Kevin Townsend

The GOP is in a strange place. After falling short of expectations in the midterms, some Republicans blame Donald Trump, and some want to anoint a challenger for 2024.

December is here and with it comes the third winter of the pandemic. With holiday travel and indoor family gatherings, the season has brought tragic spikes in COVID cases the past two years. Are we in for more of the same, or will this winter be different?The Atlantic deputy editor Paul Bisceglio talks with the staff writer Katherine Wu about what to expect.

Poll workers serve an essential, if usually uncelebrated, role in American democracy. Organizing and tabulating is the basic business of elections. Or, it was until 2020.When then–President Trump refused to accept his loss and spread falsehoods about a stolen election, vote-counters were among the first people to face blowback. Poll workers endured combative protestors, threats, and harassment while completing their work.

Fifteen years on, what can we learn from how the movie Knocked Up treated abortion, pregnancy, and women’s bodily autonomy? And what does it say in the era of a leaked Supreme Court opinion that could overturn Roe v. Wade as we know it? Join The Review as Sophie Gilbert, Megan Garber, and Hannah Giorgis dissect Judd Apatow’s 2007 film.Listen to the discussion here:The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

The 1980s Los Angeles Lakers were one of the most dominant teams in sports. At a time when professional basketball was on its heels, the Lakers brought new excitement: Magic Johnson versus Larry Bird, Jerry Buss and the glitzy Forum Club, and an up-tempo flow offense. That’s the story of HBO’s big-budget series Winning Time, whose Season 1 finale aired on Sunday, May 8.David Sims, Vann R.

At a time when the American office is anywhere a Zoom window can be opened, the notion of truly separating work and home is an alluring one. Take that thought to its furthest extreme and you have the Apple TV+ thriller Severance.

In the director Robert Eggers’s brutal $90 million Viking epic, a prince seeks revenge on the uncle who killed his father and married his mother. If the plot sounds familiar, it’s because the Scandinavian source material of the legend of Prince Amleth was also the inspiration for Hamlet. And like so much of Shakespeare’s work, the story has been told and retold across centuries.

What’s better than a Marvel Cinematic Universe? A Marvel Cinematic Multiverse. Once limited to theoretical physics and comic-book plot conveniences, the notion of a multiverse has been an essential tool for Hollywood. Whether it’s a role that’s been cast and recast, a franchise character that gets a spin-off when the larger story ends, or simply a reboot telling a new story without upending its origins, the answer to any big movie problem is often: multiverse.

What’s better than a Marvel Cinematic Universe? A Marvel Cinematic Multiverse. Once limited to theoretical physics and comic-book plot conveniences, the notion of a multiverse has been an essential tool for Hollywood. Whether it’s a role that’s been cast and recast, a franchise character that gets a spin-off when the larger story ends, or simply a reboot telling a new story without upending its origins, the answer to any big movie problem is often: multiverse.

The Grammys have always been more than a bit old-fashioned. The ceremony typically consists of exciting new artists covering the songs of yesteryear, interspersed with awards going to established acts over those same exciting new artists. But though reforms at the Recording Academy, which hands out the awards, have led to better representation in recent years, this past week’s Grammys renewed debate about whether they’re still too stuck in the past.

The Grammys have always been more than a bit old-fashioned. The ceremony typically consists of exciting new artists covering the songs of yesteryear, interspersed with awards going to established acts over those same exciting new artists. But though reforms at the Recording Academy, which hands out the awards, have led to better representation in recent years, this past week’s Grammys renewed debate about whether they’re still too stuck in the past.

A familiar voice opens the latest episode of The Dropout, Hulu’s series about the fall of the infamous blood-testing start-up Theranos: “You founded this company 12 years ago, right? Tell them how old you were.” It’s former President Bill Clinton, praising the company founder and figurehead, Elizabeth Holmes, as played by Amanda Seyfried. “I was 19,” Seyfried replies in Holmes’s near-parodic baritone, to a wave of admiring laughter and applause.

In The Batman, Matt Reeves’s long and grim superhero epic, Robert Pattinson plays a brooding sophomore of a dark knight. He wears mascara. He journals. He is vengeance. He is the shadows. But despite all the memes and fanboy hand-wringing generated from the Twilight actor’s casting, Pattinson’s is a back-to-basics Batman. He isn’t the tired, aging crimefighter played by Ben Affleck, nor is The Batman the umpteenth pearl-scattering origin story for the character.

In The Batman, Matt Reeves’s long and grim superhero epic, Robert Pattinson plays a brooding sophomore of a dark knight. He wears mascara. He journals. He is vengeance. He is the shadows. But despite all the memes and fanboy hand-wringing generated from the Twilight actor’s casting, Pattinson’s is a back-to-basics Batman. He isn’t the tired, aging crimefighter played by Ben Affleck, nor is The Batman the umpteenth pearl-scattering origin story for the character.

Drive My Car is a special movie. It’s a film about language, but its silences carry the most powerful moments of communication. It’s a three-hour drama about grief, but the experience of watching it is breezily loose and oddly comforting. And it’s one of very few adaptations of the renowned Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s work, although the moments that best capture his style were invented by the director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi.

