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Arielle Angel (Editor-in-Chief): In the latest issue of n+1, E. Tammy Kim writes about middle age. In a loose, diaristic collection of vignettes titled “Creature of the Late Afternoon,” she explores the surreality of the “sandwich generation” sans children—an “open-faced sandwich,” for whom the word “family” still describes “the one I was born into: mother, father, and brother.” It is her parents’ deaths that will define her adulthood, she writes, not the milestones of the next generation. This confrontation with mortality is not subtle: The essay begins with a visceral description of the exhumation of her grandparents’ graves in Korea (her uncle is tired of the burden of keeping them up and has opted for a more final cremation), and ends with the author accompanying her parents on a ride around the cemetery in Washington State where they have recently bought plots. The prose is understated and unsentimental, but with an easy intimacy, leaving plenty of room for the reader to tap into the big emotions roiling under the text.

That’s particularly true if you, like me, happen to be a childless woman in your 40s, reeling from multiple familial losses. Over the last year and a half of mourning my father, I have thought often about whether it’s possible to feel satisfied with your last words to a loved one. People say “Tell them now!” and that seems like good advice, but when faced with the opportunity to communicate something holistic to the living, I cannot find anything to say except “I love you,” which is important, but too generic to feel significant. Kim tells us she is working on a book about her mother, and that she often feels strange memorializing her while she is still alive and well. She wants the book to provide an answer to the question of her own childlessness, in form if not in content; for her aging mother, and for herself. The size and desperation of that desire hints at the impossibility of fulfilling it. Words refuse to distill what continues to accrue moment to moment; words cannot resolve death. But as Kim’s essay suggests, they might still capture the texture of a life lived together.

Jonathan Shamir (contributing writer): British journalist Rachel Shabi’s new book, Off-White: The Truth About Antisemitism, takes on the dizzying and unenviable task of trying to chart a way through the hall of mirrors that is antisemitism, anti-antisemitism, and anti-anti-antisemitism politics. It begins by retreading the familiar history of Western antisemitism, from a Christian hatred that became structural in religious and then legal regimes in Europe to a more (but not exclusively) prejudicial manifestation. The main novelty for a popular audience lies in placing this historical narrative in relation to other forms of racism—and indeed, as the blueprint for the European project of racemaking—while maintaining antisemitism’s distinctive character that eludes easy categorization within a binaristic and structural understanding of racism. Unlike other forms of racism, Jews’ attenuated and contingent relationship to whiteness (hence the title, “off-white”) meant they were scapegoated as much as subjugated, and the consequences were not any less deadly. Drawing on a wide range of contexts, Shabi presents a compelling alternative history that captures antisemitism’s function “to confuse us over where actual power lies and to dilute and repel our efforts to confront the social, racial, and economic injustices emanating from those real structures of power.”

Antisemitism may defy a strictly material analysis, given that wealth and status have failed to protect Jews—as Shabi argues, the limited bestowal of privilege by ruling powers is “part of its MO”—yet Shabi’s alternative framework of how antisemitism is used highlights continuities over ruptures in the story of eternal Jewish persecution. In understanding antisemitism as a structure of scapegoating, Shabi does not sufficiently address questions of real power, and how Jewish political agency and subjectivity change over time. When she considers how this might come to bear on fortifying progressive coalitions, it becomes particularly apparent that class hierarchies and institutional positioning shape how communities approach questions of safety.

Shabi foregrounds Britain’s antisemitic history as “the first and the worst,” all the way from the medieval persecution of Jews forced into money-lending to the contemporary British elite’s cynical and overzealous philosemitism. But while there may be “creepy resonances” between the bookends of this history, her telling downplays the significance of changes on questions of agency. Jews were readmitted into Britain in the 17th century, and the development of their own independent institutions and closer integration into the establishment happened well before most other minority groups arrived in the mid-20th century. This historical head start helps explain why mainstream British Jewish institutions have typically sought safety through vertical alliances with the state, rather than through participation in anti-racist coalitions, except in cases where the class position of Jews aligned more closely with other marginalized groups—for example, in the anti-fascist demonstration at Cable Street. (The pattern is not unique, as other upwardly mobile minorities, such as the British Hindu community, have followed a similar political trajectory.)

More significantly, Shabi’s framework struggles to fully account for the most profound rupture in modern Jewish political life: the establishment of Israel and its refractions across the diaspora. She insightfully shows how Zionism once positioned itself as a radical break from diasporic history before eventually rebranding itself as the endpoint of antisemitic persecution. But while she is clear that the Zionist project of political sovereignty has essentially rendered the framework of antisemitism defunct for understanding the position of Israeli Jews vis-a-vis Palestinians, she sidesteps the thornier question of how to understand a diaspora that mostly regards Zionism as identity rather than merely ideology. This revolution in political subjectivity, and more importantly in material and institutional relations, goes unaddressed. How, for example, might her frame of antisemitism apply to a protest outside a synagogue or Hillel that is hosting an IDF fundraiser? From a moral and material perspective, Shabi rightly argues that the left must fix its focus on the actors who exploit these fears, and she adeptly remaps this evolving cast to include far-right parties and Christian Zionists. But if antisemitism is increasingly internalized through the lens of Zionism, reproducing the very zero-sum dynamics that she wants to dismantle, Shabi underestimates how fraught it becomes to build the kind of unified, progressive coalition she envisions. The impasse, then, lies no less in reckoning with Zionism’s political consequences—both for Palestinians and for the Jewish communities increasingly organized in its shadow.

