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    Book Review: ‘In the Form of a Question,’ by Amy Schneider

    Amy Schneider’s new memoir, “In the Form of a Question,” captures a life of bold choices well beyond wagers on the Daily Double.IN THE FORM OF A QUESTION: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life, by Amy SchneiderAmy Schneider is one of the “Jeopardy!” greats, second only to Ken Jennings in games won (40 to Jennings’s 74). She’s fourth overall in regular-season winnings ($1,382,800) and fifth if you include tournaments ($1,632,800). In her new memoir, “In the Form of a Question,” she locks down a No. 1 spot, though, for best hang. Extolling the virtues of recreational drugs, the thrills of casual sex, the flirting potential in offering tarot readings? Ken Jennings could never.In “Question,” Schneider bounces between bloggier, jokier chapters (“Why in God’s Name Did They Make ‘Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue’?”) and more revealing, still jokey ones, about her gender transition and other formative experiences (“So if You’re Trans, Does That Mean You Like Guys?”). Her prose is warm and funny, though the omnipresent snarky footnotes sometimes deflate moments of earnest momentum.Other times, the little sidebars are home to some of the more endearing jokes, such as describing “The Music Man” as “probably the best work of literature ever written about the eternal conflict between unsophisticated farmers and the grifters who want to sell them musical instruments at above-market prices.” This is, deeply and completely, a theater-kid book.“When it comes to other people, I don’t have a setting between ‘at least slightly uncomfortable’ and ‘almost disturbingly comfortable,’ between ‘co-worker’ and ‘Elena Ferrante character,’” Schneider writes. That comes through here, and the more Ferrante-ish chapters are the book’s most interesting. Perhaps there is less of a need for listing the meanings of each tarot card, or an essay describing how good the TV show “Daria” is.Images from a handwritten diary entry from the day her first wife left; her candor about self-loathing (“I kept a mental list of all my shortcomings, all my failures, everything I had to feel ashamed of, and I tended to that list with great care, always on the lookout for opportunities to add to it”); the nervous ecstasy in her trans awakening — that’s where the book feels the most special and alive.The gossip in any of us will always yearn for more happy tales of sex and drugs, and Schneider has a bunch of fun ones. “There’s a fascinating nocturnal world out there, and the only people who can access it are those who have done some blow,” she notes. Sure, having a long-term partner who cares about you can be fulfilling. “But when you hook up with somebody who doesn’t know you well, then it must be because they’re horny for you, and that feels great!”Fleeting moments of righteous bitterness — “not that everything about my wife’s sexual relationship with a mysterious homeless felon that she met at a comedy open mic was perfect” — and tossed-off lines about acrimonious friend breakups and decades-long love triangles add edge and fizz.In the scheme of “Jeopardy!” memoirs, this one is not particularly “Jeopardy!”-centric. There is no training-montage section, no “Jeopardy!” war room, and Schneider describes herself as a lonely and ambivalent student. Her self-actualization comes about not through a career in software engineering or through making money from trivia, but through casting off the oppressive guilt and shame around sex and bodies that colored her entire young life.Fame is mostly but not exclusively great, she admits, and drifting too far into its bubble is dangerous. “I love how many more ways I can now imagine life turning out for me,” she writes, though “icon, but like in a cautionary tale sort of way,” could be one of them.Trans stories are often commodified for either misery or nobility in the face of misery, but “In the Form of a Question” is a much fuller, livelier, more textured and sardonic picture. When you win enough money to quit your job, you actually get a new job, Schneider says. She describes hers, wryly but rightly, as “Famous Celebrity Trans Person.” If this book is part of the gig, things seem like they’re going pretty well.IN THE FORM OF A QUESTION: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life | By Amy Schneider | 272 pp. | Avid Reader Press | $28 More

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    Late Night Shows Return After Writers’ Strike Ends