In the past 30 years, two Westerns have won Best Picture at the Academy Awards and both redefined that most American of genres. When Clint Eastwood’s brutally revisionist Unforgiven won in 1993, it marked a turning point for films that had long idealized frontier violence. The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men then won in 2008, defining modern Westerns beyond the typical 19th-century setting.

Throughout the Hulu series Pam & Tommy, Pamela Anderson spends a lot of time as the only woman among crowds of men. A tableful of male lawyers press her into a lawsuit that devastates her public image. More lawyers subject her to a brutally misogynistic deposition. Television affiliates gather around her like a magazine cover come to life.

The romantic comedy was once a tentpole of Hollywood. The genre defined A-list careers, won awards for studios, and made piles of cash. Then one day, rom-coms seemed a thing of the past, and their relative absence from theaters has been an open mystery for the better part of a decade.

Attempts to summarize the Showtime series Yellowjackets have mostly had to rely on creaky comparisons: a female Lord of the Flies … a ’90s Stranger Things … a teen Lost, but in Canada. The coming-of-age horror story is indeed tough to categorize, but nonetheless thrillingly addictive. The show follows a championship-bound girls’ soccer team that crashes in the wilderness in 1996, threading their story with that of the surviving members as adults in 2021.

We’re nearly two years into the pandemic and parents are not okay. Variants have upended schooling. Tests are in short supply. And a work-life balance that disappeared in 2020 feels no closer to returning. It’s enough to make some mothers get together to just scream.Few works of entertainment express the strains and contradictions of parenthood today like Netflix’s The Lost Daughter.

Over the past two years of the pandemic, old, reliable shows with new lives on streaming platforms have been a mainstay for audiences. (Who wants new plotlines when headlines about COVID-19 variants offer enough of that already?) And the deepest well for comfort watches may be the ’90s sitcom. Friends, Seinfeld, and the rest of “Must See TV” add up to hundreds of hours of cheery sets filled with familiar faces.

When the first season of Netflix’s Emily in Paris debuted in October 2020, it was met with both delight and ridicule: delight at its escapism into sunny France and from away the election and pandemic, but also ridicule at Lily Collins’s bubbly American abroad blithely Instagramming her croissants by the Seine. (“The whole city looks like Ratatouille!”)These reactions are not mutually exclusive though, as Emily in Paris’s many conflicted fans can attest.

In its opening weekend alone, Spider-Man: No Way Home became the highest-grossing movie of the year. On pace to be the only billion-dollar film of 2021 and already setting the record for biggest December opening ever, Spidey does impressive numbers.And as No Way Home is the third Tom Holland entry, the ninth overall Spider-Man movie, and the 27th release in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, its numbers are also testament to the enduring popularity of superhero movies.

The finale for HBO’s third season of Succession opens with a family session of Monopoly, a game that offers the perfect summary of the show: Players fight to be the last one standing—trading advantages and risking jail—going around the board over and over without a clear end in sight.

For most everyone, 2021 has been a long and lonely year. Pop stars, it seems, are no exception. Although music about heartbreak has been around for as long as there’s been music, this past year’s charts have looked particularly lovelorn.Pop music has been a months-long opera of celebrity splits. We went from Olivia Rodrigo’s world-conquering “Drivers License” in January to Adele’s new album, 30, which she’s said is about “divorce, babe, divorce.

For most everyone, 2021 has been a long and lonely year. Pop stars, it seems, are no exception. Although music about heartbreak has been around for as long as there’s been music, this past year’s charts have looked particularly lovelorn.Pop music has been a months-long opera of celebrity splits. We went from Olivia Rodrigo’s world-conquering “Drivers License” in January to Adele’s new album, 30, which she’s said is about “divorce, babe, divorce.

Emily Dickinson’s life, according to the show Dickinson, had a lot more gay sex and twerking than your middle-school English class would have had you believe. And, from what we now know of the reclusive poet’s life, at least half of that is true.

In the new biopic Spencer, Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales, wanders her decaying childhood home, talking with Anne Boleyn’s ghost. The beheaded second wife of King Henry VIII warns Diana of her dispensability as a royal and tells her to assert her power. It is not, strictly speaking, a faithful reproduction of history.The surreal film from the Jackie director Pablo Larraín presents Kristen Stewart as the late ex-wife of Prince Charles in a meta bit of casting.

A desert planet. An empire spanning the galaxy. A young boy burdened to be its savior. The 1965 novel Dune’s influence on Star Wars is obvious, but Frank Herbert’s work has echoed throughout all of modern science-fiction storytelling.

The following contains spoilers for Succession, up to and including Season 3 Episode 1.A full two years have passed since HBO’s billionaire-family soap opera last aired, but only moments have elapsed on the show. Kendall Roy (played by Jeremy Strong) just used a press conference to betray his father, Logan (Brian Cox). It’s war, and the Roy family’s scandal-plagued media empire could face subpoenas any minute.