Off-White doesn’t profess to offer solutions, only a diagnosis—perhaps because it spans so many contexts that demand different responses, or perhaps because the devil lies in the praxis. The commendable initiatives that Shabi does briefly highlight in her conclusion—antisemitism training for leftists, Jewish groups working to disentangle religious and cultural practice from the violence of the Israeli state, and alternatives to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, among others—are either premised on or actively engaged in the project of separating Judaism and Jewishness from Zionism. Her book serves as a thoughtful primer that can equip progressives to better understand and combat antisemitism and disrupt the cycle of weaponization, but Shabi also gestures, perhaps more than she intends, toward the necessity of recognizing Jewish agency in shaping the present impasse and hopefully the way out. While she is right to insist that the left must direct its critique toward state and colonial power, these regressive dynamics are not simply imposed from above, but are today sustained within our communities. In the battle for a better world, the Jewish left’s unique role in challenging our institutions or building our own, disentangling Judaism from Zionism, and resisting the weaponization of antisemitism is no less urgent than the left’s need to reclaim this space.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Sex is the first of a trilogy of films by the Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud, released here in the US after the third film, Love. This is not the intended order, but it’s the order Americans have, and though the changed sequence alters the impact of elements of the unified whole, it does nothing to change the brilliance of each individual film.

Sex begins with two uniformed chimney-sweeps sitting in their office discussing dreams. One of them, the supervisor, tells the other about his dream of the previous night, in which he met David Bowie, who looked at him as if he were a woman. He’s confused by the dream’s significance, its meaning, its questioning of his masculinity. But after all, it’s nothing more than a dream. His fellow sweep, however, has a more material tale to tell: the previous day, after a job at a client’s house, he was asked by the client—a man of a certain age—if he wanted to have sex. He begged off, he explains, but then, after leaving and upon further reflection, returned and had sex. He’s not, he insists, gay. He was just pleased that someone looked upon him with so overtly sexual a gaze. So innocent does he think this passing event is that he tells his wife about it. It was just sex, not cheating, and he claims she was fine with it.

But she wasn’t, and her entire world, her vision of her husband and of their marriage, has been forever changed. The privacy of their facial expressions during sex has been violated. For the husband, this was just loosely floating, uncontrollable desire that signified nothing. For the wife, it’s a sign that his desire, fully controllable, is no longer directed meaningfully towards her, whatever he might say.

The supervisor is going through his own crisis. He sings in a church choir, and he feels his voice has changed. A singing teacher tells him his tongue is tense, and bizarrely tugs at it to release the tension. He’s asked to sing the song in which his voice failed, and his son, with whom he has a warm and close relationship, later reproaches him for not singing a religious song to demonstrate his problem. He accuses his father of hiding his religious faith from the attractive young singing coach.

The nature of faith, sex, and dreams are the themes of this touching and intelligent film. Is it right to place a name on a direction of sexual desire? How are the faithful to deal with forms of desire their religion considers aberrant? Do our dreams reveal something truly fundamental about us? Haugerud, as he did in Love, allows his characters the opportunity to clearly and fully explore their ideas and feelings. Everyone’s values and beliefs are expressed, with no judgment attached.

Oslo itself is also a theme of the other film in Haugerud’s trilogy, Dreams—the Norwegian capital’s shift from the social democratic ethos represented by its old, stodgy, but welcoming city hall to more stark modern architecture. The film contains countless scenes of cranes at work or at rest, of lots being cleared for future construction. Nothing is fixed, all is in flux—physically, emotionally, and intellectually. Dreams expresses the uneasiness of the present and the future, while at the same time accepting that new forms of happiness are possible.

Daniel May (publisher): Diversion—from the Latin, “to turn aside.” The term’s neutrality suggests that what we might turn aside is of lesser importance than what we are turning toward, but in general parlance we understand that, as a noun, an effective diversion allows us and even compels us to turn aside, and turn away from, what we know is of less urgency and less meaning than what the diversion calls us toward. This is the danger of the diversion, of course, and of an economy that so relentlessly produces it. But in bleak and demanding times, who among us is immune from the mental rest that a good diversion provides?

But what makes a good diversion? Let’s propose three conditions. First, of course, it cannot be overly demanding; it must pull us out of the pressures of family and the obligations of politics (this is why almost all great art makes for bad diversion) but it can’t lead to their neglect (heroin: bad diversion). Second, it must be demanding enough to hold one’s attention, lest the wandering mind return to the horrors of the day’s news or the anxieties of, say, the last conversation with one’s parent. Third, and by far the most difficult, it must not actively make one feel worse about themselves. This is the fundamental problem not only with say, opioids, but with so much of what counts as diversion in an economy that has come to depend on it; the numb what-am-I-doing-with-my-life hangover that follows an hour of scrolling on Twitter or TikTok and lasts almost as long as the scroll itself.

So let me submit: the NBA podcast. Bear with me.

