says the character never experienced love before meeting Li—who would become the mother of Shang-Chi and his younger sister Xialing (Meng’er Zhang). “Finally meeting Li, that would really bring out the romance that was unheard of for the character,” he says.

As for the character’s relationships with his children, there is a marked contrast between Wenwu’s interactions with Shang-Chi and Xialing. “I definitely feel the traditional legacy passed towards the son,” Leung says. “In Mandarin, we would say zhong nan qing nü (重男輕女), that’s the kind of dynamic that they have in the family.” The Chinese idiom refers to a gender bias that promotes a patriarchal worldview. In the film, Wenwu’s attention is largely focused on the titular character while Xialing remains in the background—until she boldly steps into the spotlight herself and joins the family tradition of martial arts.

Read more: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings Made Me Feel Seen Like No Other Hollywood Blockbuster Has

Significance of martial arts-inspired action scenes

The fight choreography for Marvel’s first Asian-led superhero film is based on martial arts. Leung says one particular action sequence was reminiscent of his past projects. “My first scene is fighting in the bamboo forest,” he says, referencing the dance-like duel between Wenwu and Li in the pair’s first encounter. “It reminds me of my early movies in my acting career, the costume movies,” Leung adds.

In Mandarin, the term gu zhuang (古裝) refers to period costumes that actors wear in historical films and series. Leung has starred in a number of these projects, including playing a near-blind swordsman in Wong’s 1994 film Ashes of Time, which co-starred his wife, actor Carina Lau. The movie, along with many earlier TV shows Leung appeared in such as The Duke of Mount Deer (1984) and New Heavenly Sword and Dragon Sabre (1986), were adapted from or inspired by Louis Cha’s wuxia novels. Cha, also known by his pen name Jin Yong, was influential in shaping this genre of Chinese fiction featuring martial artists with superhuman abilities.

It’s no coincidence that the element of fantasy signature to wuxia sequences is reflected in much of Shang-Chi’s action choreography, from Wenwu’s face-off in the bamboo forest to hand-to-hand combat elsewhere. In an interview with Empire, Cretton said that in addition to drawing inspiration from Jackie Chan, the film’s choreographers created “beautiful wuxia-style fight scenes.” Liu has also spoken of how the movie incorporates multiple styles of martial arts. “Tai chi, which is very, very flowy,” he said in a Marvel featurette, and wing chun, which he calls “more combative,” as well as a range of regional styles.

Wenwu’s fighting style also incorporated many influences. Leung says that, on set, he suggested a combination of martial arts types for his character. “It’s like MMA [mixed martial arts,]” Leung explains. “[Wenwu] has had a long history of life experience so I felt like this character deserves variations of different kinds of martial arts.”

What success means to Leung

For Leung, it’s fate that brought the actor to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and, more broadly, Hollywood. Asked about his thoughts on building a career in Hollywood, he says, “I believe in destiny.” He explains: “You can’t force things to happen. If it happens in Hollywood, great. But then at the same time, leave it up to destiny to see what happens next.”

Leung doesn’t feel beholden to geography. “Throughout my career I’ve been collaborating with different talents from Taiwan, Vietnam, France, China, Hong Kong,” he says. “I just really enjoy collaborating with different talents from around the world.”

Despite Leung’s dozens of award nominations and wins in Hong Kong and reputation as a legendary performer in Asian cinema, his mindset as a perfectionist is clear as we close our video call on the note of success. “I never really consider myself as successful because I always look back and think that there must be something that I could do better,” Leung says.

“When people ask me what’s my favorite film, I’ll say, ‘The next one,’ because I always say that there’s room for improvement.”

