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    Review: Sarah Paulson Makes a Horrible Discovery in “Appropriate”

    Making a blistering Broadway debut, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2014 play about the legacies of hatred feels like a new work entirely.Think of the worst person you know: the kind who blabs people’s secrets, mocks their diction, dismisses their pain while making festivals of her own. Throw in a tendency toward casual antisemitic slurs, for which she thinks she has a free pass, and a “What’s the big deal?” approach to racism.Now add a deep wound and a wicked tongue and you’re almost partway to Antoinette Lafayette, the monster played by Sarah Paulson in the blistering revival of “Appropriate” that opened on Broadway on Monday. Recalling yet somehow outstripping the thrilling vileness of theatrical viragos like Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and Violet in “August: Osage County,” she is the burned-out core of a nuclear family reactor, taking no prisoners and taking no blame.But even in Paulson’s eye-opening, sinus-clearing performance, Toni, as she’s called, doesn’t sum up the outrageousness of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play, which has a deep wound and wicked tongue of its own. To get all the way to its sweet spot — and Lila Neugebauer’s production for Second Stage definitely gets there — you must further multiply Toni by her brothers, each awful in his own way.Bo (Corey Stoll) is passive and entitled, content to let others fail as long as he can’t be faulted. Frank (Michael Esper) is a serial screw-up, the rare person for whom statutory rape is not the worst thing on his résumé. At the heart of their grievances is greed — Bo’s for money, Frank’s for forgiveness and Toni’s for revenge.So when the three, accompanied by their assorted spouses, children, enablers and ghosts, gather in the grand dramatic tradition to dispose of their late father’s estate, you know things are going to explode. Indeed, as the curtain rises at the Helen Hayes Theater, it appears they already have. The Arkansas plantation house in which generations of the family have lived, in eyeshot of the cemetery where generations of their slaves are buried, is now a hellhole in spirit and fact. The once grand building is collapsing under the weight of centuries of evil and, more recently, decades of hoarding.Michael Esper, left, and Elle Fanning as an engaged couple in Second Stage Theater’s production of the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe two seemingly incompatible stories — the evil and the hoarding, one national, one domestic — come together in a way I don’t want to spoil; it’s part of the brilliance of the play that it lands its biggest surprises with satisfying thumps at exactly the right moments. Suffice to say that when horrible relics of the past, both the country’s and the family’s, are discovered in the clutter, they force the Lafayettes to re-examine the legacy of their father, supposedly once in line to be a Supreme Court justice but also, depending on whom you ask, a saint or a psychopath.To Toni he was “a thinker! A loving person!” Frank says he was bipolar and abusive. Bo is too avoidant to offer a strong opinion, but his wife, Rachael (Natalie Gold), makes up for that. To her there is no question the old man was an antisemite (she once overheard him refer to her as Bo’s “Jew wife”) and a racist. Even so, she has insisted on bringing the couple’s children — a petulant 13-year-old girl (Alyssa Emily Marvin) and a hyperactive 8-year-old boy (Lincoln Cohen, on the night I saw it, and, alternating in the role, Everett Sobers) — to experience their “roots” as part of “a little American history Southern tour-type thing.”It’s the kind of laugh line — there are also guffaws, cackles and strange gasp-giggle combos — that works because we think we know more than she does. But it’s also a stinger because, the play suggests, we may not. In “Appropriate,” the “little American history Southern tour-type thing” is meant for the audience, too.That history is of course full of horrors, not the golden past portrayed in works about the gracious days of juleps and spirituals. But neither is it, for Jacobs-Jenkins, as neatly political and singularly damning as when filtered through a progressive lens. Questioning whether racism and antisemitism are really the core sins of this particular family, “Appropriate” posits that the problem may instead be that they’re just personally hideous. And if that’s true, could it also be true that the various institutions of subjugation so rampant throughout human society are nothing more (or less) than convenient formats for the expression of hate hard-wired in our hearts?Cherry-picking some of the worst examples imaginable — the play also features Elle Fanning as Frank’s sententious, sage-smudging fiancée and Graham Campbell as Toni’s drug-dealing son — Jacobs-Jenkins makes a convincing if despairing case. That he does so largely through comedy and melodrama (with an astonishing coda of surrealism) makes “Appropriate” easier to enjoy than to understand. The grammatically two-faced title doesn’t help, but easy understanding is not what the author appears to be after.The director Lila Neugebauer accentuates the conflicts and alliances among the characters, our critic writes. The cast includes, from left, Natalie Gold, Stoll, Paulson, Fanning, Graham Campbell and, above, Alyssa Emily Marvin.