Given the pride of place that it holds in the formation of American masculinity, sports as such offers an ambivalent candidate for diversion. The central problem is that those invested in sports tend to be, well, invested in it. However preposterous and patently ridiculous it is to those free from the gravitational pull of fandom, for the vast majority of the inhabitants of Planet Sports, life is either frustrating or heartbreaking—and the latter only in the good years. I spent no small amount of psychological energy in my twenties actively working to unburden myself of the hold that the Minnesota Vikings—a multimillion-dollar company that exists in order to make it easier for other companies to sell their products to viewers of its games—had over my mental well-being.

Perhaps that is a bad example, as football is particularly ill-equipped when it comes to the third condition. The sport is straightforwardly brutal, and however much I can still find myself getting sucked into a playoff game, watching more than a half makes me feel like I’ve been sniffing glue (disclaimer: I’ve never sniffed glue). But I can hazard a defense of basketball, on aesthetic and even political grounds. That defense would point to the accessibility of the sport (it can be and often is played in parking lots and playgrounds), its historical connection to America’s underclass, the relative (compared to other leagues) political engagement of its stars and even executives, and above all the nature of the game, which revolves around how to make space for others (or, if you’re good, how to let others make space for you). I can, however, understand why such a defense would ring hollow to anyone aware of the actual economics of the NBA, or those that may grow annoyed at the screams of partners or friends potentially waking up sleeping children because some guy put some ball in something. More personally, and I write this as someone who has loved basketball for as long as I’ve been sentient, the trouble is that actually watching basketball takes up too much damn time. In this respect, it cannot meet our first condition; it is just too demanding.

But! The NBA podcast—and more specifically the trio of shows that are the crown jewel in “The Ringer’s Podcast Network”: The Bill Simmons Podcast, The Ringer NBA Show, and The Zach Lowe Show—is just demanding enough, easily assimilable into dishwashing or exercise, providing escape with minimal self-loathing.

While the hosts of all these pods are constantly on each other’s shows, each one manages to retain a distinctive vibe. While Simmons is bombastic, encyclopedic in his knowledge of NBA history and histrionic in his enthusiasms (and resentments), the NBA Show trio of Justin Verrier, Rob Mahoney, and Wosny Lambre (Big Woz) come off as friends that like hanging out to talk hoops while gently mocking each other’s non-basketball related hobbies.

But the best of these is The Zach Lowe Show. Lowe is a former high school teacher and PhD student in US history who worked as a criminal justice reporter at The Stamford Advocate and The American Lawyer before turning to the NBA. I like to think that his politics and academic training have something to do with my affection for him, but the truth is that it would take an exacting, and creative, reading of his work to draw the connections. He clearly just loves basketball. He loves the strategy of it, he loves the players, he loves the executives, he loves the coaches, and he loves those that love the game. That love leaves him with a generosity toward those in the sport but a general annoyance with the vast majority of those in sports media, who he subtly but clearly considers insufficiently respectful and considerate of the talent and brilliance of the people that play and make the sport. To wit: after a 20-minute monologue describing all the limitations of recently fired Knicks coach Tom Thibodeou, he imagined a conversation with the subject of his criticisms: “The counters that Thibs would have to all of this shit that I’m saying now, I would be like, oh, oh, so you actually thought about all of this and then charted it out five steps ahead; if I do that, they’re going to do that. These are not original ideas to this coach. He knows more about basketball than I will ever know. He forgot more about basketball today than I will ever know.”

In substance, none of this is remarkable. But it’s hard to care deeply about something as ultimately trivial as sports while also being careful with it. We want our diversions to mean less to us than what we truly value. But we also don’t want to feel like suckers for caring about them. It’s a hard balance to strike, but when it is struck, it is just pleasurable enough.

Jonathan Shamir (contributing writer): The first of many times that I picked up The Sellout, the Man Booker Prize-winning novel by Paul Beatty, must have been shortly after its release in 2015. My inability to commit to reading the novel was not because I couldn’t get into it, but the exact opposite: the prose was so alive, so dense that I found myself paralyzed every time I tried to read it, deferring until I felt I had the necessary lucidity of mind to fully grasp its genius. Needless to say, that fabled state of mind never arrived, but I did finally read the book, and it was everything I imagined it would be.

The Sellout begins at the Supreme Court with the trial of the Black protagonist—known in his case by his surname Me, known to his lover by the nickname Bonbon, and known to his father’s erstwhile frenemy as The Sellout—for reinstating slavery and segregation in his Californian hometown, the agrarian ghetto of Dickens, in order to put it back on the map (literally, after its erasure). From the courtroom, where the narrator lights up a joint because charging him for such a minor misdemeanour would be “like charging Hitler for loitering or a multinational oil company like British Petroleum for littering,” he gives us his life story, and explains how he found himself pioneering the violent reversal of American history’s not-so-relentless forward march.

Beatty’s novel is a carnivalesque critique of ‘post-racial’ America, playfully taking ideas about race to their logical extremes to expose the hypocrisy, and often the emptiness, in their wake. In other words, he’s trying to bring back overt racism to force America to confront the lie of its disappearance. In the picaresque adventures across Dickens, a group of Black thinkers known as the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals rewrite a “politically correct” version of the American canon, excising the n-word and replacing the word “slave” with “dark skinned volunteer”; a washed-up child actor volunteers to be the narrator’s slave in order to feel “relevant again,” quipping that “true freedom is having the right to be a slave”; gangs perform historical reenactments of the glorious turf wars of the past; and white children playact their own freedom rides to the newly-segregated Chaff Middle School (even though, given that only Blacks and Mexicans live in the area, it is already de facto segregated) after the narrator puts up a punny sign that the whites-only Wheaton Academy will be set up next door.

