In October 2024, a few months before _Heated Rivalry_ was greenlit by studio producers in Canada, Amazon Prime Video announced that it was adapting the popular hockey romance book series _Off Campus_. Set at a fictional Ivy League school called “Briar University,” author Elle Kennedy's series follows four rakish men’s hockey players on the Briar U team as they meet the women who convince them to…

Although Plato's _Symposium_ is best remembered as a Socratic dialogue, it was also, at its core, a story about a dinner party. In Athens, symposia consisted of a lavish banquet followed by a _lot_ of drinking, during which time the guests would deliver speeches. Like many dinner parties, the _Symposium_ is famously crashed by a drunken guy (Alcibiades) who derails the conversation but is, at…

I call them my dummies, the people who I watch on my big screen in the evenings as a way to calm my nervous system. It's not necessarily that my dummies are stupid, but anyone who agrees to go on a reality television show has to have enough optimism in their body to drown out any truly critical thought. They believe in love, or at least fame. They believe not only that they are special, but that…

Going into the third season of _Euphoria_ , the much-delayed, much-discussed, maybe final season of the hit HBO series, a friend roped me into catching up on the show's first two seasons. I had avoided the show during its initial run and the peak of its hype machine, mainly because the internet discourse had been so exhausting, ping-ponging between rational conversations about on-set…

I was introduced to the work of Kane Parsons via my YouTube algorithm. His first Backrooms video, “The Backrooms (Found Footage)”, came up on my homepage the week he uploaded it in early 2022. I remember it well because the video—impressive on its own for being slick, professional, and, crucially, scary—quickly racked up views over the course of a few days. I wasn’t familiar with the Backrooms…

The following is excerpted from a chapter of Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography, by Joshua Kendall. The book is available for purchase now.

In the spring of 2015, like many Americans, Garry Trudeau figured that the upcoming 2016 election would essentially be a repeat of 1992, as it would also feature a Bush versus a Clinton—in this case, former Florida governor and younger ­brother of…

From the moment you begin Robert Coover’s 1968 novel _The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop.,_ you are in a rarified space. What kind of title is that for a novel, so long and unwieldy? The recent reissue of the novel by New York Review Books gives little clue as to what could happen inside its cover. Behind the title there are several misshapen die with colorful dots and…

The specifics are a little difficult to pin down, but that’s true of most things surrounding novelist, filmmaker, and playwright Missouri Williams. Here are the facts I’ve been able to piece together: At some point in her young adulthood, Williams began to have seizures. In a 2025 interview with TriQuarterly, Williams said that the episodes began after she had moved to “a new city with a new…

“Autobiography,” the critic John Berger said, “begins with a sense of being alone. It’s an orphan form.” Berger wrote these words weeks after the death of his mother, but he was speaking generally, about the project of remembrance which so many artists take up over the course of their lives. That loneliness—that orphanhood—is a matter of separation, a gap between the self as subject and author.…

_Welcome to**** Listening Habits_,_a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently._

Have you heard the bad news? Drake has been forsaken: by his rap peers, by his label bosses, and worst of all by the listening public. He has been strung up and nailed to the cross. He has been stabbed in the back by all parties. And yet he has risen once again, bearing three…

_“Grogu is dead. Grogu remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the…

The post-retirement track record for your hyper-competitive, multiple-champion GOAT-class athletes is not necessarily one you'd want for yourself. So often they seem stranded, often surrounded but generally quite alone, peering down from atop a mile-high butte of money and notoriety at a world that is much too far away to recognize; the people moving through and within it, to the extent they are…

When I first read that Daniel Radcliffe would be doing _Every Brilliant Thing_ on Broadway, I didn't think it would work. It's not that I was worried about Radcliffe, who besides his film and TV career has established himself as a bona fide stage entertainer. I was worried about everybody else in the theater, because this play runs on audience participation. For Radcliffe in particular I imagined…

_This article originally appeared May 11 on The Small Bow._

Early on Saturday mornings, Amy Wallace would be yanked out of bed by her big brother, David. He was determined not to miss the start of the cartoons. At their home in Urbana, Illinois, the siblings situated themselves in front of the television and waited for the color bars to turn to _The Road Runner Show_ , David eager, impatient,…

Earlier this spring, when I saw the trailer for _The Sheep Detectives_ , I had what I have come to understand is a universal experience. When I watched Hugh Jackman, a kindly shepherd named George, read murder mysteries to his impressively realistic animated flock of sheep, I found this premise odd but charming. When I learned that George was murdered, his flock suddenly tasked with solving the…

Patrick Radden Keefe is interested in blockbuster stories. He once told _The New Yorker_ ’s _Critics at Large_ podcast that he wasn’t a fan of “true crime.” Instead, he often writes about fraud, gangsters, scammers, and high-powered lawyers. He’s the bad boy at the legacy magazine, the Anthony Bourdain of journalism, whom he coincidentally profiled in 2017, a year before his death. In another…

Provides radical vision and practical solutions for the arts.
Focus on funding, income, spaces and housing for artists. "People Before Profit commit to major increases in funding for the arts and to ensure artists have adequate incomes to live and create, and can access spaces for their art."