    “We’ve been gone so long, ‘The Bachelor’ is now a grandfather,” Jimmy Kimmel joked on Monday.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.They’re BaaackLate night shows returned on Monday night for their first broadcasts since May, after a five-month writers’ strike ended last week. In their monologues, hosts expressed gratitude to be working again and caught up on some of the news that happened while they were sidelined.“We’ve been gone so long, ‘The Bachelor’ is now a grandfather,” Jimmy Kimmel joked.“The stalemate finally ended when the studios realized, ‘We’ve got to end this now, or it’s another three months of watching ‘Suits.’” — JIMMY FALLON“It was kind of weird coming back after being gone for five months. The studio was empty for so long, NBC converted it to a Spirit Halloween.” — JIMMY FALLON“I missed my writers so much. I was so happy — so happy to see them this morning. I will admit, by lunch, I was a little over it.” — SETH MEYERSWhile off the air, Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers and John Oliver collaborated on a podcast called “Strike Force Five,” with proceeds donated to their out-of-work staff members.“We still, by the way, have two episodes and thousands of T-shirts left to sell,” Kimmel said on Monday. “The strike ended exactly on the day we ordered the shirts and hats, so if you want one, go to StrikeForceFive.com, or I’ll be giving them out until Christmas 2045, OK?”Neither on the podcast nor on “The Tonight Show” did Jimmy Fallon mention an apology he issued in September after current and former employees reported experiencing a “toxic workplace” under his leadership. Instead, he focused on gratitude for viewers who choose “to have me in your bedrooms at nighttime.”“I’m more excited than the guy seeing ‘Beetlejuice’ with Lauren Boebert.” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, everyone is excited. Today, my dad called me up and said, ‘Finally, I can watch Kimmel again.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Bad Business as Usual Edition)“We looked at the calendar today and — check my math on this — I believe we have been off the air for 154 indictments.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Donald Trump got arrested four times while we were on strike — once for the classified documents, once for interfering with the election, once for Jan. 6, and once for shooting Tupac, allegedly.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Trump is now facing 91 felony counts. Ninety-one felony counts. It’s like all of Melania’s birthday wishes came true at once.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Donald Trump arrived in New York last night to stay at his possibly soon-to-be-renamed residence, Trump Tower, ahead of his appearance today in a Manhattan courthouse for a fraud trial, and I just want to say it’s really nice of him to come back to New York for our first show.” — SETH MEYERS“Trump might not even have the money to pay the penalty in his fraud trial, which means there’s a remote but realistic possibility that Trump Tower gets taken away, he has to sell Mar-a-Lago and he ends up crashing with Rudy Giuliani.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingThe actor Matthew McConaughey turned rhymes from his new children’s book “Just Because” into a spirited duet with Jimmy Fallon on Monday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightFresh off a sold-out date at Madison Square Garden, the musical supergroup boygenius will perform on Tuesday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutBeyoncé on tour last summer. Her “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé” will be released on Dec. 1.The New York TimesThe highly anticipated film version of Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour will debut in movie theaters on Dec. 1. More

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    Echo Brown, Young Adult Author and Performer, Dies at 39

    A one-woman show that used her date with a white hipster to talk about life, race, love and sex, led an editor to sign her to write two novels.Echo Brown, a late blooming storyteller who mined her life to create a one-woman show about Black female identity and two autobiographical young adult novels in which she used magical realism to help convey her reality, died on Sept. 16 in Cleveland. She was 39.Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed by her friend Cathy Mao, who said the cause had not yet been determined. But Ms. Brown was diagnosed with lupus in about 2015, leading eventually to kidney failure, Ms. Mao said by phone. A live kidney donor had been cleared for a transplant, which was expected to take place early next year.Ms. Brown, who grew up in poverty in Cleveland and graduated from Dartmouth College, had no professional stage experience when her serio-comic show, “Black Virgins Are Not for Hipsters,” made its debut in 2015. It told her autobiographical story, through multiple voices, about dating a white hipster, including wondering what his reaction to her dark skin would be, and the sex, love, depression and childhood trauma she experienced.