Shirley Li

Growing up in suburban New Jersey, I dreaded having new visitors over. I wasn’t asocial; I just feared that anyone who wasn’t Chinese—as in, the majority of my classmates—wouldn’t understand my family home and all of its inevitable differences from their own. Even if they didn’t ask me about the cultural objects they might stumble upon around the house, I felt the need to explain what they were seeing, in order to make them comfortable.

The first time I saw Amy, Ali Wong’s character in Beef, I found myself sitting up a little straighter and leaning a little closer toward my TV. I knew Wong had a starring role, but Amy caught me off guard.

This story contains spoilers through the second episode of Succession Season 4.The Roys of Succession tend to go out of their way to prove they’re not delicate people. They reject any opportunity to talk about their feelings. They’d rather drop f-bombs than share hugs and kisses. And they relish their daily boardroom showdowns: Reneging on deals, jousting in bidding wars, and tearing apart competitors is, for them, a way of life.

Tetris is a simple, satisfying game. Blocks arranged in different geometric shapes fall from the top of the screen, get rotated to and fro, and fall into rows that clear when the pieces fit together just so. Playing Tetris can be a meditative experience; the game can be understood in any language and tackled by anyone of any age, and it can even seep into addicted players’ dreams. Tetris is popular because it’s pleasurable.

Gossip can provide sensational grist for an entertainer’s appeal, for better or worse. But for singer-songwriters whose artistry is often diaristic, scandal is especially intriguing.

This story contains spoilers for The Last of Us Season 1, Episode 7.An abandoned mall at the end of the world is not a pretty sight. Stores, looted and left in disarray, offer only broken mannequins and empty shelves. Glass shards blanket the floors. Fluorescent bulbs flicker. A place once known as a center of commerce has become a dirt-strewn husk of its former self.

A few months ago, I nearly ran over one of Uber Eats’s delivery robots with my car. The little guy was trundling along a crosswalk when I made a left turn. As if startled by my presence, it stopped abruptly in the middle of the street, and its “eyes,” two rings of lights, blinked. Even though its position now meant that I couldn’t complete my turn and was stuck blocking oncoming traffic, I instinctively apologized.

Of the Brontë sisters, Emily has long been considered the most vexing. She was reportedly jovial around her siblings but disagreeable and timid around anyone else. Her equally tempestuous and aloof reputation left her friendless, and the novel Wuthering Heights—her bold, brutal masterpiece—incensed some readers while enthralling others. She’s a literary oddity, a creature whose reserved disposition seemed to belie a wildly inventive imagination.

Bowen Yang didn’t break first, but he was the cast member least able to handle the cascade of giggles that caused yesterday’s final Saturday Night Live sketch of the night to lose total control. Partway through “Lisa from Temecula,” a bit about a woman named Lisa (played by Ego Nwodim) aggressively carving up her “extra-extra-well-done” steak, Yang cracked up, throwing down his prop fork.

News of mass shootings, as frequently as they happen in the U.S., has been shown to produce acute stress and anxiety. But for many Asian Americans, this past week’s deadly attacks in California—first in Monterey Park, then in Half Moon Bay—feel profoundly different. The tragedies occurred around the Lunar New Year, during a time meant for celebration.

In Velma, HBO Max’s adult-oriented Scooby-Doo spin-off, familiar faces get involved in all sorts of gritty, R-rated activities. Velma (played by the show’s executive producer, Mindy Kaling) and Daphne (Constance Wu) sell drugs. Fred (Glenn Howerton) gets shot in both legs. Shaggy (Sam Richardson), known by his birth name, Norville, tries to sell a kidney on the black market.

Early in Missing, a teenager named June (played by Storm Reid) gets a FaceTime call from her mother, Grace (Nia Long). Grace is about to leave June home alone for several days and wants her daughter to jot down some reminders. Instead of transcribing her mother’s advice, however, June key-smashes to give the impression that she’s diligently taking notes, eventually spelling out her annoyance: “omg omg stfuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.

In a hayloft overlooking the soy fields, dirt roads, and rustic houses that make up their isolated religious colony, eight women gather for a discussion. The eldest ones lead. The youngest two braid each other’s hair. They talk and talk and talk for hours, trying to reach a decision before the men who hurt them return the next day. Often, the women nitpick one another’s words—why they’re chosen, how they’re used, and what they mean.

This story contains major spoilers for the film Avatar: The Way of Water.Avatar: The Way of Water, like any good world-building sequel, introduces a deluge of new elements to its extraterrestrial setting of Pandora. There are different locations to visit, such as the home of the Metkayina, a reef-dwelling clan. There are strange species to meet, such as the whalelike tulkun.

This story contains major spoilers for the film Avatar: The Way of Water.Avatar: The Way of Water, like any good world-building sequel, introduces a deluge of new elements to its extraterrestrial setting of Pandora. There are different locations to visit, such as the home of the Metkayina, a reef-dwelling clan. There are strange species to meet, such as the whalelike tulkun.

Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize–winning exposé of the producer Harvey Weinstein was undeniably consequential. Their investigative reporting for The New York Times helped kick-start a cultural reckoning over sexual harassment and abuse across a wide range of industries. In 2019, the duo chronicled their work in the book She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement.

Glass Onion begins with a puzzle—or rather, a series of puzzles. Each of the new characters in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out sequel receives an intricate box packed with gears and motors that crank out riddles and codes. Once they’re deciphered, the package unveils an invitation to a weekend getaway on a remote island owned by a wealthy acquaintance. It’s a classic murder-mystery setup.

In the final track of Midnights, Taylor Swift confesses to being a “mastermind” who plans so carefully that she can’t possibly lose. The song is addressed to her lover, but she might as well be singing about the meticulous rollout of her new album. Over the course of nearly two months, she posted cryptic videos teasing the music without allowing anyone to hear a single note. She put together a “manifest” that looked like something out of the metaverse.

When the writer-director Charlotte Wells began conceiving of Aftersun, her exquisite debut feature, she didn’t plan to unravel a parent-child dynamic. She simply wanted to observe how any conventional relationship can shift in a new place—so she situated her characters in a resort, outside of their regular routines.

The first Harry Potter film initially depicts the night Harry learns he’s a wizard like a scene from a horror movie. Harry and the disagreeable Dursleys—his uncle, aunt, and cousin—have escaped to a cottage on a remote island, attempting to outrun the letters alerting Harry to his magic. But the messenger arrives anyway, in the form of a half-giant named Hagrid.

About halfway into Park Chan-wook’s new film, Decision to Leave, a woman reaches into a man’s pocket to find a stick of lip balm. The two of them are alone, visiting a temple amid a downpour. She silently removes the cap, rolls the wheel to expose the tube, and applies it onto his chapped lips. He’s shocked at first, almost reluctant, but she smears away with quick, confident strokes. Then she smiles, as if to say, There. That’s better.

Hocus Pocus, as a film, makes little sense. The plot, about a coven of witches who seek to eat children, involves a talking cat, a boy who despises trick-or-treating, and far too many mentions of virgins lighting candles. Released inexplicably in the middle of summer 1993, it was a box-office failure that put off critics.But Hocus Pocus, as a cultural phenomenon, makes perfect sense. The costumes are easily replicable, the one-liners fantastically quotable.

Nothing against all of the other Emmy winners tonight, but even the most perfectly rehearsed, elegantly delivered acceptance speech couldn’t possibly compare to Sheryl Lee Ralph’s moment in the spotlight. In the minutes after the actor won Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, she sang and beamed and soliloquized, inspiring the audience to leap to their feet again and again—and again.

This story contains spoilers for Season 1, Episode 4 of House of the Dragon.Like a court musician ordered to strum a princess’s favorite tunes under a Weirwood tree, HBO’s House of the Dragon knows how to play all the hits that satisfy Game of Thrones fans. The small-council meetings crackle with passive-aggressive tension. The sets look eye-popping, the dragons only more so. The battle sequences appear to spill enough blood to fill the Narrow Sea.

Rogue One sets itself apart from other Star Wars films seconds after it starts. There is no opening crawl, no wall of yellow font drifting into a star field. The franchise logo doesn’t appear, and the John Williams fanfare doesn’t kick in. There is merely the title card informing viewers that it’s “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”—and then bam: The action begins.

When Johnny Depp showed up at Sunday night’s MTV Video Music Awards, the audience seemed shocked. The actor wasn’t there to present a trophy or perform a tune. His mini monologue, in which he joked about how he “needed the work,” was hard to hear. His face, superimposed onto a life-size version of a Moonman, was hard to see.

New TV shows have it rough these days—especially if they don’t take place in Westeros, Middle Earth, or other well-trodden storytelling locales. Since 2020, original programming has had to contend with pandemic-scrambled production schedules, competition from cinematic universes, the boom in streaming platforms, and, most recently, the threat of disappearing from libraries altogether.

A certain video by the comedian Nathan Fielder has never failed to make me laugh. In it, he’s dressed as a pharmacist and prepares a prescription—except instead of pills, he’s using raisins.

Minions! You know them, even if you don’t want to. The banana-yellow, denim-clad, booger-shaped thingamabobs are so popular that they’ve overtaken the film franchise in which they originated. They’ve had their images stitched onto every piece of merchandise possible—sanctioned or not—and probably make up the bulk of those memes your one relative won’t stop posting on Facebook.

This world was not built for the likes of Marcel, the stop-motion-animated minuscule shell who sports pink shoes. Riding in a car makes him vomit repeatedly, unreachable itches make him scream, and typing a single word using a laptop keyboard becomes a full-body workout. Marcel, voiced by the actor and comedian Jenny Slate, can be terribly naive and, given his predilection for corny one-liners, unnervingly candid. (“Guess why I smile a lot?” he observes.