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI have to admit that when I first saw it, at the Signature Theater in 2014, neither understanding nor enjoyment were forthcoming. Rereading my scathing review in light of what is obviously a rave today, I am forced to grapple with my own past, and the play’s. It would be easy to say that the difference between then and now is the heavy rewriting Jacobs-Jenkins has done in the interim. And certainly, comparing the two scripts, I see the clearer dramatic architecture and sharper point-of-view that a playwright in his prime, at 38, can impose. (I thought Jacobs-Jenkins’s most recent play, “The Comeuppance,” was one of the best of 2023.)It would also be easy to attribute the improvement to Neugebauer’s direction, which is so smart and swift for most of the play’s substantial length that you feel gripped by storytelling without being strangled by argument. Her staging, on a towering double-decker set by the design collective dots, is also nearly ideal, accentuating (with the help of Jane Cox’s painterly lighting) the conflicts and alliances among the characters. And the daredevil cast, instead of reveling in falling apart, focuses for as long as possible on keeping it together. We thus experience, in the force of that repression, just how awful human awfulness must be if human will cannot ultimately corral it.Though all those improvements are real, they do not fully explain why I’ve flipped for this revival. Perhaps this does: Playwrights who show us things we are reluctant to see may have to teach us, over time, how to see it. And we must be willing to have our eyes opened. I guess I’ve changed at least that much in 10 years of reviewing, and Jacobs-Jenkins is part of the reason.AppropriateThrough March 3 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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    ‘Lawmen: Bass Reeves’ Review: A Frontier Injustice

    David Oyelowo gives an unimpeachable performance, but Taylor Sheridan still hasn’t met a western that he can’t turn into an overheated melodrama.What we know, or have decided to accept, about the life of the deputy U.S. marshal Bass Reeves has more of the flavor of carnival legend than of scholarship. The Paramount+ series “Lawmen: Bass Reeves,” which concluded on Sunday, was based not on history books or biographies but on novels. The most prominent telling of his story so far was a dramatization of a dramatization.That kind of haziness leaves room for invention, and the tales that have settled around Reeves — a former slave credited with 3,000 arrests; a crack shot said to have killed 14 men in the line of duty — could be the basis for a new take on classic western action and adventure. The tales also suggest that the career Reeves carved out for himself, and the extreme success he found, would at least occasionally have caused him some excitement and joy. That is not where “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” ended up.David Oyelowo gave an unimpeachable performance as Reeves, focused and intense and emotionally true. And the show’s creator, Chad Feehan, and his directors, Christina Alexandra Voros and Damian Marcano, put onscreen a notably handsome and visually credible evocation of the American West in the 1870s. The show had texture — it gave a tactile pleasure throughout its eight episodes.But as it went along, it became less of a treat to watch and more of a chore. Its story of heroism against all odds had gun battles and frontier romance, but we were almost never allowed to simply enjoy them. And poor David Oyelowo appeared to be having less fun than anyone.It was to the show’s credit that it didn’t try to make Reeves a six-gun superman — he operated with guile and caution, letting other people’s carelessness and hotheadedness work for him, and he grimaced and cowered when under fire. But the show’s one-note insistence on his beleaguered nobility, even as his composure faded and his trigger finger got too itchy, was so continual and unmodulated that it flattened the character and drained the story of humor.Reeves’s arc in the early episodes, as he emerged from slavery, tried his hand at farming and then was recruited into the marshals’ service by a sympathetic judge (played by Donald Sutherland), had an urgent, realistic snap to it. But once he put on the badge, the show slowed and got down to its real business, which wasn’t dramatizing the exploits of an exceptional lawman under grueling circumstances.Lauren E. Banks as Jennie Reeves and Demi Singleton as her daughter Sally. The best moments in “Lawmen” were its domestic scenes.Emerson Miller/Paramount+The latter half of the season was, instead, about putting Reeves through a crisis of conscience over his enforcement of laws enacted and administered by the same white men who had once enslaved him. (The more interesting choice dramatically, and probably the one better supported by the historical record, would have been for him not to care.) And having established its seriousness, the show went big, inventing as its embodiment of racist evil an ex-Confederate Texas Ranger (played by Barry Pepper) who used Black prisoners as slave labor and, just to drive home his odiousness, quoted French Enlightenment drama.That “Lawmen” would undergo a mytho-melodramatic implosion is perhaps not surprising. It is in the purview of the executive producer Taylor Sheridan, who has shown a bent for gaseous mythologizing in westerns like “Yellowstone” and “1883.” And Feehan has a history with shows that privileged macho poetics over straightforward action, like “Ray Donovan,” “Banshee” and “Rectify.”The best moments in “Lawmen” were its domestic scenes, which ran in counterpoint to the alternately depressive and histrionic story of Reeves’s work. Reeves’s wife, Jennie, and his oldest daughter, Sally, who kept the farm running in his absence, were played with warmth and great feeling by Lauren E. Banks and Demi Singleton; as impressive as Oyelowo was, it was always a relief when the action shifted to the farm.And racism and racial oppression in the post-Reconstruction era were treated more cogently and dramatically in those scenes as well. The awakening of the pragmatic Jennie to the larger issues championed by her sister Esme (Joaquina Kalukango) was subtle and touching; by contrast, the closing scene of Reeves leading a column of Black prisoners to freedom bordered on camp.Sheridan’s track record as a producer has ticked up lately, with “Tulsa King” and “Special Ops: Lioness” and even the early episodes of “Lawmen.” But when he makes westerns, modern or historical, he always seems to be caught between two conflicting impulses. One is to make anti-westerns like those of the 1960s and ’70s, in which the clichés of the genre are exposed and debunked; the other is to make deluxe versions of the classically sentimental western, in which those same clichés are renewed and celebrated. There’s another choice, of course, which would be just to make a good western. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: Holiday Films and the iHeartRadio Jingle Ball