“It’s very revealing, and I felt very vulnerable doing it,” she told The Oakland Tribune in 2015, adding, “It’s as if you get onstage and share your deepest, darkest secrets. Putting my sexuality out there in front of people can make me feel very exposed.”The show was successfully staged in theaters in the Bay Area; she also performed it in Chicago, Cleveland, Dublin and Berlin.Robert Hurwitt, the theater critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, called Ms. Brown “an instantly attractive and engaging performer” who “has us eating out of her hand well before she gets everyone up and dancing to illustrate (with a little help from Beyoncé) why Black women shouldn’t dance with white men until at least after marriage.”And the writer Alice Walker said on her blog in 2016, “What I can say is that not since early Whoopi Goldberg and early and late Anna Deavere Smith have I been so moved by a performer’s narrative.”When “Black Virgins” was mentioned in a profile of Ms. Brown in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine in 2017, Jessica Anderson, an editor at Christy Ottaviano Books, an imprint of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, took notice.“I reached out blindly to see if she would turn her attention to writing for a young adult audience,” Ms. Anderson said in a phone interview. “She wasn’t familiar with young adult or children’s literature. I sent her some books, and she had an immediate sense of what her storytelling should be.”The result was “Black Girl Unlimited” (2020), a novel that Ms. Brown tells through the lens of her young self as a wizard who deals with a fire in her family’s cramped apartment, her first kiss, her brother’s incarceration, sexual assault and her mother’s overdose.Ms. Brown’s first novel presents her young self as a wizard and carries readers through events like a fire in her family’s apartment, her first kiss, her brother’s incarceration and her sexual assault. Macmillan“Brown’s greatest gift is evoking intimacy,” Karen Valby wrote in her review in The New York Times, “and as she delicately but firmly snatches the reader’s attention, we are allowed to see this girl of multitudes and her neighborhood of contradictions in full and specific detail.”Ms. Brown’s second book was “The Chosen One: A First-Generation Ivy League Odyssey” (2022), a coming-of-age story that uses supernatural elements like twisting portals on walls to depict her disorienting and stressful experiences at Dartmouth as a Black woman on a predominantly white campus.Ms. Brown’s second novel focuses on her stressful experiences at Dartmouth as a Black woman on a predominantly white campus.Christy Ottaviano BooksPublishers Weekly praised Ms. Brown for the way she ruminated on her “independence, fear of failure and mental health” with “vigor alongside themes of healing, forgiveness and the human need to be and feel loved.”Echo Unique Ladadrian Brown was born on April 10, 1984, in Cleveland. She was reared by her mother, April Brown, and her stepfather, Edward Trueitt, whom she regarded as her father. Her father, Edward Littlejohn, was not in her life. During high school she lived for a while with one of her teachers.Ms. Brown thought that Dartmouth, with its prestige and stately campus, would represent a “promised land” to her and be “the birth of my becoming,” she said in a TEDx talk in 2017.But early on she heard voices from a speeding truck shout the N-word at her.“They weren’t students, they probably weren’t affiliated with Dartmouth in any way, but it was enough to shatter me,” she said. The incident taught her a lesson: “There are no promised lands in this world for marginalized people, those of us who fall outside the category of normal.”She graduated in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in political science — she was the first college graduate in her family — and was hired as an investigator with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the independent oversight agency of the New York City Police Department. She left after two years, believing that “we didn’t have the power to do the work that was necessary,” she told the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.She worked as a legal secretary and briefly attended the Columbia Journalism School. She became depressed, started to study yoga and meditation, and moved to Oakland in 2011. While there, she was hired as a program manager at Challenge Day, a group that holds workshops at schools aimed at building bonds among teenagers.Her job included telling students about her life, which helped her find her voice.