What drew me in more than anything else was Beatty’s remarkable prose, overflowing and overloaded with everything from legalese to psychoanalytic theory to a full array of erudite African American cultural references and vernaculars, not to mention flashes of Spanish and Latin, and even a line of Cyrillic at one point. The language is alive and thrashing with all these different registers, as though this kind of maximalist cognitive overload can meet the questions about race that are overdetermined to the point of absurdity, and, of course, have no easy answers.

It’s also been a long time since literary fiction made me laugh so much. (Special mention to one early scene when the narrator’s father—“the sole practitioner of the field of Liberation Psychology”—mugs the narrator to test whether the bystander effect applies to Black people, only to instigate a pile-on because he didn’t account for the “bandwagon effect.”) But for all the times I laughed, there were times I felt like I shouldn’t, and jokes that flew miles over my head. The raucous and irreverent humor felt like it was also probing what laughter might be revealing, and what it might be staving off. In the penultimate chapter, the narrator recalls going to a comedy show with his father where the comedian evicted two white audience members for laughing. “Do I look like I’m fucking joking with you? This shit ain’t for you. Understand? Now get the fuck out! This is our thing.” The room goes silent, and the narrator reflects on why he didn’t confront the comedian. Not because the aggrieved white people needed him, but because there is a void in the center: “So what exactly is our thing?”

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The exhibition of paintings by René Magritte at the Luxembourg + Co. gallery on the Upper East Side, on display until July 12th, provides visitors with an opportunity to do something rarely possible with such a well-known and omnipresent artist. The show, titled The Phantom Landscape, allows us to examine Magritte’s paintings—so beautiful, so rich, so disarming—away from the crowds and distractions of museums that are little more than stops on the tourism checklist. Magritte’s playfulness, his wit, and, most importantly, the questions he slyly poses about language and images as they exist separately and in relation to each other can best be appreciated in the gallery’s quiet, well-laid-out sixth floor space.

The show features works any Magritte aficionado is familiar with, but sometimes with a curious twist. In the famous La Clef des songes (The Interpretation of Dreams) from 1935, which is nearly as emblematic of the artist’s oeuvre as Ceci n’est pas une pipe, we are presented with images of a horse, labeled “the door”; a clock, labeled “the wind”; a pitcher, labeled “the door”; and a valise, labeled “the valise.” Magritte’s questioning of the nature of language’s falsely assumed necessary relationship to the object named is presented here with the greatest simplicity, the objects painted as they would be in a child’s primer. And yet the simplicity is denied by the artist’s refusal to fix them with their commonly accepted names. The version on display in the show is not the most familiar version, captioned in French; rather, here we get a rare work in English by the francophone Belge. This was an opportunistic choice by Magritte—the Parisian gallery at which he was shown had gone bust, so he repainted the original in English in an effort to sell to an American. I assume it worked.

Magritte provides no answers to the questions his paintings pose. Le Paysage fantôme (The Phantom Landscape), from 1928, is a portrait in muddy colors of a plain-looking woman—Magritte’s wife Georgette—with the word “montagne” written across the middle of her face. Is it that her nose is a mountain in the landscape of her face? Is the face obscuring the landscape, rendering it a ghost? Many possible answers work, and this is the central richness of Magritte.

There are several paintings in which the scene being painted, often an actual landscape, is interrupted by the canvas within the canvas that continues the landscape that is being painted. Does the painting continue the landscape, or vice versa? The opposition and collaboration of artifice and reality are ever-present in Magritte’s work. Bright blue skies with banks of clouds predominate, reinforcing the oneiric quality of the paintings. Dresses in human poses with no bodies in them, the torsos of classical sculptures at an otherwise deserted seaside, a solitary gravesite on the sand, a unicorn with a castle tower as a horn—these are images unmistakably by Magritte. The gallery has wisely kept explanatory texts to a minimum. Even the French titles are untranslated. I approve wholeheartedly. The Phantom Landscape allows and even obliges us to truly consider the works on show. It insists that we spend more than the 17 seconds surveys have shown most museumgoers spend before any painting. The rewards are immense.

Josh Lambert (contributor): Sharp-eyed viewers of the season finale of The Last of Us, which aired on HBO Max this past Sunday, will have caught something I was waiting for all season. When Dina gives Ellie a bracelet for good luck, we catch just a glimpse of the charm on it, a hamsa.

Those of us who have played the original video game understand why Dina would wear a symbol beloved by North African Jews and Muslims, and by Sephardic Jews more generally. The game takes pains to let us know that Dina is Jewish—a descendant, she explains to Ellie, of Jews who survived the Inquisition and the Holocaust before also surviving a zombie apocalypse. For whatever reason, the show entirely skipped the scene in the game in which the two young women wander through a ruined synagogue, chatting about belief and prayer, the Jewish calendar, the Torah, and the tradition of eating apples and honey on Rosh Hashanah.