    The star-studded concert comes to small screens. “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” “The Polar Express” and “A Christmas Carol” air on various networks.With network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Dec. 18-24. Details and times are subject to change.MondayA CHRISTMAS CAROL (1938) 6:45 p.m. on TCM. There are 16 film and TV adaptations (and counting!) of Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella, but this is one of the first. Staring Reginald Owen as Ebenezer Scrooge, this film tells the story pretty much as we all know it: Scrooge hates Christmas and mistreats his employees, including Bob Cratchit (Gene Lockhart), until a series of ghostly visitors show him the error of his ways and a vision of the future.TuesdayTaylor Momsen and Jim Carrey in “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”Ron Batzdorff, Universal PicturesHOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS (2000) 8:20 p.m. on Freeform. This live-action version of Dr. Seuss’s 1957 children’s book might be the most popular, with Jim Carrey donning a full-body green fur suit and a strange accent. As the people of Whoville are preparing for their favorite holiday, Christmas, the Grinch comes down from his lair on Mount Crumpit with a plan to sabotage it all — until he comes face to face with the sweet and endearing Cindy Lou Who. And (spoiler!) by the end, the Grinch’s heart grows three sizes.WednesdayTHE POLAR EXPRESS (2004) 10 p.m. on AMC. As a child, I was terrified of this movie’s premise: a train pulling up outside of my house to take me who-knows-where. But by the end, I was charmed by the Christmas spirit just like everyone else. The children ride the magical train to the North Pole so that the little skeptical protagonist, Billy, can be proved wrong — Santa Claus actually is real!ThursdayIHEARTRADIO JINGLE BALL 2023 8 p.m. on ABC. The 2023 Jingle Ball show has been touring the U.S. since the beginning of December, but if you’d rather cozy up on the couch to watch instead of filing into an arena, you’re in luck. This broadcast will feature performances by Olivia Rodrigo, Usher, Nicki Minaj, SZA, Niall Horan and many more. I’m most excited to see Sabrina Carpenter perform her Christmas version of “Nonsense.”Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie in “Barbie.”Warner Bros. PicturesBARBIE (2023) 9 p.m. on HBO. After a blockbuster summer at the box office, Greta Gerwig’s film has finally landed on the small screen. The movie follows Barbie (Margot Robbie) as she leaves Barbie Land and has the unfortunate realization that, outside, misogyny is alive and well; Ken (Ryan Gosling) obviously thrives. “It’s amusing when Barbie points out a billboard filled with women, mistaking them for the Supreme Court because that’s what the court looks like in Barbie Land, just with more pink,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The New York Times. “However politically sharp, the gag is an unpleasant reminder of all the profoundly unfunny ways in which this world, with its visible and invisible hands, tries to control women, putting them into little boxes,” she added. For that reason, I can’t help but tear up every time I hear the movie’s anthem by Billie Eilish: “What Was I Made For?”DICK VAN DYKE 98 YEARS OF MAGIC 9 p.m. on CBS. Dick Van Dyke is celebrating his 98th birthday with a two-hour special featuring guests who include Zachary Levi and Rita Ora as well as archival footage from “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” “Mary Poppins” and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”FridayCary Grant and Deborah Kerr in “An Affair to Remember.”20th Century Fox/PhotofestAN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER (1957) 10 p.m. on TCM. Before there was “Sleepless in Seattle,” there was this classic: Nickie Ferrante (Cary Grant) and Terry McKay (Deborah Kerr) meet on a trans-Atlantic ocean liner and strike up a friendship and maybe something more — but since they are both with other people, they decide to set a time, six months off, to meet at the Empire State Building. But when the day comes Terry doesn’t show up.SaturdayEXTENDED FAMILY 8 p.m. on NBC. There’s a new sitcom in town, and this one focuses on the peaks and pits of managing family life after divorce. Abigail Spencer and Jon Cryer play Julia and Jim, a former couple who agree that the day they divorced was the best day of their lives, but they find that co-parenting with an ex can be complicated. Episodes will air weekly in January.SundayCHRISTMAS EVE MASS 11:30 p.m. on NBC. Pope Francis leads the traditional annual service from St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. More

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    Carrie Coon Likes to ‘Play the Baddie’ in ‘The Gilded Age’

    Playing a new-money upstart in “The Gilded Age,” the actor isn’t afraid to go big. “You can’t take it too seriously,” she said. “You can’t take yourself too seriously.”Carrie Coon remembers vividly the first time she walked onto the Long Island set of the HBO series “The Gilded Age” and into the regal foyer of the mansion she occupies as Bertha Russell, wife of the railway tycoon George Russell (Morgan Spector).“I thought, ‘Oh, oh, oh, I have to fill this,’” she recalled.Delectably, Coon has. In Season 2 of the series, a rococo drama set in 1880s New York City, Bertha takes her fight to join Manhattan’s elite to the opera. She sponsors the nascent Metropolitan Opera as an alternative to the Academy of Music, which won’t accept her new money. Whether in intimate scenes or grand ones, Coon (“The Leftovers,” “Fargo”), as Bertha, gives a full-bodied, deep-voiced performance. A foyer? That’s nothing. This is a woman who can fill the Met.On an afternoon in late November, a few weeks before the “Gilded Age” finale aired, Coon joined a Zoom call in a white bathrobe and satiny makeup. She was attending the Met herself that night, along with many of her castmates. (In an unusually elegant publicity stunt, they would occupy a box at “Tannhauser.”)Although the show’s cast doesn’t lack for acting talent, Coon has become a fan favorite. This is probably because Bertha seems to enjoy herself so much, embracing each of the script’s melodramatic turns. Whether interfering in the relationships of her children, Larry (Harry Richardson) and Gladys (Taissa Farmiga), or tangling with her former lady’s maid (Kelley Curran), now a rival, Bertha seems to savor each squabble and brawl. So does Coon.