A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. So goes the old feminist slogan, coined by Irina Dunn and popularized by Gloria Steinem. But, as FX’s adaptation of the cult-hit Y: The Last Man comics so vividly illustrates, that doesn’t mean life on Earth would continue as normal if every mammal with a Y chromosome suddenly dropped dead. On the contrary: within seconds, planes would crash, pileups would block roads, most nations would be leaderless. Power plants and other essential utilities would be dangerously understaffed. Supply chains would break down. Corpses would be absolutely everywhere. Just about every fish on the planet would be forced to confront the cataclysm while mourning at least one beloved bicycle.
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All of these harrowing events are set in motion in the series premiere of Y, which comes to FX on Hulu (along with episodes 2 and 3) on Sept. 13. Like the many other post-apocalyptic TV dramas that have aired in the past several, increasingly apocalyptic years, from The Walking Dead to The Leftovers to Snowpiercer, the show combines sci-fi spectacle, cutthroat survivalism and a portrait of collective grief with an implicit critique of the way we live now. Where it distinguishes itself from predecessors, in the six flawed but steadily improving episodes provided for review, is in its focus on the fraught, delicate topics of gender and genetic sex. What might a society composed exclusively of X chromosomes look like? And what might that society have in store for the one cisgender man—and his male pet monkey, Ampersand—left standing?

It kind of figures that, aside from being leading-man-handsome, said XY survivor isn’t a remarkable specimen. When we meet 27-year-old novice escape artist Yorick Brown (Ben Schnetzer of Goat), shortly before the male extinction event, he’s eking out a living in New York City teaching magic to rich kids and trying to lock down his longtime love, Beth (Juliana Canfield from Succession). Aimless though he is, Yorick at least has a better attitude than his cynical, self-destructive sister Hero (Olivia Thirlby, recently seen in The L Word: Generation Q). She’s also estranged from the one member of their family who has proven to be exceptional—their mother, Congresswoman Jennifer Brown (the great Diane Lane, playing a high-glam Nancy Pelosi), an influential Democrat struggling to make her mark amid a Republican administration.

When the male-ocalypse hits, the President of the United States is among the billions to start bleeding profusely from the mouth and then, almost instantly, perish. As the first wave of chaos subsides, it becomes apparent that Jennifer is the highest-ranking survivor in the line of succession. In some of the most captivating scenes of the early episodes, we watch her loyal, bipartisan coalition of women work day and night to save a scared, starving country where almost all forms of transportation have ground to a halt, mass communication is a thing of the past and cities like Boston and New York have devolved into wastelands. By President Brown’s side is the show’s most mysterious and fascinating character, a versatile black-ops genius known as Agent 355 (Ashley Romans of NOS4A2 and Shameless, excellent) who, for reasons she never learned, was assigned to protect the former POTUS on the same day that he died.

It’s 355 who manages to reunite Yorick with a mother who is, by all appearances, shocked to learn that he survived. But his presence isn’t exactly convenient for the President. While conspiracy theorists amass at the gates of the government’s live-in headquarters, convinced that Jennifer knows something about what happened that she isn’t telling, there are rumblings among right-wing women on the inside that an all-XX world is, in fact, the future liberals want.

One promising early antagonist is the late President’s unctuous daughter, Kimberly, played marvelously against type by Amber Tamblyn. As the mother of three young sons and Establishment-Republican royalty, she’s staked out territory in the culture wars as a “boy mom” whose books argue that cancel culture is “teaching our boys to be afraid to become men.” Now that her career has been suddenly mooted, her own mother has sunk into a depression and she’s all but delirious with grief, Kimberly is agitating for influence in the Brown administration. Unsurprisingly, she believes the first priority for the new regime should be to salvage the sperm banks and start cranking out new dudes. “Without men, there is no future,” she insists. “I hear you,” says Jennifer, dismissively. “But we’re just trying to survive the present.”

That the present is one giant, endlessly complicated global mess of unprecedented proportions doesn’t just present an all-consuming problem for the show’s characters; it’s also the defining problem for the show’s writers, led by executive producer and showrunner Eliza Clark (Animal Kingdom). In conjuring a world where everything changed in a matter of minutes, it must be hard to decide where to direct the viewer’s gaze, and even harder to determine which aspects of post-apocalyptic life can wait to be explored later. Too many time jumps in the first two episodes leave too many blanks to fill in about society’s collapse. I had trouble finding a foothold, at first, in this murky American landscape. It’s not always clear what is meant to be a mystery (though the cause of the die-off certainly falls into this category) or a coincidence and what is a plot hole.