As the On the Nose podcast mentioned a couple years ago, the game has occasioned some intense arguments online about its politics. I have quibbles both with the idea that The Last of Us, Part 2 offers “the most fleshed out direct Jewish representation in a AAA [i.e., blockbuster video] game,” and with the argument that the whole game can be boiled down to an “allegory about Israel-Palestine.” But the moment in Sunday’s finale when Dina’s dreamboat baby-daddy, Jesse, pronounces “This is not our war” offers some sense of why I’ve read the game as reflecting the tendency of liberal American Jews in the mid-2010s to take the position that mounting fascism in Israel, Netanyahu’s empowerment of Hamas, and the immiseration of Gaza were just not their problem. “Everything’s a moral if only you can find it,” the show tells us, in a slogan you might have also caught on a bookstore wall in the finale.

There’s plenty more to say about this, let alone about dozens of other changes, many of them unaccountable, that the show has made in adapting the game for television. But if you’re interested specifically in the backstory to Dina’s character that has been left out of the series you’ve watched, and if you can put up with, or skip over, a smattering of critical theory, please keep your eyes out for an article I’ve written for the summer issue of the scholarly journal Jewish Social Studies, which should be available online in the next couple of weeks.

Devin E. Naar (advisory board): For a beautifully illustrated and historically rooted tale about the relationship between a Sephardic Jew from the Ottoman Empire and his Japanese friend in Seattle during the World War II-era incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry, check out Josh Tuininga’s graphic novel, We Are Not Strangers. Inspired by stories Tuininga heard about his great uncle’s unusual efforts to support his Japanese friend during Incarceration, the graphic novel not only reveals a little-known but much-needed story of allyship, but also highlights the vulnerabilities that the Sephardic characters face along the way—whether difficulties at Ellis Island, being targeted by white men in Seattle, or a side plot about a charming Nona (grandmother) who smuggles her way across the US border to circumvent immigration quotas. (Full disclosure: I wrote the afterward!)

If you are interested in a deeper dive into the politics and ideologies of Sepharadim and Mizrahim, peruse the recordings of the 2025 Sephardi Modernity Seminar Series: “Partners, Outsiders, and Others: Sephardi Jews and the Global Left.” Organized by Angy Cohen of the Spanish National Research Council and Yuval Ivry of Brandeis University, the series features leading scholars who delve into themes as diverse as Iraqi Jewish feminist leftists, Mizrahi feminist politics, Jewish communists in Egypt, and Sepharadim and leftist activism in Argentina and Brazil, among other topics. The opening session, “Colonized Outsiders; Arabised Jews,” begins with Moshe Behar of the University of Manchester exploring a critique of the Balfour Declaration by Yosef Castel, a local, Ottoman-born, self-described Palestinian Jew in 1921. Inspired by an ethos stemming from his upbringing in the multinational world of the Ottoman Empire, Castel posited a binational solution to the question of Palestine before the better-known Ashkenazi advocates of this vision, associated with Brit Shalom, entered the scene. We need more exposure to and knowledge of the array of Jewish political expressions on the left engaging with and critiquing Zionism.

In terms of contemporary cultural representation, if you haven’t seen the second season of the Netflix series Mo, you must do so. While Alisa Solomon encouraged JC readers to watch the series a few months ago, it’s also worth considering from the perspective of Sepharadim and Mizrahim. A tremendously necessary, humanizing, and funny portrait of a Palestinian family based in the US—with a detour to Mexico due to draconian US immigration laws—the show misses an opportunity to convey an equally nuanced dynamic with regard to Jewishness. Jewishness is presented largely through Fiddler on he Roof-style caricatures and a hyper-white representation and ongoing commentary about the blue eyes of the character of Guy, an Israeli restaurateur and the new love interest of Mo’s ex-girlfriend. What stories that move beyond the Israeli/Palestinian or Jew/Arab binaries could Mo have told if one of the characters were Mizrahi or Sepharadi—Middle Eastern, of Arabic- and/or Ladino-speaking heritage? Perhaps an heir of the kind of figures featured in the Sephardic Modernity Seminar Series mentioned above? Rather than accepting the Ashkenormativity of American Jewish culture, what if Mo had taken a cue from the work of Palestinian musician Jowan Safadi, whose provocative and must-watch bilingual music video, “To be an Arab,” delves into questions of Arabophobia and self-hatred among Sepharadim and Mizrahim?

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Anyone old enough to have lived through the Reagan years can’t help but be horrified by the cult that has formed around his falsified memory. When even Democrats cite him positively, we know the degradation of American life is pretty much complete. This is, after all, the man who financed and armed the murderous contras in Nicaragua, who ignored AIDS, who was the benignant face of unfettered greed—and who brought us to the brink of nuclear destruction. It is this last element of the Reagan nightmare that resides at the heart of Jeff Daniels’s new documentary Television Event. The titular phenomenon is the three-hour, made-for-TV movie The Day After that first aired on November 20th, 1983, when it was seen by 100 million Americans. The Day After was not only effective cinematically, but had an impact on the real world, by showing the American populace what it would look like if we descended into the nuclear war that Reagan was so casually courting.

In Television Event, the story is told by the main driving forces behind the making of the movie, including cocky director Nick Meyer, network suits Brandon Stoddard and Stu Samuels, producer Robert Papazian, and writer Ed Hume. Their narration brings to life the world of 1983, in which the threat of an atomic apocalypse was in the air; Daniels adds in the context of the massive anti-nuclear demonstration in the spring of 1982, when a million people marched in Manhattan against Reagan’s seeming rush to war. As we learn, the production faced an uphill battle: The White House mounted a campaign against the film, network censors tried to soften it, and advertisers were almost impossible to find. (The Orville Redenbacher’s popcorn brand took advantage of the situation and seized promotional spots across the three hours for only $11,000.)