“I love that feeling of taking over a space,” she said. “It’s a really satisfying and rare feeling as a woman to have that.”As the wife of a railway tycoon, Coon’s character, Bertha Russell, whose parents were potato farmers has to fight hard for recognition and access among New York’s social elite.Barbara Nitke/HBOIn between bites of a lunchtime sandwich, Coon discussed ambition, big choices and why no one recognizes her offscreen, even now. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. Mild Season 2 spoilers follow.Who is Bertha and what drives her?If Bertha had been of another time, Bertha would have been a C.E.O., an executive, a senator. She’s an ambitious woman in a time where there was no place for ambitious women besides the social sphere. The heart of Bertha is her interest in her children. Her son is fine — her son is a white man with lots of money. Her daughter, however, does need to be protected.Yet Bertha often sacrifices her children’s happiness in favor of the family’s social standing.Her myopia is really frustrating because what we see in the Russell’s marriage is that Bertha has, in fact, married for love and respect and ambition. But Bertha understands very well the obstacles for women, even women of a certain class. We’re not even touching on what’s going on for women of color and immigrants who are all working in this capitalist system that will crush them. Bertha is wrong about what she’s doing. But when it comes to our children, we do have these blind spots. It is ultimately about love and protection. She just goes about it without any nuance.Are there any limits to her ambition?I don’t think so. Limits are imposed on her externally. I don’t feel that she intrinsically has a sense of limits. Her cause is meritocratic in a way. She believes that you can and should be able to earn your place.You seem to move through the world more humbly. Is it freeing to play someone so different from you?It’s fun to play the baddie. It’s fun to traffic in your own capacity for ruthlessness. You are correct in assuming that’s not the way I move through the world. And yet in order to have any longevity in a business as ruthless as ours can be, for women in particular, you really have to have some of that gumption. Anybody who’s still in it, even if they don’t admit it, they have ambition at the root. But it’s terrific fun. In my life I’ve played a lot of really hapless moms — frenzied and lost and grasping. Grasping at this level is a much more delightful way to be at work.From left, Harry Richardson, Taissa Farmiga, Coon and Morgan Spector in a scene from Season 2, in which Bertha helps bring the New York Metropolitan Opera into being.Barbara Nitke/HBODoes Bertha know that she’s a villain?She’s not a villain. She helps build the Met! She believes that doors should be open to her. What makes anyone else better than she is? She comes from potato farmers, and here she is. Why wouldn’t you open the door to someone who’s worked that hard? That’s how I feel about people who pick up their children and carry them across rivers and deserts from Central America to get here. Those are the kind of people you want here. Those are resilient, astonishing people who will do anything for their loved ones.Your voice is pitched higher than Bertha’s. How did you find the particular pitch and rhythm of it?Certainly the rhythm came out of the writing. And then, in Season 1, when I come in and say, “Oh, what an interesting moment for me to arrive,” somehow my voice was just lower that day. I was like, Oh, there she is. It’s fun to be working down there. I never get recognized on the street; I don’t even get recognized by my crew when I’m out of my wig. Even my castmates at a party a couple of weeks ago didn’t recognize me. But people recognize the voice, though very rarely.And then her gait, her gestures. How did you find those?These costumes shape you in such a particular way. Women were supposed to glide, to be smooth. You weren’t supposed to see movement. But Bertha is an upstart and I felt that her hips should be involved. I don’t know how conscious that choice was. When you’re asked to walk into that foyer in a hat and a cashmere coat, you just have to sashay.In this season the show has leaned further into melodrama. How does it feel to play those big theatrical scenes?Terrifying, but wonderful. It just feels like you’re doing Eugene O’Neill all the time. But oh, gosh, we really do have fun. That’s the key to it: You can’t take it too seriously. You can’t take yourself too seriously. I’m not afraid of big choices, and I’m not afraid of people not liking Bertha, just like I’m not afraid, now that I’m 42, of anybody not liking me. So I try to have fun. There was one take when Bertha first saw Turner (Curran’s character) that was so hilariously broad. I staggered; I grabbed Morgan’s arm; I fell a little bit. As soon as the take was over, we howled because it was a hat on a hat on a hat on a hat.Walking in that first day, we had no idea what we were doing. We didn’t know how big it was going to be. We didn’t know how much space there was. But as we were shooting, we were like, OK, I think we can handle a little more size. In Season 2, some of the exposition is out of the way, we’ve got the characters introduced. Now we get to have a little more fun.This season focuses largely on the real-life battle between the Academy of Music and the nascent Metropolitan Opera. What is it a proxy war for?We always draw a parallel with the moment when the Kardashians were invited to the Met Ball. The world of celebrity and what money can afford you, it’s really emblematic of that. The opera also represents the struggle in this country, this feeling of people resisting inevitable change and holding on very tightly to an older way of life.Bertha ends the season in triumph. Could she have ended in any other way?I don’t think so. The show is exploring a very particular time, an extraordinary time of industry and change and growth. We know already that the moneyed people won, the new people won. Where they weren’t invited, they built something new from the ground up. So her rise is really inevitable. She’s an inexorable force. There’s nothing that will stop her. More

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    Was a Scandal the Best Thing to Happen to Hasan Minhaj?