“I found that I could drop people into emotion and pull them out with humor,” she said in the Dartmouth magazine article. “That’s where I learned I was a good storyteller and wondered, ‘Where can I go to tell more stories?’”She began taking classes in solo performing with David Ford at the Marsh Theater in San Francisco. At first, she wrote comic scenes, then created more serious ones.“It was clear that she was someone who was ready for this, and she had a very easy time getting the words off the pages as a performer,” Mr. Ford said. “There was something miraculous about her.”In addition to her mother and stepfather, Ms. Brown is survived by her brother Edward. Her brother Demetrius died in 2020.Ms. Brown’s latest project was a collaboration with the actor, producer and director Tyler Perry on a novel, “A Jazzman’s Blues.” It is based on a 2022 Netflix film of the same name that Mr. Perry directed from a script that he wrote in 1995, about an ill-fated romance between teenagers (the young man becomes a jazz musician) in rural Georgia that takes place largely in the late 1930s and ’40s. It is to be published early next year.Ms. Anderson said the project came about because, as Ms. Brown got sicker, “it was too energy-consuming for her to work on her own material. So she was looking for a more creative partnership. and this came about through her agent.” More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Catfish’ and ‘Sullivan’s Crossing’

    The MTV show is back for a ninth season. The CW premieres a new show based on a novel of the same name.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, Oct. 2-8. Details and times are subject to change.MondayJaime Camil on “Lotería Loca.”Fernando Marrero/CBSLOTERÍA LOCA 9 p.m. on CBS. Rogelio, what are you doing here? Jaime Camil, of “Jane the Virgin” fame is stepping out of his telenovela role and into a hosting role on this new game show. Based on a Mexican game, similar to bingo, each episode will feature two players — the first place player will get to move up for a chance to win the cash prize at the end.TuesdayCATFISH 8 p.m. on MTV. Nev Shulman and Kamie Crawford are back to bust people on their lies and (very occasionally) make a great love story happen. This long running show centers on online dating and figuring out if people really are who they say they are. Even though the episodes are almost formulaic at this point (someone reaches out to say that the person they are talking to online won’t meet them, Nev and Kamie investigate, they all fly to find the person, and finally they have a sit down emotional conversation about why the “catfish” lied) it somehow never gets old to see Nev put people in their place.From left: Kelli Williams, Shanola Hampton, Gabrielle Walsh and Karan Oberoi in “Found.”Matt Miller/NBCFOUND 10 p.m. on NBC. Like I said last week, crime procedural shows are making their big comeback in 2023, and this new show further proves that. The show follows Gabi Mosely (Shanola Hampton) and her team as they try to solve cases of missing people. The twist? Gabi is keeping her childhood kidnapper in her basement and getting their help to figure out each clue and resolve the cases.WednesdaySULLIVAN’S CROSSING 8 p.m. on The CW. With “Riverdale” and “Nancy Drew” off the air, The CW is lining up a whole new roster of shows, starting with a story based on a novel by Robyn Carr of the same name. Maggie Sullivan (Morgan Kohan) moves back to her hometown, a campground in Nova Scotia, that is run by her estranged father after she finds herself in legal trouble. The part I’m most excited about? Maggie’s father is played by Scott Patterson who is making his CW re-debut after playing the grumpy but lovable Luke Danes on seven seasons of “Gilmore Girls.” The show also stars another “Gilmore Girls” alum: Chad Michael Murray.THE SPENCER SISTERS 9 p.m. on The CW. If you are a daughter with a mother of any age, you have certainly eye-rolled before at “you look like you could be sisters” from random men on the street. But this show has taken that concept and run with it. The mother/daughter duo, who are often mistaken for sisters, investigate crimes together in their hometown, Alder Bluffs. Like lots of CW shows, this first premiered in Canada earlier this year.ThursdayTHIS IS ELVIS (1981) 6 p.m. on TCM. Long before Baz Luhrmann used archival footage of Elvis Presley mixed with shots of Austin Butler in the role for the final scene of “Elvis,” this documentary did the same thing. It combines footage of Presley along with reconstruction of some moments of his life with actors and voice-overs for Vernon Presley, Gladys Presley and Priscilla Presley.FridayAlicia Silverstone and Stacey Dash in “Clueless.”Paramount PicturesCLUELESS (1995) 8 p.m. on CMT. To me, Cher Horowitz (played by Alicia Silverstone) will always be the No. 1 It Girl. From the incredible outfits (the yellow two-piece set lives in my mind