The genius of The Day After was the choice to have it set right in the heart of middle America (Lawrence, Kansas) amidst the daily doings of a group of its residents. It was the bucolic America of Reagan’s ads—the “Real America” of Republican fantasy—that we saw literally obliterated. (No one who has seen the film needs reminding of just how graphic it was: the people incinerated, the flames engulfing everything, skeletal systems made visible before the bodies vanished in the nuclear storm.) The movie was intended as a warning, and it worked. After it made the prospect of nuclear devastation cinematically real, the American public made their feelings felt and finally had a sensible conversation about Reagan’s disastrous policies. Two months later at his State of the Union address, the president had to sound like a peacenik.

It may be true that we’re living in a Golden Age of television, but the splintering of media consumption means that no such shared spectacle will be possible again. If the 1980s were no aesthetic high point for the medium, Television Event makes a compelling case that these three hours justified its existence.

Simone Zimmerman (advisory board): Sarah Aziza’s words have been ones I have returned to again and again over the last 19 months, from her haunting cataloguing of watching the first weeks of the Gaza genocide unfold to her reflection on the role of witnessing in the pages of this magazine. Aziza’s new memoir, The Hollow Half, tells the story of her brush with death from anorexia, alongside her family’s story—their expulsion from Palestine in 1948, the experience growing up between the US and Saudi Arabia, and their attempts to return home to a land hollowed by Israel’s colonization. Sarah’s mom is white, her father Palestinian, and she writes of coming into her identity as a Palestinian American woman, making sense of these two halves of herself. She traces the hollowing grief of the ongoing Nakba and the pressure to conform to American whiteness, all while trying to understand and overcome the gnawing pain that literally eats her from within. Aziza writes with a breathtaking fierceness and vulnerability, her intellect matched by her lyricism.

Near the end of the book, Aziza reflects on being denied entry to Israel. She writes that the experience of receiving the officer’s “no” at the border “colonized, spread. Joining, compounding my anorexic drive to silence the other, unbearable histories inside my flesh. Starving to murder time, to sever self from self.” In response to this devastation, Aziza movingly invokes the words of Black Studies scholar Christina Sharpe, who, she notes, “standing in the midst of a longer disaster” of slavery and anti-Black racism “calls for a courageous grappling, a yes to the weight of what we inherit, and the ruptures we live among. It is only through such reckoning that liberation might be found.” Reading Aziza’s words, during perhaps one of the bleakest moments in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, was painful, but it was also a reminder of what we are struggling for—a people’s right to live, full and whole. We are blessed to have such courageous storytellers as Sarah Aziza.

Naomi Gordon-Loebl (deputy publisher): I first saw Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers when it came out in December 2023. I’d promised the friend I’d brought along that we wouldn’t see anything depressing. When the lights came up, though, both of us were teary. “That was so sad!” she said. “Wait, no,” I said. “I think it’s uplifting!”

All of Us Strangers is about a lonely gay writer who meets and forms a relationship with a mysterious stranger. It’s sexy, dark, and surprisingly fast-paced for a film in which very little happens. I won’t give away why it could be pitched as either uplifting or depressing, depending on how you spin it—that would ruin the movie, and I think you should see it.

But I will say that I watched All of Us Strangers again this week, and while I stand by my initial assessment that it’s ultimately hopeful, I can’t argue with the fact that the film is suffused with a deep, at times almost suffocating, melancholy. It’s present from the very first shot, when we see Andrew Scott writing—or more accurately, trying and failing to write—alone in a high-rise London apartment building that seems like an architectural manifestation of late-capitalist isolation.

In the end, then, what All of Us Strangers left me with was neither uplift nor sadness, but rather, simply an awareness of my own capacity to feel. Which reminded me of another film I saw recently: Constance Tsang’s Blue Sun Palace. I wasn’t going to write about Blue Sun Palace, since my brother worked on it and I’m far from a neutral source. But the film, which centers around a massage parlor in Flushing, Queens, hasn’t left my mind since I first saw it weeks ago, and rewatching All of Us Strangers emphasized why. In both films, grief is always close at hand; both feature protagonists whose lives have been marked by tragedy. And to the extent that either is hopeful, that hope hinges on what might happen after the credits roll—a future that is anything but guaranteed.

It can be hard to feel deeply in a world so enveloped by horror, as ours is in this moment. It’s often easier to numb out or become cynical; the hazards are simply fewer. But I had no choice but to feel while watching Blue Sun Palace and All of Us Strangers. These are films about the kind of sadness that threatens to never release you, and the arguably scarier belief in the possibility of something else. It is precisely this range of emotions that reminds me that I am human. What more could I ask of art?

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language—now streaming nearly everywhere, including on Kanopy for free—might be the best film I’ve seen in 2025. It’s certainly the funniest; this model work of absurdism, which stays faithful to its premise without ever becoming too exaggerated or silly, had me laughing so hard I was afraid my neighbors would hear me through the walls.