    At the Beacon, the comic took a different tack after posting a video rebutting a New Yorker article on fabrications in his work. The crowd went wild.Finishing a story about a girl cheating on him in 11th grade, Hasan Minhaj turned to the audience at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan during the first of two shows on Friday night and said, “Don’t fact-check me.”The crowd came alive at this nod to the recent New Yorker article by Clare Malone exposing several of his onstage stories as fabrications. “I had to go head-to-head with one of the most dangerous organizations in the world,” he said, adding that he didn’t mean the U.S. military or the Israeli Defense Forces. “I am talking about a white woman with a keyboard.”Then he mocked the article as “water is wet” obvious before describing it as a sign of success. “I’ve made it: I got a real old scandal,” he said, adding, “A dorky scandal.” With regret in his voice, Minhaj said he didn’t molest a child or sleep with a porn star: “I got caught embellishing for dramatic effect.”Typical crisis management dictates you should move on, not fixate. But in our attention economy, where the most popular Netflix specials of the past year featured Chris Rock talking about the Slap and John Mulaney joking about going to rehab, comedians are wise to consider Rahm Emanuel’s famous political advice: Never let a good crisis go to waste. Minhaj split the difference. He did not linger on the story but dedicated a solid chunk of jokes to it that got one of the biggest responses of the night. There were moments when I even thought this scandal might be the best thing that ever happened to him.For such a polished, assured comedian, getting your image scuffed up a bit can add a little more tension to your comedy. David Sedaris faced a similar media firestorm and very few even remember it. In his new act, Minhaj mocked how politicians treat him as a spokesman for his people. (“They think I’m the brown whisperer,” he said.) The more nuanced critiques of his deceptions focused on the context of his work, firmly in “The Daily Show” tradition of blurring lines between silly comedy and grave journalism. The New Yorker article took some of that weight off him, shifting expectations.It’s notable that he released a 21-minute video defending himself and criticizing the New Yorker piece as misleading. (For a smart analysis that gets into the weeds on the issues, read Nadira Goffe from Slate.) Instead of downplaying the dust-up as he did onstage, he argued in the video that the New Yorker writer made him sound like “a psycho,” and he even expressed a few notes of contrition, promising to be “more thoughtful” about blending fiction and nonfiction. In a way, he did this at the Beacon, drawing attention to his lies, teaching his audience how to read him.Reactions to this article varied wildly. My least favorite was the popular genre of commenters who emerge after every scandal to pile on by saying, “I never liked their work anyway.” It manages the feat of trivializing moral and artistic issues.Yet the Minhaj controversy quietly opened a useful, long overdue discussion about truth in comedy that leverages nonfiction. More art than ever leans on the trust and authenticity of journalism, so it’s good for performers to think about the peculiar bargain they have struck with their audience and how to navigate it. There is an endless number of funny ways to tip off a crowd to your level of honesty.While I thought some of Minhaj’s fabrications were unnecessary and wrongheaded, I never thought he was a “psycho.” What I saw was a comic responding to the incentives of a culture that not only prefers its politics wrapped inside a personal emotional story, but also gives clout to dramatic displays of victimhood.We live in a time when seemingly everyone, no matter how rich, famous or successful, is angling to play the victim. Elon Musk invites sympathy by telling us that a company refusing to advertise on his site is equivalent to blackmail. When even Taylor Swift says she was canceled in the Time magazine article announcing her as Person of the Year, you know that the ability to repackage yourself as the underdog is limitless.As it happens, this provides an opening for jokes. In Leo Reich’s cleverly self-aware new special, “Literally Who Cares?” (Max), the young comic spoofs this tendency. He begins by saying his show is sponsored by his dad, who runs an incredible small business you might have heard of named Deutsche Bank. By the end, he insists he’s oppressed. “I read something recently that even if you haven’t been oppressed, you can feel like you have and it triggers the same endorphins.”The comic artist currently tackling this theme best is the filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli, whose feature “Sick of Myself” introduced audiences to a character who intentionally takes pills to make herself physically ill, to gain attention and fame. Borgli’s new movie, “Dream Scenario,” is about a beta male professor played by Nicolas Cage accused by a colleague of “searching for the insult.” In an outlandish twist, he starts showing up in people’s dreams doing violent things, and fragile students freak out in a parody of delicate sensitivities. The professor sees himself as the real victim and is then tempted by the embrace of Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson and, of course, the French. In other words, this movie is riffing on the most popular victim narrative of our moment: Cancel culture.Thankfully, Minhaj doesn’t go there, but he gets close. At one point in his show, he said the real divide in the country was not between rich and poor, Democratic or Republican, but between “the insane” and “the insufferable.”The insane include the people who stormed the capitol. He calls them nuts, before adding: “but fun.” Then he grew more animated describing the insufferable by their “NPR tote-bag energy” and “hall monitor” tendencies. It was a head fake to The New Yorker article before a pivot to self-deprecation, poking fun at the time he corrected Ellen DeGeneres on her show for mispronouncing his name.“What was I expecting?” he asked. “She’s a billionaire who’s best friends with Oprah. She’s not a Sufi poet.”Minhaj is telling us that he was a member of the insufferable. A reformed one, perhaps? It repositions him less as a righteous political comic than a more self-questioning, personal comic, a move he had already begun to make; this scandal may have accelerated the shift.His show concluded with a long bit about therapy and family, in which, deploying one of his characteristic dramatic pauses, followed by whispery voice close to the microphone, he confessed his real kink: Acceptance. More