rent free), to her rousing speech on immigration (“may I please remind you that it does not say R.S.V.P. on the Statue of Liberty”) you can’t help be fascinated by her. Come for the notorious one liners (“you’re a virgin who can’t drive”) and stay for the jarring reminder that though this movie came out nearly 30 years ago, Paul Rudd still looks almost exactly the same.SaturdayGREAT CHOCOLATE SHOWDOWN 8 p.m. on The CW. This show is what “The Great British Bake Off” would be like if it focused on only one ingredient: chocolate. The finale will feature the three remaining bakers as they create a four-part chocolate dessert meant to embody their baking history. The winner will walk away with $50,000 and a potential stomach ache.SundayTHE CIRCUS 7 p.m. on Showtime. Whether we are ready or not, we are officially entering into campaign season for the 2024 presidential election. As you watch the debates and read up on the candidates, this show can act as a companion guide. Hosted by John Heilemann, Mark McKinnon and Jenn Palmieri (who have all acted as political strategists and communication directors on the national level in some capacity), this show is returning for its eighth season to home in on President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign and former President Donald Trump’s campaign amid criminal proceedings.LAST STOP LARRIMAH (2023) 9 p.m. on HBO. Deep in the Australian outback there is a town with 11 residents. In December of 2017, Paddy Moriarty and his dog disappeared. What was once a tight knit community turned into a crime scene and an investigation began into whether someone in town was to blame. This documentary explores the town’s history and how everyone in the small community became a suspect. More

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    Golden Bachelor, Boomer Bait?

    “The Golden Bachelor” is part of broadcast networks’ efforts to cater to their mostly older audience.In September 1985, a new hit premiered on NBC. The network envisioned a show like nothing else on TV. “Take some women around 60. Society has written them off, has said they’re over the hill,” the pitch to producers went. “We want them to be feisty as hell and having a great time.”The result, of course, was “The Golden Girls,” the beloved sitcom about a group of single women, widowed and divorced, living together in a house in Florida. The show was ranked in the Top 10 of Nielsen ratings for six of its seven seasons. More than 27 million people watched the 1992 series finale.Thirty-eight years later, ABC is betting that a house full of single women, ages 60 to 75, and the 72-year-old man whose heart they’ll vie to win, can achieve ratings success with the aid of mostly boomer-age viewers who still flip on the TV for the prime-time lineup, and have yet to fully abandon network television for streaming.I tuned in for Thursday night’s premiere of “The Golden Bachelor” at 8 p.m. sharp with high hopes. Buzz for the season promised we’d accompany a mild-mannered retired and widowed “grandzaddy” from Indiana on his quest for a second chance at love with one of 22 equally self-possessed bachelorettes. This sounded more my speed than the high-conflict carryings-on I usually associate with reality TV. Perhaps I’d be part of the showrunners’ hoped-for “new audiences who might have turned their noses up at the brand before now.”In the innuendo-packed first episode, we meet our bachelor, Gerry Turner, who spends the hour speed-dating the eager bachelorettes, including Leslie, a fitness instructor from Minneapolis who tells us she dated Prince; Sandra, a retired executive assistant from Georgia with a Zen practice that incorporates curse words; and Faith, a high school teacher from Washington State who rides in on a motorcycle, serenades Gerry with a guitar and seems from the little time we spend with her to be a leading contender for last woman standing.When the show opened with a scene of Gerry getting dressed, deliberately showing him putting in his hearing aids as he recounted the tale of his wife’s death over the strains of “The Wind” by Cat Stevens, I thought this might be a departure for the “Bachelor” franchise, a more serious examination of aging and mortality. But once we arrived at the mansion where Gerry canoodles with each potential sweetheart — a dizzying procession of bawdy jokes and canned repartee — I remembered that this was a reality show with a bonkers conceit that is about pure entertainment (and ratings). It may not end up being any more cerebral than its brethren, but that’s not its remit.So can “The Golden Bachelor” keep network television afloat through the imminent shortage of scripted shows occasioned by the writers’ and actors’ strikes? My colleague John Koblin says it’s “off to a decent start”: While far from the