entertainment
Settings and storylines that make for good gameplay rarely lend themselves to compelling plots and filmable universes. So it's pretty amazing that Amazon's new Fallout series manages to be faithful to the aesthetics and vibe of the video games on which it's based while also working as a fun and enjoyable (albeit gruesome and bizarre) action-adventure show. The show, like the games, is set in a nuke-ravaged wasteland formerly known as the United States, where 1950s camp bleeds into Wild West gunslinging and ultraviolent post-apocalyptic gore-horror. The plot follows the intersecting stories of ...
Reason
Sheila Vakharia, who now works for the Drug Policy Alliance, began her career as a clinical social worker at a conventional addiction treatment center, where she soon became disenchanted. "Few of my clients attended treatment voluntarily, most did not think they had a drug problem, and most never completed the program," she recalls in her new book The Harm Reduction Gap, "because they could not maintain abstinence and comply with our tight structure," which included regular urine testing that she was required to supervise, much to her dismay. Vakharia's next job, at a program that provided ste...
Reason
The podcast Blowback, originally just about the Iraq War, has expanded to cover U.S. foreign policy misadventures from the Korean War to the Bay of Pigs to support for the Afghan mujahedin. Last summer's season on Afghanistan returned the podcast, hosted by Noah Kulwin and Brendan James, to its roots: reminding Americans of how yesterday's proxy becomes today's enemy, a switcheroo that has worked repeatedly because of Americans' short memories and shorter attention spans. Before it was memory-holed, the CIA's support for Islamist rebels in Afghanistan received loud public support in Washington...
Reason
A new documentary chronicles the legal troubles of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who took the titular trust fall into the arms of the American public when he published information governments didn't want us to know. Certain activists have risen to his defense, including most libertarians, but "Free Assange" has hardly been a mass rallying cry. The Trust Fall, though typical in its structure (mostly talking heads, some bespoke animation) and proudly on its subject's side, might convince even doubters that Assange's actions—accepting classified documents from a source, then publishing them—a...
Reason
Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars, by Kliph Nesteroff, Abrams, 312 pages, $30 The first paragraph of the book jacket lays it out: "There is a common belief that we live in unprecedented times, that people are too sensitive today, that nobody objected to the actions of actors, comedians, and filmmakers in the past. Modern pundits would have us believe that Americans of a previous generation had tougher skin and seldom complained. But does this argument hold up to scrutiny?" There's a good point underneath the hyperbole. People tend to believe—and pundits, politicians, and ac...
Reason
In the first episode of Netflix's latest hit documentary series, Unlocked: A Jail Experiment, an inmate with newfound autonomy says, "There's no way we can let criminals govern themselves." But for six weeks, 46 inmates at Arkansas' Pulaski County detention center did just that. No longer confined to their cells for 23 hours a day, they were free to roam the cellblock with no guards in sight, all day long. And upon good behavior, they were given even more privileges, such as free phone calls and increased visitation rights with family and friends. By cultivating a community-driven atmosphere, ...
Reason
Charles Fort lived a century ago but is still invoked fairly frequently today: the "inspired clown" (as the screenwriter and playwright Ben Hecht called him) who haunted the New York Public Library, collecting reports of anomalous events and devising wild theories to account for them. Fort's influence after he died isn't as widely appreciated. But Joshua Blu Buhs makes a strong case in Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers that the eccentric writer cast a long shadow, leaving a mark not only on the world of Bigfoot hunters and UFO buffs but also in literat...
Reason
Cabrini is, on an obvious level, a movie about the anti-Italian animus facing swarthy newcomers to America in the late 19th century. It tells the story of Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, a Catholic religious sister who arrives in 1889 to serve the desperately poor Italian-American community in Five Points, New York. She encounters her fair share of bigotry, but the obstacles that repeatedly threaten to derail her efforts come more often from City Hall than from everyday New Yorkers. Starved for resources, Cabrini convinces a New York Times reporter to write about the slum—and an avalanche of do...
Reason
One way to understand the Bad Boys franchise is as a referendum on shifting cultural views of masculinity. The first two films, released in 1995 and 2003 respectively, followed the brash antics of two hard-charging Miami cops, Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) and Mike Lowrey (Will Smith). Mike and Marcus are a classic cinematic odd couple: Marcus is sloppy, goofy, messy, harried, and married; Marcus is handsome, uptight, hard-charging, and very, very single. But they shared a certain bro-code—vulgar, violent, competitive, sex-obsessed, and constantly engaged in insult comedy, much of which had...
Reason
After escaping the oppressive regime of North Korea, Loh Kiwan arrives in Belgium to seek asylum, hoping to find freedom and a fresh start. Instead, he finds himself entangled in the bureaucratic limbo of the asylum process. Without money, a home, or the legal right to work, Kiwan's situation in the South Korean film My Name is Loh Kiwan (streaming on Netflix) becomes increasingly desperate. He is forced to sleep in public bathrooms in the brutal winter and scavenge for food in trash bins. Kiwan finally gets a break when he lands an illegal job at a meat factory. Even then, safety and stabilit...
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