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    On ‘Survivor,’ the Clothing Choices Are More Deliberate Than You May Think

    Contestants’ wardrobes are more deliberate than you may think.Year after year, with each new crop of “Survivor” castaways, it’s easy to see that they’re meant to represent a familiar cross-section of archetypes.Even in their off-the-rack tank tops and cargo shorts, characters like the cranky old military vet, the arrogant corporate executive and the pharmaceutical rep next door are recognizable on sight.That’s no accident: While the conventions of reality TV encourage viewers to believe that these contestants arrive with whatever hastily selected items they can grab, their clothing is carefully vetted and assembled with producers and wardrobe staff to maximally portray players’ personalities and emphasize the show’s “Robinson Crusoe” mise-en-scène.Since it debuted in 2000, “Survivor,” which will soon finish airing its 45th season on CBS, has had an ever-shifting cast and has regularly introduced new twists for contestants as they compete to be the last person standing and win a cash prize. Over time, players’ wardrobes — dirt-crusted and minimal though they may be — have helped further plots and create through-lines in the series, which continues to draw among the highest ratings on network television.Jeff Probst, the host of “Survivor” and its executive producer and showrunner, said clothing was at the foundation of the show’s premise.“The idea is, what if you were shipwrecked with a group of strangers?” Mr. Probst said. “A lawyer’s clothing should look very different from a nurse, who looks different from a pizza maker.”Caitlin Moore, a “Survivor” casting producer, works alongside the show’s longtime wardrobe supervisor, Maria Sundeen, to help contestants select clothes for the show. It involves “a lot of going through the closets, trying to find the pieces that will work,” Ms. Moore said.“We are very much in a collaborative process, working together to come up with what really feels like a reflection of their own personality yet also meets the needs of production,” she added.For “Survivor: South Pacific,” producers asked John Cochran, who was then a student at Harvard Law School, to show up in a sweater vest to play up his Ivy League bona fides.Monty Brinton/CBS‘You Should Wear a Red Sweater Vest’John Cochran was completing his studies at Harvard Law School when he was cast in the 23rd season of “Survivor.” He and his mother were at a mall looking for practical attire that could get him through 39 days without shelter on the Samoan island of Upolu, he said, when he got a call from Ms. Moore.“We were, like, looking at REI camping stuff,” said Mr. Cochran, now 36 and a television writer in Los Angeles. “And Caitlin says, ‘We don’t know what you’re going to think of this, but we’re thinking you should wear a red sweater vest.’”Ms. Moore explained that red would be a color scheme for that season, he said. She was hoping to play up his Ivy League bona fides — and his nerdiness — with the vest, he added.Mr. Cochran initially balked at the request. “I’d never worn a sweater vest before,” he said. “I already exude nerdiness. I’m trying to downplay my ruddy complexion and rosacea and red hair.”Mr. Cochran, right, eventually ditched the pink collared shirt from “South Pacific” and just wore his red sweater vest as a tank top. “That was my ultimate act of rebellion,” he said.Monty Brinton/CBSBut in the first episode of “Survivor: South Pacific,” which was broadcast in 2011, Mr. Cochran could be seen furiously paddling a boat across that ocean in a crimson sweater vest, a pink collared shirt and khakis, the tropical sun beating down on his reddening face.This rather ridiculous image made the impression that Ms. Moore and her team had suspected it would, and when Mr. Cochran agreed to join the cast of “Survivor: Caramoan” the year after, it was a no-brainer that he would show up wearing the same attire.“It was a fun journey to go on,” Ms. Moore said, “and to see him start to lean into it.”Mr. Cochran said he acquiesced to the producers’ vision for his wardrobe partly because, as a fan of the show, he recalled how other contestants’ attire had helped them connect with viewers.He pointed to Rob Mariano, who was rarely without a Boston Red Sox hat in his many “Survivor” appearances, and to Rupert Boneham, another contestant in multiple seasons, who was known for wearing a tie-dyed tank top. (When Mr. Boneham ran a third-party campaign for governor of Indiana in 2012, he evoked his “Survivor” wardrobe by occasionally wearing tie-dye accessories. He finished third in that election, which was won by former Vice President Mike Pence.)“Whether it’s a tie-dye shirt or a Boston Red Sox cap,” Mr. Cochran said, “these discrete, identifiable items become so linked to the person.” His red vest, he added, became “my ‘Survivor’ costume.”Sandra Diaz-Twine spent hundreds of dollars on clothes for “Survivor: Pearl Islands,” but a plot twist that season meant that most of the items couldn’t be used.Robert Voets/CBSLillian Morris, a Boy Scout leader, dressed in a full scouting uniform for the “Pearl Islands” season.Monty Brinton/CBSA Sartorial Plot TwistMr. Probst said that the biggest change to the show’s approach to wardrobe came with its seventh season, “Survivor: Pearl Islands,” which was broadcast in 2003.Before then, each contestant had been permitted a knapsack of clothing items, including some survival gear. But for “Pearl Islands,” the players, who included Mr. Boneham, were surprised to enter the competition with significantly fewer items than they had worked with producers to select.Once cast members arrived at the shooting location, Mr. Probst said, they were asked to dress in certain outfits they had brought to wear for press photos that would be used to promote the show. Mr. Boneham wore his tie dye. Lillian Morris, a Boy Scout leader, dressed in a full scouting uniform. Shawn Cohen, an advertising sales executive, was in an Armani suit.But instead of going to a photo shoot, cast members were plunged immediately into the game, wearing only the clothes on their backs.“Some of the most iconic looks of ‘Survivor’ came from that season,” Mr. Probst said.Sandra Diaz-Twine, the winner of “Pearl Islands,” said she was shocked when she realized that most of the clothes the production crew had approved for her to bring couldn’t be used.