most-watched show of the week, the premiere episode was the most-watched show on network television on Thursday night and, with delayed viewing, the audience will only grow.But, more pressing for viewers, will Gerry ultimately find his soul mate? Who will get the final rose? And will people like me, still skeptical of love competition shows, tune in to find out?I was charmed to learn that one of the showrunners for “The Golden Bachelor” studied “The Golden Girls” for conversation topics should the repartee on the show start to lag. I’m holding out hope that we will see the golden bachelorettes in their chenille bathrobes and house scuffs, sharing a cheesecake in the middle of the night.For moreSee the moment in the NBC promotional special from 1984 when the “Night Court” actress Selma Diamond joked about an imaginary show called “Miami Nice,” a bit that inspired network executives to create “The Golden Girls.”Part of the networks’ continuing efforts to retain older viewers? Game shows.“Older daters face all of the challenges their younger counterparts do — burnout, ghosting, gaslighting — but many of them have found that dating can be infinitely better when you don’t have as much to prove,” writes my colleague Catherine Pearson of the roses and thorns of dating after 60.THE WEEK IN CULTUREMichael Gambon as DumbledoreJaap Buitendjik/Warner Bros. PicturesMichael Gambon, best known for playing Dumbledore in several of the Harry Potter movies, died at 82. Read how he inhabited the role of the beloved Hogwarts headmaster.A man was charged with murder in the 1996 killing of Tupac Shakur. Since his death, Shakur has become an almost mythical figure.A judge ended a legal arrangement between Michael Oher, the subject of the hit movie “The Blind Side,” and the people who took him in when he was a teenager. It had given them authority over his affairs.Amal Clooney, Anne Hathaway and Jon Hamm hit the fall galas in New York.After a lackluster debut for Helmut Lang in New York, the brand’s creative director, Peter Do, showed a better-received collection under his own name at Paris Fashion Week. In Milan, some of the most interesting looks were on the street.A meme of “King of Queens” actor Kevin James has taken over some people’s social media feeds, Vulture reports.Aerosmith postponed the rest of its farewell tour until next year because its lead singer, Steven Tyler, injured his vocal cords.Performances of Stephen Sondheim’s final musical, “Here We Are,” commenced this week. The composer died in 2021.Cher is accused of hiring four men to kidnap her adult son as an apparent form of intervention, The Los Angeles Times reported.Usher will perform at the Super Bowl. Listen to a playlist inspired by his hit “Yeah!”Electronic Arts, a video game publisher, released “EA Sports FC,” a rebranded version of its popular soccer series FIFA. Much of the game is the same, The Guardian reports.The French actor Gérard Depardieu’s art collection sold at auction in Paris for $4.2 million.The home of the French singer Serge Gainsbourg is open to the public, with everything as it was on the day he died.The eight remaining campuses of the Art Institutes, a system of for-profit colleges, will close by the end of the month.THE LATEST NEWSHiroko Masuike/The New York TimesHeavy rainfall pounded New York City and the surrounding region, causing flash floods, shutting subway lines and turning roads into lakes. See some of the hardest-hit areas.Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who gained national stature in more than 30 years in the Senate, died at 90.Hard-line Republicans tanked Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s long-shot attempt to avert a government shutdown ahead of a midnight deadline tonight to keep federal funding flowing.A co-defendant in the Georgia election interference case against Donald Trump pleaded guilty to five charges, the first of the 19 defendants to enter a plea.The United Arab Emirates is giving weapons and medical treatment to one side in Sudan’s war under the guise of saving refugees.An I.R.S. contractor was charged with leaking tax return information believed to be Donald Trump’s.CULTURE CALENDAR📚 “Let Us Descend” (Tuesday): This book, inspired by Dante’s “Inferno,” is the latest from Jesmyn Ward, a two-time National Book Award winner and the youngest recipient of the Library of Congress’s American fiction prize. The novel follows an enslaved teenager named Annis as she travels through the pre-Civil War South after her white slave-owner father sold her. The book is among the most anticipated novels of the year.