Clark and her team also faced a unique challenge in bringing the original story’s gender politics up to date. Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s Y: The Last Man comic debuted in 2002—which, from a current vantage point, was still essentially the Dark Ages when it came to pop culture’s understanding of and sensitivity to transgender identities. “We are making a show that affirms that trans women are women, trans men are men, non-binary people are non-binary,” Clark has said, and that’s accurate. Along with adding a transgender male character, Hero’s best friend Sam (played by a trans actor, The Fosters and Shameless alum Elliot Fletcher), the series repeatedly acknowledges that, its title notwithstanding, the end of XY genotypes is not the end of men. We watch Sam become an object of both desire and distrust in all-female spaces. A geneticist character, Alison Mann (Diana Bang), delivers an entertaining rant about how, thanks to androgen insensitivity syndrome and other conditions, even biological sex isn’t a strict binary.

Brilliant but tormented by her knowledge of future crises that XY extinction has made all but inevitable, not to mention deeply suspicious of the government and corporations, Alison is one of several strong characters who only show up midway through the season. Elsewhere, far-right politicians flirt with a constitutional crisis. (If only these characters didn’t speak to each other in the mustache-twirling tones of cartoon villains.) And a C-plot that I’d written off as gratuitous and, frankly, boring heats up with the emergence of a ragtag misandrist community—whose leader is played by a chilling Missi Pyle—that occupies an abandoned big-box store.

It’s only at this point, five or six episodes in, that Y begins to counterbalance all the necessary, if needlessly plodding, exposition and world-building with more stimulating explorations of character and themes both gender-related and not. As President, how do you allocate extremely limited resources in an ongoing emergency? Is it more important to bury the dead or to feed the living or to preserve the most crucial artifacts of human civilization or to investigate what actually happened to kill off all the XY creatures? What would it be like to start your day as a person of maximum privilege—a straight, white, American man with a congresswoman for a mother—and end it as the world’s smallest, most vulnerable minority? What would an XX-only Earth look like? Would a planet governed and populated solely by fish be any better off, in the immediate aftermath of a plague or in the long run, than one where bicycles hold almost all of the power?

These are questions intriguing enough to power TV’s next big sci-fi epic—or even a franchise in the vein of The Walking Dead, though hopefully one more substantive and less repetitive than that intellectual-property behemoth has become. (And if the recent greenlighting of two new Murphy-verse anthologies, American Love Story and American Sports Story, is any indication, Disney-era FX is in the market for franchises.) Y: The Last Man improves so much over the course of its first six episodes that its potential feels limitless. If audiences can weather its apocalypse, the show might well become something special by the time rebuilding commences.

With the U.S. experiencing back-to-back record heat waves, the opening chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 Sci-Fi novel, The Ministry for the Future, is starting to feel eerily prescient. The book’s story details the impact of climate change on our near future, and how global society manages—slowly, shakily—to avert total cataclysm. In a recent telephone chat, TIME spoke with the Hugo and Nebula-award winning writer about his book, the future, and the role of ecoterrorism in the climate movement.

TIME How did you pass the pandemic?

Kim Stanley Robinson I had been in the Grand Canyon, out of contact, on a rafting trip [when the shutdown started], with U.C. Davis geology students. When we went in, nothing had happened except for rumors and the NBA had canceled its season. When we came out, it was to a completely different world. I honestly didn’t think something like that could happen. Everybody was suddenly aware [that] we’re in a planetary culture. Ecology matters. Science matters. That was a new thought for our civilization. The pandemic was like a slap in the face. We’re now living in a science fiction novel that we’re all co-writing together.
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How did the pandemic impact the novel’s reception?

I wrote the Ministry For the Future in 2019, before the pandemic. My novel was rendered obsolete even before publication—it can happen doing near future science fiction. But when it came out in October, it actually got a more understanding response than it would have without the pandemic: people reading it thought, ‘yeah, this could happen,’ because the pandemic had happened. One thing that pandemic did to me personally was to make me think that the timeline in Ministry For the Future is very much off. Things are going to happen faster than I wrote. So things I talked about happening in 2030s or the 2040s, they’re going to happen in the 2020s.

That’s quite terrifying. The novel opens with a gruesomely realistic heat wave in India that kills 20 million. Then again, I’m sitting in a heat wave here in Rome, and half the U.S. is experiencing unprecedented temperatures. Why did you start with a heat wave?