“I had charged like $500, $600, on my credit card,” said Ms. Diaz-Twine, 49, who lives in Fayetteville, Ark., and has appeared in several subsequent seasons of the show. “I wanted to make sure that I had a different clean outfit like every day. And then they say you’re jumping off the boat with just the clothes on your back. I was like, Oh my god, I charged all this stuff to my credit card.”Since then, “Survivor” has gone back and forth on what clothing — and how much of it — contestants may bring. “We always listen to players,” Mr. Probst said. “It’s a give and take.”Rob Mariano on “Redemption Island,” the show’s 22nd season.Monty Brinton/CBSBuffs, Underwear and SwimsuitsOne garment worn by all contestants who have appeared on the show is the buff: a scarflike band of stretchy cotton emblazoned with the “Survivor” logo. It is rendered in different colors each season and has become one of the series’s sartorial signatures.“There are clearly guys who have ordered a buff before they go on the show and have put it on in the mirror looking at all the different ways they could wear it,” Mr. Probst said.Parvati Shallow, 41, a recurring contestant who first appeared in “Survivor: Cook Islands,” the show’s 13th season, broadcast in 2006, said the buff is critical for players who have only so many clothes. “You can wear it as a shirt, a skirt, a headpiece, a scarf,” she said.After her fourth and latest “Survivor” appearance, in the “Winners at War” season broadcast in 2020, Ms. Shallow, an executive coach and yoga teacher in Los Angeles, made headlines for criticizing the show’s dress code on a podcast hosted by another “Survivor” alum. She said she was pressured to compete in her underwear rather than the bathing suit she had requested. (In the seasons before “Winners at War,” producers began to discourage wearing swimsuits.)“It was a point of contention with me,” she said in a recent interview with The New York Times. “I went back and forth with wardrobe. They said no, nobody was getting a bathing suit.”She ultimately went with patterned undergarments that gave the impression of a swimsuit, but said it was not a happy compromise. “I had just had a baby,” she said. “I was like, My body looks nothing like it used to look like.”Mr. Probst said in an email that Ms. Shallow’s characterization was not accurate. He added that the choice to move away from bathing suits on the show was a creative one. “‘Survivor’ wardrobe has always centered around the conceit that the players were shipwrecked and left only with the clothes on their back,” he said.For Ms. Diaz-Twine, returning to “Survivor” after winning the “Pearl Islands” season offered the chance to upgrade those clothes. In preparation for the show’s 20th season, “Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains,” she said, “for the first time ever, I bought a Victoria’s Secret bra.”“I won a million dollars,” added Ms. Diaz-Twine, who will appear with Ms. Shallow in the second season of “The Traitors,” another reality TV competition, which will be released in January on Peacock. “I can’t show up in panties from Walmart.” More

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    Michael Stone, Psychiatrist and Scholar Who Studied Evil, Dies at 90

    He attempted to define evil by plumbing the biographies and motivations of hundreds of violent felons who had committed heinous crimes.Dr. Michael H. Stone, a psychiatrist and scholar who sought to define evil and to differentiate its manifestations from the typical behavior of people who are mentally ill, died on Dec. 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.The cause was complications of a stroke he had in January, his son David said.Dr. Stone was best known to the public as the author of the book “The Anatomy of Evil” (2009) and as the host from 2006 to 2008 of the television program “Most Evil,” for which he interviewed people imprisoned for murder to determine what motivated them to engage in an evil criminal act.He ranked the acts on a 22-category scale of his creation. Modeled on Dante’s nine circles of hell, his taxonomic scale ranged from justifiable homicide to murders committed by people whose primary motivation was to torture their victims.Only human beings are capable of evil, Dr. Stone wrote in “The Anatomy of Evil,” although evil is not a characteristic that people are born with. He acknowledged that while acts of evil were difficult to define, the word “evil” was derived from “over” or “beyond,” and could apply to “certain acts done by people who clearly intended to hurt or to kill others in an excruciatingly painful way.”For an act to be evil, he wrote, it must be “breathtakingly horrible” and premeditated, inflict “wildly excessive” suffering and “appear incomprehensible, bewildering, beyond the imagination of ordinary people in the community.”“Mike’s major contribution to psychiatry was sharpening the distinction between mental illness and evil,” Dr. Allen Frances. a former student of Dr. Stone’s who is now chairman emeritus of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, N.C., said in a phone interview.“The problem,” Dr. Frances said, “is that with every mass murderer, every crazy politician, every serial killer, the first tendency in the public mind and the media is that he’s mentally ill.” Dr. Stone, he said, helped to change that default position.Dr. Stone became known for his book “The Anatomy of Evil” and for hosting the TV program “Most Evil.”Prometheus BooksAnalyzing the biographies of more than 600 violent criminals, Dr. Stone identified two predominant personality traits: narcissism, to the point of having little or no ability to care about their victims; and aggression, in terms of exerting power over another person to inflict humiliation, suffering and death.In “The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime” (2019), a sequel to Dr. Stone’s 2009 book, he and Dr. Gary Brucato warned that since the 1960s there had been an “undeniable intensification and diversification” of evil acts committed mostly by criminals who “are not ‘sick’ in the psychiatric and legal sense, as much as psychopathic and morally depraved.”The reasons, they wrote, included greater civilian access to military weaponry; the diminution of both individual and personal responsibility, as preached by fascist and communist governments earlier in the 20th century; sexual liberation, which unleashed other inhibitions; the ease of communication on cellphones and the internet; the rise of moral relativism; and a backlash against feminism.In 2000, Dr. Stone figured in a sensational murder trial that tested the limits of