🎬 “Foe” (Friday): Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan, who are among the buzziest young actors working, play a married couple living on a farm in 2065 in this sci-fi drama. Their lives are upended when Junior (Mescal) is told that he’s been chosen to work on a space station. While he’s away, Henrietta (Ronan) will live with a duplicate version of her husband. — Desiree IbekweRECIPE OF THE WEEKLinda Xiao for The New York TimesTomato sandwichesAs September fades away, it’s time to celebrate some of the last of the good heirloom tomatoes by piling them in the sandwich of your dreams. While there are loads of variations to choose from, my tomato sandwich is probably the messiest, in the very best way. The recipe is a hybrid, combining the garlic-rubbed, oil-slathered toast of Catalan pan con tomate with the kind of slivered onions you would see in a tomato tea sandwich, and the bacon of a BLT. Act fast, because sad winter tomatoes will not do justice to a sandwich as good as this.REAL ESTATEHiroko Masuike/The New York TimesA dining table for six: Inside the Long Island City apartment of a best-selling cookbook author.A new frontier: As rising sea levels threaten coastlines, some developers look to floating homes.What you get for $1.4 million: A Cape Cod-style house in Monhegan Island, Maine; an Edwardian home in Evanston, Ill.; or an 1890 rowhouse in Washington, D.C.The hunt: These newlyweds want a three-bedroom house with a yard and a reasonable commute to Manhattan. Which did they choose? Play our game.LIVINGSimon Bailly/SepiaSelf-esteem: Want to believe in yourself? “Mattering” is key.Going solo: Make the best of attending a wedding alone.Elton John’s piano: Celebrity memorabilia and estate sales headline the coming auction season.Child of Birkin: The new standard-bearer for French-girl style just opened a store in Manhattan.Lessons from summer: Climate change is making travel season less predictable.ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTEREmergency essentialsWhen preparing for a natural disaster, no single strategy is right for everyone. But Wirecutter experts have found a few things to be true. When you put together a bag to grab in an emergency, don’t buy a premade kit. Instead, add gear that you actually need and know how to use. (Here’s a good place to start.) And it’s not just about the gear — simple tasks you can do today, like taking a CPR or first aid class, or designating a point person to be in touch with, can make a big difference. — Ellen AirhartFor more advice, sign up for Emergency Kit, an easy-to-follow guide to preparing for natural disasters from Wirecutter’s experts.GAME OF THE WEEKENDTaylor Swift at last week’s Kansas City Chiefs game.David Eulitt/Getty ImagesKansas City Chiefs vs. New York Jets: Taylor Swift and the N.F.L., two of America’s cultural juggernauts, pulled off a remarkable bit of brand synergy last weekend. Swift showed up in Kansas City to cheer on the Chiefs’ star tight end, Travis Kelce, whom she is rumored to be dating. The TV cameras, of course, cut to her constantly, and her exuberant celebrations brought life to an otherwise lousy game. Will she show up again this week? The N.F.L. surely hopes so — her presence would make this prime-time broadcast must-see TV, even if the game itself is another dud. (Fans who want great football without the spectacle should tune in earlier in the day to the powerhouse matchup between the Miami Dolphins and the Buffalo Bills.) 8:30 p.m. Eastern tomorrow on NBC.NOW TIME TO PLAYHere is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were bootjack and jackboot.See the hardest Spelling Bee words from this week.Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines.And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku and Connections.Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — MelissaSign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. More

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    ‘Billions’ Season 7, Episode 8 Recap: Going Nuclear

    Mike shows just how ruthless he is willing to be for sake of expediency.Season 7, Episode 8: ‘The Owl’Mike Prince is trying to do the right thing. A man for whom his wife, Andy, cares deeply has had a mountain-climbing accident in the Himalayas. He is injured and alone, in the path of a storm, running out of food and stranded on the Chinese side of the mountains.Mike has the resources to arrange a successful extraction, even under these physically and politically dangerous conditions. To rescue the man means risking an international incident and potentially ending his presidential campaign. Not to rescue him means the man will die, and Andy will lose someone who is more to her than a friend.So Mike does what you or I might like to think we would do under these circumstances. Risks be damned, he orders the rescue mission — confident that his seasoned pros won’t be caught but prepared to take the political hit if they do.At least, that’s the story it seems he’s telling