[Many] argue that humans are so good at adapting to things that it’s ridiculous to fight so hard to keep the [global average] temperatures down. Then I heard about wet bulb 35°C temperatures (the intersection of humidity and heat at which point the human body is no longer capable of cooling itself even in the shade) and that made me want to write that scene as a way of saying we can’t just adapt. We have to mitigate, we have to keep the temperature down. Or else vast swathes of the Earth’s surface could become uninhabitable and there could be mass deaths. I chose India because I thought they were vulnerable. It’s millions of people stacked against the Himalayas where the heat waves could stick and be humid, not dry heat waves like in the American West.

They are not just victims. They come up with solutions too.

I couldn’t just do it in India and then go to Zurich and have the rest of the novel be in Zurich, I had to stick with India. I just had to bear down and say look, the problems may hit there first, but the solutions might come from there first too. I thought it would be interesting to see India coming to grips with the problem first. Luckily I have Indian acquaintances, I ran that manuscript past them a couple of times and they helped in significant ways.

The global reaction in your book was parallel to what it would likely be in real life: that climate catastrophes only happen to far away, developing countries. Not “us.”

Humans are very good at saying “it happened to someone else, it won’t happen to me.” This is like a survival mechanism, a cognitive ability or a cognitive error. And so, no, a heat wave in India would not change the world instantly, no way. Even one in the southeastern United States, which, like India, is vulnerable because it’s got heat and humidity in combination. The whole Caribbean is a candidate for a wet bulb 35°C event, and one even happened outside of Chicago [in 1995], so the Midwest is also vulnerable. But people just go on and say, “well these things happen.” This is how climate change is different from the pandemic. When the pandemic began, everybody was thinking “I could die from this.” Nothing can stop it unless we change everything, and we changed everything. Well with climate change, you can think well, “I live in the north.” “It’ll happen after I die.” You can always put it off and say it’ll happen to someone else. It can happen to everyone. It will.

One of your central characters is Mary Murphy, a UN bureaucrat, not exactly the dashing hero we typically see saving planet earth. Who inspired you?

There are Marys all over! I even met a woman named Mary Murphy, who was on the Dublin City Council and an environmentalist. I literally met the minister for the future for the country of Wales, John Davidson. And I hope to meet Mary Robinson, who was an obvious model for my Mary Murphy. After the book came out I met Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican woman who got the Paris Agreement written, and she was definitely a Mary figure and she told me how much she loved the book and I was thinking to myself, “well, yeah, I bet you did.” There are a lot of women in diplomacy, who often are working on humanitarian causes, peace causes, climate causes. I don’t want to make a gender assignment type thing about it, it just seems to me that you see it happening.

The ministry in the book enacts necessary, but difficult, financial changes. Is that what it is going to take in the real world?

The analogy I use is like when a doctor says to you, “we read the signs in your blood and in the X rays and MRIs. And you’re gonna die unless you let us give you chemotherapy,” which is effectively poison. “Even tough you don’t feel anything’s wrong right now, we need to poison you in order to save your life.” And most people say, “Okay, go ahead,” because they want to live, and so they’ll take the chemo, even when they’re asymptomatic. It’s a trust in science.

So here’s a macro case of where civilization has to trust in science. A lot of people will say, “well that won’t work.” But the Paris Agreement exists, because the governments of the world have listened to their scientists. They have said we have got to do this, we have to do this chemo, we have got to change the infrastructure to make the economy safe, to make individual people safe. And governments are in charge of economies and economies are people’s livelihoods. But they’re doing this anyway, because they’re believing the scientists about what’s coming down on us.

But the poison in this analogy is privation—it’s stop doing the things you like to do like driving or flying or using a clothes dryer. That’s harder for people to embrace outside of a medical crisis. In the book Mary uses old-fashioned airships to get around. That technology is starting to make a comeback today.

Yeah, one thing people really love is travel, it’s a human joy to want that, and I think it’s an ancient drive to wander and see new things. So if you get into this puritan mode that to survive we’re all going to have to shelter in place forever, it’s a groan from everybody. I’ve been interested in something that replaces jets, which are like getting on a bus. So I’ve been thinking about airships and hot air balloons, this is all kind of a childhood love, And yet it seems to me that sailing ships— another childhood love —are carbon zero. For me as an American leftist, slowing down is like an anti-capitalist move. We can increase quality of life, even if it decreases profit. That is not privation.