doctor-patient confidentiality. He wanted to testify in the murder trial of Robert Bierenbaum, a plastic surgeon and former patient of his who was accused of killing his wife, Gail Katz-Bierenbaum, in 1985.Dr. Stone had written a letter to his patient’s wife two years before her death, advising her to live apart from her husband for her own safety. He had asked that she sign and return it, but she never did. He had also contacted Dr. Bierenbaum’s parents, with his permission.The judge ultimately excluded Dr. Stone’s testimony from the trial on the basis of professional confidentiality. But the testimony of several other witnesses about the letter contributed to Dr. Bierenbaum’s conviction.Dr. Stone identified two predominant personality traits in those who commit evil acts: narcissism and aggression.Librado Romero/The New York TimesMichael Howard Stone was born on Oct. 27, 1933, in Syracuse, N.Y., the grandson of Eastern European immigrants. His father, Moses Howard Stone, owned a wholesale paper business. His mother, Corinne (Gittleman) Stone, was a homemaker.A prodigy who learned Latin and Greek as a child, he was only 10 years old when he began seventh grade. As the youngest and smallest student in the school, as well as the only Jewish one, he formed an alliance with a 17-year-old classmate who was a boxer, his son David said: Mike would do the classmate’s homework, and the classmate would protect him from local antisemitic bullies.He entered Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., when he was 16, enrolling in a premedical curriculum but double-majoring in classics in case he was rejected by medical schools that had already met their quota of Jewish students. He enrolled in Cornell Medical School in Manhattan after graduating from Cornell in 1954 and received his medical degree in 1958.He originally studied hematology and cancer chemotherapy at Sloan Kettering Institute in Manhattan, but his mother’s chronic pain disorder prompted him to switch to neurology and then, eventually, to psychiatry. He did his residency at the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where he met Dr. Clarice Kestenbaum, whom he married in 1965.He is survived by two sons, David and John Stone, from that marriage, which ended in divorce in 1978; his wife, Beth Eichstaedt; his stepchildren, Wendy Turner and Thomas Penders; three grandchildren; and one great-grandson.Dr. Stone spoke 16 languages and, like a vestige from another era, customarily wore three-piece suits. He was known for his impish sense of humor: His latest book, “The Funny Bone,” published this year, is a collection of his cartoons, jokes and poems.An amateur carpenter, he built the shelves that housed his library of 11,000 books. His collection included about 60 books on Hitler — further evidence, like his memories of childhood bullying, of his yearning to define evil.As a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst and for many years a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Dr. Stone also conducted a long-term study of patients with borderline personality disorders, including those who had contemplated suicide. He concluded that, often as a result of therapy and other treatment, the condition of about two-thirds of them had improved appreciably some 25 years later.In “The New Evil,” Dr. Stone and Dr. Brucato offered a possible explanation for why “particularly heinous and spectacular crimes,” especially those committed in America and by men, had been on the rise since the 1960s. They warned against “the rise of a sort of ‘false compassion,’ in which the most relentless, psychopathic persons are sometimes viewed as ‘victims.’”The two concluded by invoking a familiar metaphor: A frog dropped in a pot of boiling water will immediately try to escape; but, if placed in cold water that is gradually heated, the frog will remain complacent until it’s too late.“It is our ardent hope that, after a period of terrible growing pains, our culture will eventually learn that true power and control come only after a lifelong process of mastering and inhibiting the self,” they wrote. “Perhaps, as a first step, we should admit that the water in our collective pot is growing disquietingly warmer, day by day.” More

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    Mayim Bialik Out as ‘Jeopardy!’ Host

    The departure of Bialik, who had been absent from the show for months, leaves Ken Jennings, a former champion, as the sole host.Mayim Bialik, who received an Emmy nomination for her work on “Jeopardy!” after the death of longtime host Alex Trebek, said on Friday that she would not return to the popular game show, leaving Ken Jennings as the sole host.Bialik began hosting “Jeopardy!” on an interim basis in 2021, and on a permanent one last year. She has not appeared on the program or its “Celebrity Jeopardy!” offshoot for the past few months. In May, the entertainment news site Deadline reported that she had stepped away from “Jeopardy!” in solidarity with the Hollywood writers’ strike.“Sony has informed me that I will no longer be hosting the syndicated version of Jeopardy!” Bialik wrote on social media on Friday, referring to the firm that produces the show. “I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to have been part of the Jeopardy! family.”She did not mention the strike, which ended in the fall.Sony confirmed Bialik’s departure in a separate statement, saying only that the decision for Jennings to continue alone was made “to maintain continuity for our viewers.” The company thanked Bialik for her contributions and said that it hoped to continue to work with her on prime time specials, without elaborating.The shake up at “Jeopardy!” is the latest for a show that struggled to find a replacement for Trebek after his death in November 2020. Following a string of celebrity hosts, including LeVar Burton and Mehmet Oz, and a botched plan for executive producer Mike Richards to take over, Bialik filled in as a temporary host and split duties with Ken Jennings, a former champion.Bialik, who has a Ph.D. in neuroscience and is best known for starring in “The Big Bang Theory,” a television show, made it clear when she stepped in as interim host in 2021 that she wanted the position to become permanent.Some critics questioned her impartiality. Trebek had been celebrated for having a neutral and impartial air, while Ms. Bialik was outspoken on topics such as vaccines.But in July 2022, Bialik and Jennings were named permanent joint hosts, and both were nominated this year for an Emmy for “Outstanding Host for a Game Show.” More