It’s almost quaint to read now, but author Lauren Weisberger spent the majority of her 2003 press tour for the release of _The Devil Wears Prada_ trying to distance it from its obvious source material. “So much of the book is composed of stories from my friends,” she told _Publishers Weekly_ at the time. “A lot of my girlfriends ended up in publishing and in magazines, or doing fashion PR or…

Cllr Reddy said any solution must also protect workers who have given years of service to the café and the community.
“Axis Café is not just another business. It is a vital community space in Ballymun."

There is nothing that sucks the life out of a good time like someone self-consciously asking whether you are having fun. Maybe a moment ago, you were having fun, but now, faced with their anxiety (or worse, their reassurance that certainly you are having a good time, maybe even the best you've ever had), your attention is diverted to them: the fear in this other person's eyes and their terror…

Mary Bennet, middle of five, has few virtues to recommend her. Unlike her eldest sister, Jane, she is not beautiful. Nor is she witty, like second-eldest Elizabeth. Her younger sister, Kitty, may be frivolous, but at least she is good-humored and has a fun nickname. Youngest daughter Lydia, meanwhile, is disastrously reckless, but you can’t deny she has spirit. Although one might think Jane…

Gaza is the compass. These words—emblazoned on large banners at the 2025 People's Conference For Palestine in Detroit, and frequently invoked by comrades in the Palestinian Youth Movement at speeches and rallies—contain a truth with which so much of the world has yet to reckon, though it will sweep them along regardless.

In other words, Gaza is the place—and the event—in reference to which we…

For the duration of my childhood, it felt like all of the romantic-comedy heroines were journalists. They worked at newspapers in _Kissing Jessica Stein_ , _Sleepless In Seattle_ , _The Holiday_ , _Never Been Kissed_ and _When Harry Met Sally_. If they didn't work at newspapers, they worked at glossy magazines like in _How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days_ and _13 Going On 30_. In _Hitch_ , she's a…

Jules Boykoff loves soccer. He loves the feeling of the ball at his feet, he loves the rush of cheering on the Portland Timbers at the fortress that is Providence Park, and he loves the knowing hum that goes around a stadium when a player delivers a little moment of sublimity that isn't flashy enough to make the highlight reel. "It's a collective recognition of the tiny acts of soccer…

Converts can often seem like the only really religious people around. They tend to take their faith up, whatever it may be, with enthusiasm and vigor and, most importantly, without embarrassment; the cliché of the "zealotry of the convert" is well known even beyond the confines of institutional or traditional belief. No shrug of ambivalence for the initiate. But then, that's what makes them…

The novelist Walter Tevis described his 1963 sci-fi novel _The Man Who Fell to Earth_ , obliquely inspired by his struggles with alcoholism, as “disguised autobiography.” It had been optioned at least three times before attracting the attention of director Nicolas Roeg, who saw it as a more spiritual story of alienation. Roeg initially wanted the main character, an extraterrestrial inventor, to…

_Michael_ is a bad movie. Let’s just get that out of the way now. It is a movie designed less to tell a story than to recreate moments, ones you are probably already familiar with. It is a movie designed to give you a karaoke experience in a theater setting with other like-minded Michael Jackson fans. It is a movie designed to make the estate of a dead pop star a great deal of money, in line with…

What will it take to be fulfilled by life? Love, perhaps, or community, power, or professional success. At different points in my life I believed that having my work published would make me happy, or leaving the country, going back to school, getting a literary agent. I thought a new girlfriend might do it, or a new apartment. Some of these I achieved; some I’ve yet to; one or two, thankfully,…

"Ahoy there, perverts!" are the first words out of Gabby Windey's mouth. The host of the new Hulu show _Love Overboard_ stands on the deck of a 280-foot superyacht named _The Chakra_ , wearing a gorgeous, slinky dress with cut-out sections. "Welcome to _Love Overboard_!" she says, throwing her hands over her head.

The appetite for reality shows about young, hot, stupid people competing to find…

There’s an apocryphal story concerning the original pitch for _Girls:_ Supposedly, Lena Dunham wrote it on the back of a cocktail napkin. It was all vibes but no plot or fleshed-out characters, and situated the show concept somewhere between _Gossip Girl_ and _Sex and the City_. It was about the sort of girls Dunham—then 23 years old and making a web series in SoHo—knew and was friends with. The…