In the novel, the public willingness to abandon air travel and other climate-change accelerators comes not from a desire to save the planet per se, but from the very real threat of terror attacks. Even Mary’s ministry has a black ops wing. Is the political violence and eco terrorism of the book a warning, or a recommendation?

I would call it a warning. I’m a suburban American white man. I am in a very privileged position and recommending violence that I would never do myself, I would abhor that. Now, that said, the Ministry For the Future is a scary and confusing novel, in that there are people in that book that think they are fully justified in their violence against persons. I wish now that the book made a clearer distinction between murder and sabotage. When do privileged and comfortable citizens of the developed countries have a moral obligation to get in the way of fossil fuel burning and break things? That would be very different morally than murder or harming humans. So, the only thing I can say here is that the novel is confusing both on purpose—I wanted to imitate history—and by accident, in that my own mind was not clear enough to make the novel a better thought experiment. As it is, you have to read it like a detective. Did the Ministry do some of these violent acts or not? And then you have to think to yourself, ‘would I order that?’

I couldn’t help but think of that when we saw the hack of the Colonial Pipeline, followed by the hack of JBS beef industries earlier this month, two major climate change contributors.

On social media a lot of people were suggesting that these hackers had read the Ministry For the Future. I wasn’t sure if I should be horrified or pleased. But these things are going to be happening. I was basically acting like a reporter with this book. I didn’t make up new things, I just looked around the world, and sieved through to the points that I could put into a story of things that were happening now. And then I shoved it out into the future.

More than anything it was the financial markets and banking regulations that saved the day more than science, which seems like an unusual choice for a science fiction writer who writes a lot about scientists, and who is married to one.

The reason I focused on finances is, a; I’m interested in it. but b; I think it’s key. The scientists have already done their job. We already have the clean technologies. If we only worked with what we had right now we could be to carbon zero and even carbon negative. We don’t need the innovative new technologies. We’ll get them anyway, and it’ll make it easier, but if we had to go with what we have right now we could do it. But scaling them up? People are gonna have to pay for it. And you probably need to compensate the fossil fuel owners, financially, because they’re part of the economy in a big way, and if they just crash, then we go into a depression. A whole lot of money has to be seized and directed that way, as if we were in a war. I did have my scientists in Antarctica MacGyvering salvation at sea level, which was great fun, and turns out to be more possible than I thought when I wrote the book, but finance will be key.

Some of the other controversial solutions you touch on in the book, such as geoengineering and nuclear power, are third rail topics in the environmental sphere. Why was it important to include them?

Everything should be on the table. You do see analyses in which we just don’t need nuclear power, that solar and wind become so cheap and so powerful that between those and battery power we can get by without. So there is a debate to be had. But there’s no way that you should just say nuclear is dangerous and we always have to be against it no matter what. There are higher priorities than political correctness. The word geoengineering has been demonized particularly on the left because it looks like it’s a getaway card for the fossil fuel industry or it looks like we’re trying to ignore the problem and just MacGyver our way out of it. Well, women’s empowerment is geoengineering because it drops the population rate and that impacts the biosphere. Anything that’s done at scale is geoengineering. I know people in the geoengineering world who are trying to get rid of the word, it covers too many separate activities that have different impacts, and different possibilities. So, one replacement that I want to recommend is climate restoration. Geoengineering, you think about the engineering of the planet, you know we can’t do that very intelligently. Climate restoration speaks to the why of it, that we need to restore the climate or we might cause a massive extinction event. So then hopefully it comes back onto the table.

The IPCC report was grim. Does that make you lose hope?

No. It’s just going to be another spur in our butts to really act because we are right on the verge of starting to mess with a mass extinction event that we can’t undo. So I think a sense of urgency is justified, and does not replace hope. You need to use hope like a club to beat your opponent.

Hollywood has yet to address climate change in a big way. Will Ministry change that?

There’s promising developments going on with Ministry For the Future for a TV series, but I can’t say much more.