Set mostly in an alternate-reality version of Winnipeg where the population is predominantly Iranian and the main language is Persian, the movie is made in the style of Iranian arthouse cinema—full of charming children, sensitive adults, and touching reflections on human solidarity. In this cockeyed Winnipeg, Louis Riel, the leader of a 19th-century rebellion of Métis Manitobans, is a national hero; accordingly, the unit of currency is the riel (a nod to the Iranian rial). The film finds a fictionalized version of Rankin returning home from Montreal, where the people in government, obsessed as they are with their own quest for sovereignty, don’t even know which province Winnipeg is in. The film is a wonderful sendup of Canada that plays cleverly on its hypothesized cultural fusion. Gray, freezing Winnipeg is still its grimly ugly self, a city so grim that schoolchildren are told to frown when class pictures are being taken. But now the city streets are lined with the same sad-looking stalls and shops often featured in Iranian films, selling old typewriters and birthday cakes. (One store sells only turkeys, another just Kleenex.) At one point, Rankin waits for someone in a Tim Hortons—Canada’s Dunkin Donuts—where the pastries are served accompanied by not coffee, but tea in a glass served from a samovar, Iranian-style.

Delightful absurdity abounds. A tour guide having a rough time finding interesting sites leads the group to a bus stop where someone forgot his briefcase in 1983 (the luggage has been left in place ever, in the hope the owner will return for it), and to Louis Riel’s grave, located in a triangle formed where an off-ramp and a highway meet, where they are obliged to observe 30 minutes of silence. A class of Iranian children attend a French immersion school inexplicably set up in a drab building in a part of town known as “the Beige neighborhood”; their teacher despises them and, after one of the students is unable to read an exercise on the blackboard because he says a turkey stole his glasses, expels them all. (His story is later corroborated.)

Though unsparing in its mockery not only of the country in which it’s set but also of the exalted humanism of Iranian films, its satire is suffused with affection. Universal Language is a film of tremendous intelligence, originality, and warm humor—something urgently needed today.

David Klion (contributing editor): I’ve had a little more than two years to settle into the identity of special needs parent, ever since a geneticist sat me and my wife down and explained to us that our daughter has an extremely rare (one in 32,000) genetic condition that neither of us carry and that would permanently alter the course of our lives. Though things have gone about as well as they could have relative to the expectations set at that moment, and our daughter is thriving and charms everyone she meets, it was a traumatic moment and one I’ll likely spend many more years processing. At one point I tried to write about it for publication, but it didn’t come together. I still haven’t figured out exactly what I feel comfortable saying, or how to write about it in a way that anyone else might find helpful.

It’s in this context that I read Amanda Hess’s debut book, Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age, which was released last week and which movingly describes the experience of special needs parenting. Hess’s older son was diagnosed with Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome (one in 15,000), whose possible symptoms include an increased cancer risk and a prominent tongue that often requires surgical correction. While the specifics of our situations are very different, no one I’ve read has done a better job conveying the shock and terror of receiving a diagnosis like this, or the awe of seeing your child grow and develop in defiance of your worst fears.

I am not impartial here; I’m friends with Hess and her husband, I know their sons, Hess and I share a book editor, and I’m quoted on this exact subject in Second Life. Specifically, there’s a passage where I tell Hess that people kept asking me: Did you know before she was born?—in what I interpreted as an ambient obsession with choice and control in our professional class demographic. “The real tragedy, these interactions seemed to say, was having a baby with traits you did not personally select,” Hess writes. “Babies don’t work like that, and that’s part of what makes parenting meaningful: You do not get to choose.” Much of the public discourse on parenthood, and in particular the recent and unsettling vogue for natalism, strikes me as naively celebratory and saccharine; by contrast, I found this passage, and many others in Second Life, refreshingly honest. Hess writes about her children with ferocious love, but she never denies or minimizes the sacrifices or anxieties that accompany the decision to reproduce, and she is bracingly real about her own self-doubts.

I don’t want to make Second Life sound solemn, though; Hess is a tremendously funny observer, and her son’s condition is only one aspect of the book (much as it’s only one aspect of raising any special needs child). The bulk of Second Life is concerned with the way the internet, and particularly fertility apps, mediates the experiences of pregnancy and child-rearing. Hess has a singular talent, often on display in her cultural criticism in The New York Times, for capturing the quotidian experience of browsing the internet and being manipulated by its algorithms without ever judging or trivializing the emotional impulses being thus manipulated. In the current moment, when it can feel as though technology is rendering writing obsolete, there is something hopeful about reading such careful and precise writing about the humanity that all our technology is built around.

Nathan Goldman (senior editor): This past weekend, I ventured out to downtown St. Paul not once but twice, to see The Magnetic Fields perform their 1999 magnum opus 69 Love Songs over the course of two consecutive nights. These shows—part of a tour pegged to the iconic record’s 25th anniversary, which has now extended well into year 26—were not my first foray into that particular kind of retrospection. In fact, all but one of the shows I’ve seen this year were similar events: I also caught Frank Black celebrating his 1994 alt-rock classic Teenager of the Year and The Hold Steady commemorating their 2005 indie bar band epic Separation Sunday. (I’ve got two more coming up: Of Montreal doing their 2005 synth-pop extravaganza The Sunlandic Twins and Frank Black again, this time with his better-known act the Pixies, paying tribute to their early-’90s records Bossanova and Trompe Le Monde.) As the critic Peter C. Baker has noted, this practice, once “intriguingly novel,” has become ubiquitous—a testament, he argues, to the “acceleration of a culture industry that is unsettlingly dedicated . . . to monetizing our nostalgic attachment to media from the past.” Baker examines the perks of these “nostalgia exercises”—both for ardent fans and for artists scrambling to make ends meet in an inhospitable environment—as well as their aesthetic limits, principally the devaluation of variety and surprise. As he writes, these concerts largely abjure “the simple pleasure . . . of never knowing what song is coming next.”

