In a Season 4 episode of Friends, Ross is about to get married (again). At his bachelor party, Joey and Chandler argue over who will serve as his best man. Their bickering devolves into pettiness, until a fed-up Chandler makes an announcement about one of their guests, the barista at their favorite coffee shop: When he gets married, Chandler says, he’ll just ask Gunther to be his best man.
Adam Maida / The Atlantic
In September, The Wall Street Journal published a report, based on leaked documents, describing Facebook’s awareness of the harmful effects one of its platforms was having on young people. “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” the company’s internal research revealed. “Comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves.
Every once in a while, after a commercial break on Jeopardy, Alex Trebek would make an announcement: The judges, he’d say, had done more research. Having consulted an atlas, an encyclopedia, or Google, they’d realized that their initial assessment of a contestant’s answer had been wrong. They would now make things right. In an instant, the dollar-based score on the affected contestant’s podium would change. And then the show, its error thus corrected, would go on.
This article contains spoilers through the Season 1 finale of The White Lotus. “This is a lot of pineapple. Not subtle with the theme.”Midway through The White Lotus, Mike White’s acerbic satire on HBO, the socialite mother of a guy on his honeymoon pays her son and new daughter-in-law a surprise visit. The drop-in is partly the result of her inability to stop meddling in her son’s life.
On Etsy and similar sites, you can purchase a mug bearing the smiling face of Andrew Cuomo and the coinage that summarized his fandom: Cuomosexual. You can buy a prayer candle featuring the New York governor in a beatific pose. Or a throw pillow. Or one of many T-shirts, some bearing images of him, one featuring a list:
☐ Single.
☐ Taken.
☑️ Mentally Dating Andrew Cuomo.
The objects read as relics of a time both recent and removed. They also read as mistaken.
A scene midway through Hacks finds the show’s protagonists, Deborah and Ava, in bed together—but not in bed together. The two comedians, one in her 70s and the other in her 20s, are chatting on the phone late one evening, Ava from her Las Vegas hotel room and Deborah from her Vegas mansion. Both are watching Law & Order: Criminal Intent. “I think I could play a dead body,” Ava muses. “Well, you certainly have the complexion,” Deborah murmurs in reply.
First comes the piece of timber. Then the strip of leather. Then the fence, the mountain, the trees, the river. The pictures whirl, like icons in a Western-themed slot machine, until they land on their final image: the smiling face of Tucker Carlson.This spring, Carlson began hosting a new show on Fox Nation, the network’s digital streaming service.
In June 2019, Kylie Jenner shared with the world some pictures of a birthday party she’d thrown for a friend. The event had a theme: The Handmaid’s Tale. It featured guests garbed in blood-red gowns; servers dressed as “Marthas,” or women enslaved for household labor; and drinks with such names as “Under His Eye tequila” and “Praise Be vodka.” The whole thing was cringey and absurd.
This article contains mild spoilers for Cruella. “It’s time to make some trouble. You in?” reads one of the posts promoting Cruella, Disney’s prequel-meets-reconsideration of the classic One Hundred and One Dalmatians villain. The line is in keeping with the film: It’s slick and witty and teasingly imprecise about what “trouble,” in this context, might entail.
It started, as so many of life’s journeys do, at IKEA. We went one day a few years ago to get bookshelves. We left with some Hemnes and a leafy impulse buy: a giant Dracaena fragrans. A couple of months later, delighted that we had managed to keep it alive, we brought in a spritely little ponytail palm. And then an ivy. A visiting friend brought us a gorgeous snake plant. I bought a Monstera online because it was cheap and I was curious.
Illustration by Oliver Munday; Christine Schneider / Brigitte Sporrer / Getty
This article was published online on April 14, 2021.Embarrassment makes for rich literature, but few fictions I can think of capture humiliation with the brute efficiency of “Traumarama.” The series, which ran for a time in Seventeen magazine, offered true stories written by, and for, teenagers—three or so lines, poetic in their brevity, about unruly bodies and unforgiving worlds.
Some books age poorly; others are poorly aged from the moment they’re published. American Crisis: Leadership Lessons From the COVID-19 Pandemic, Andrew Cuomo’s recent memoir, manages to fall into both categories. The New York governor’s paean to his handling of the COVID-19 crisis is in some ways a classic political chronicle: a hero’s journey, through the ordeal to the victory, told by the hero himself.
“When television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse.”Nearly 60 years ago, the FCC chair Newton Minow delivered an excoriation of television that was officially titled “Television and the Public Interest” but would be remembered, among the broader American public, as the “vast wasteland” speech.
Late last month, the crew of a helicopter surveying a desolate stretch of the Utah desert came across an unexpected finding: a metal structure, tall and thin, gleaming among the matte-red rocks. Soon after, the object vanished. But people began finding similar ones, in California and Romania and the Netherlands—elongated prisms studding the earth, their provenance, for the most part, unknown.
Last month, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia published its , right down to the clear-eyes/full-hearts–style BELIEVE poster he tapes above his new team’s locker-room door). The quality that most defines Ted, however, is his curiosity. That is how Ted Lasso, a show so similar in structure to Emily in Paris, can read so differently from it. Emily’s ignorance is existential; Ted’s is conditional.
Here are some of the things that happened yesterday evening on the most-watched news network in America: The minority leader of the House of Representatives announced, absolutely falsely and with no pushback, that “President Trump won this election.” A former speaker of the House argued that, in the name of democracy, the U.S. federal government should “lock up” state election workers.
Earlier this week, a striking thing happened at the Supreme Court: A justice inserted several errors into the record. The mistakes came as the Court was making last-minute decisions about the precise time span of an election that has been taking place for weeks. The errors were products, as The New York Times put it, of “the court’s fast pace in handling recent challenges to voting rules.
In 2014, Kate Livingston created a quirky Halloween costume for her 12-week-old son. It featured a black, sleeved onesie. And a white silken collar. And a pair of large, plastic-rimmed glasses. Livingston snapped a picture of the cosplaying infant—he provided the cool scowl—and then added a caption, in blunt all-caps, to the photo she took: “I DISSENT.” Ruth Baby Ginsburg was born.Justices of the Supreme Court have traditionally existed above the fray.
In March 2011, The Colbert Report aired an installment of “Difference Makers,” the segment in which Stephen Colbert, through the character he played on the show, satirized American “heroes” in the guise of celebrating them. Its subject this time was a lawyer who had been making headlines for his efforts to challenge the constitutionality of “ladies’ nights” at bars.
In the summer of 1945, for 17 days, the newspaper deliverers of New York City went on strike. As hundreds of thousands of city residents found themselves temporarily deprived of their daily papers, the behavioral scientist Bernard Berelson saw an opportunity: He wanted to understand what it felt like for people to suddenly lose their primary sources of news. So he set about interviewing them.
KangHee KimThere’s a certain kind of movie that lets you down not because it’s bad, but because it could have been great. One of those movies, for me, is Sliding Doors.