Of the album-based shows I’ve seen, these ones honoring 69 Love Songs were the most immune from Baker’s critique, not because of the performances themselves but because of the band and album in question. For one thing, even when the setlist isn’t known in advance, spontaneity has always been minimal in Magnetic Fields shows, which tend to unfold less like indie rock concerts than recitals, with the band members seated and staid, performing faithful renditions with little commentary and no chaos. But more importantly, 69 Love Songs, whose title functions as a literal description of the offering, is not so much a record in the traditional sense as it is a durational formal experiment, a test of the songwriter’s prowess and the listener’s patience—the songs feel most fully realized as part of this absurd, ungainly whole. The project is also inherently performative, embracing artifice over authenticity: Stephin Merritt, who composed each of the 69 tracks, dons character after character, never singing confessionally and regularly routing the emotions at hand through clever wordplay and trope-laden genre imitation spanning everything from electro-pop bangers to country ballads. (Indeed, Merritt has said the album was initially conceived as “a theatrical revue with four drag queens,” a premise that survives in his choice to outsource vocal duties on a number of songs to a quartet of other singers.)

The band did not disappoint, proceeding dutifully but energetically through the mammoth tracklist. (“After this song,” Merritt quipped before the night one closer, “there will be a 22-hour intermission.”) For the most part, they fulfilled what Baker calls the “implicit promise . . . that old songs will sound like old recordings.” Still, certain structural limitations called for rearrangements and other alterations: Of the original vocalists, only Merritt and Shirley Simms were present (tragically, LD Beghtol, who performs my favorite song on the album and also wrote a charming little “field guide” to the record, died in 2020), so the two split singing with latecomer Anthony Kaczynski, who also took on some of the parts that Merritt does on-record, presumably to give his singularly beautiful bass voice a break. And in a delightful counterpoint to the band’s sedate reputation, they did indulge in occasional jokes and wry witticisms, sometimes injected into the music, as when they transformed the cheerleader-style chorus of “Washington, D.C.” into a laconic lament. But while many of the shifts and flourishes were welcome, they weren’t necessary; the true star was the songs themselves. Hearing one after another, I was awed anew at the achievement of the album—dozens upon dozens of truly brilliant tracks—and at Merrit’s peculiar genius. There are songwriters who mean more to me, but none I know who can match his uncanny ability to wring real feeling from a formalist exercise, unlocking the eros latent in the very structure of the love song. In his hands, the rote and well-trod become sublime.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s LOVE, now showing in New York and coming soon elsewhere, is a jewel of a film. In this perfectly controlled work, every element—the acting, the writing, the direction, the cinematography, even the music—is perfectly in balance, each augmenting all the others. The film revolves around the sexual dilemmas of Marianne, an oncologist at Oslo University Hospital, and her nurse, Tor, who has no interest in a relationship; he’s satisfied with the joys of cruising and casual sex, and spends insomniac nights riding the ferry to a nearby island in the fjords, using Grindr to alert him to any possible partners. But a meetup on the ferry soon gives way to a sexless emotional entanglement. Meanwhile, a friend has set Marianne up with a geologist who lives on that same island. The shidduch takes, and Marianne finds herself drifting into a relationship she doesn’t really want. Through these two figures, LOVE meditates on the role of chance in modern romance.

Though the film is so emotionally and aesthetically rich it nearly bursts from plenitude, it also benefits from a narrow focus. The intimate plot involves a limited cast—these two main characters, the partners they attract, and a friend of Marianne’s who’s organizing a cultural event for the Oslo 100th birthday—and a contained setting. (The entire locale, from Marianne’s hospital to city hall to the islands in the fjords, can be covered in ten minutes.) In Haugerud’s hands, this small world contains more than enough. We’re inexorably drawn into the stunning beauty of the fjords at night: the lights reflected in the water, the city itself glimmering in the background. Even the docks’ loveliness feeds the film’s wistful mood. While this melancholy splendor—and the unhappiness and ill health the characters suffer—conspire to create an atmosphere of gloom, it’s often playfully punctured by the leads’ knowing smiles.

The film’s formal harmony, as well as the intelligent conversation at its center, puts one in mind of the best of Éric Rohmer. (The two directors also share a taste for putting calendrical context at the beginning of a scene.) Even the ambient quiet that envelops the words spoken in the romantic scenes is stunning. And while LOVE ends on an unresolved note, this too is a thoughtful choice, reflecting a deep understanding of how people actually live, and sometimes love.

LOVE is the first film in Haugerud’s “Oslo trilogy,” whose other two entries—SEX and DREAMS—will be shown later this year. Though the three linked movies are meant to function independently, it still feels almost inappropriate to review this one on its own. Given the cinematic mastery on display, the three movies will surely work together in some way that enhances the meaning of each. But for now LOVE is what we have, and so it is LOVE that you must see.