himself, until circumstances on the ground change — or rather, until he changes circumstances on the ground.Despite his distaste for old-money blue bloods, Mike is dragged by his political adviser, Bradford, to a semiannual forest conclave for the rich and powerful called the Owl. In this secluded environment — clearly modeled after the Bohemian Grove, right down to the choice of its avian mascot — the nearly all-male elite can mix, mingle, urinate in the open air, go streaking through the snow, participate in tests of strength with offensive names and generally enjoy the rights and privileges of being right and privileged.There are two star attractions at this winter’s gathering, besides Prince himself. One is his chief political rival, the centrist Democratic governor Nancy Dunlop (Melina Kanakaredes, having a whale of a time playing a swaggering jerk). The other is the group’s ultimate political kingmaker and gray eminence, George Pike IV (Griffin Dunne, as quietly wolfish and menacing as a well-cast Imperial officer in a “Star Wars” project). Known to friends and foes alike as “Fourth,” Pike is there to decide which of these self-conceptualized common-sense mavericks deserves his backing.He gets his answer in the most horrifying sequence this show has seen since Bobby Axelrod paid a doctor to let a patient die. During a fireside chat in which Gov. Dunlop pushes for a nuclear-free world, Prince mocks the idea as hippy-dippy stuff and forcefully argues for the embrace of first-strike strategies. How would he know when to call down the fire? Well, he says, he would have to be sure, and being sure about things is why the people will want his finger on the button in the first place.Watching this room full of rich men discuss the incineration of millions as if they’re swapping fantasy football strategies is repulsive; there’s no other way to put it. It’s everything wrong with how decisions are made in this country, as wealthy people in no danger of facing consequences for their actions debate idly which lives are and aren’t worthless when stacked against the overriding importance of their own comfort and ambitions.Prince in particular talks as if he were purposefully demonstrating the wisdom of Chuck, who is also in attendance with his old-guard father; his friend and lieutenant Ira; and somehow, Charles’s personal Dr. Feelgood, Dr. Swerdlow. Chuck’s quest to stop Prince from reaching the White House — like the parallel sabotage campaign led by Wendy, Wags and Taylor — is predicated on the idea that no man this free of self-doubt belongs anywhere near power, let alone the kind of power present in the nuclear football. (A friendly but rueful conversation between Chuck and Prince as they pee against some trees hashes this point out directly.)Unfortunately for Chuck, Fourth doesn’t see things his way. In Prince’s tough talk about the bomb, Fourth hears a man willing to thumb his nose at the “nanny state” — a man truly made for a world where there is no black and white, no good and evil. Like many to-the-manner-born elites, Fourth is a natural constituent for a form of politics run by “big men with agendas — not the populace, not the rule of law and certainly not the voters.”Chuck leaves, visibly shaken. If self-styled guardians of the soul of the nation like Fourth don’t understand that they’re selling that soul by backing Prince, what hope does he have?Which raises another question: Is “Billions” the most chilling show on television right now? And I’m not talking about the wintry setting of this week’s episode. Like virtually every episode since Prince’s presidential ambitions became clear, “The Owl” casts an unflinching eye on the danger posed to American democracy by megalomaniacal strongmen, by the ultra-rich, and especially by the people who are both.In a sense, this is covered ground for the show. Chuck already took on billionaire overreach when he battled Bobby Axelrod for five seasons. His conflicts with the pointedly unnamed presidential administration in power in the show’s universe from 2017 to 2021, represented by odious officials like Attorney General Jock Jeffcoat and Todd Krakow, made a clear argument that authoritarianism, corruption and reactionary politics are correlated phenomena.But since Axe never got directly involved in politics, and since the former president was never depicted as an on-screen character, “Billions” has never had such an opportunity to explore all these issues up close by embodying them in one man. And in an episode that depicts the threat he presents in the starkest, most existential terms imaginable, it’s worth noting what that one man actually does.Mike Prince was trying to do the right thing, you remember. Even at the Owl, he, Bradford and Scooter hovered over his phone, listening for updates on the rescue mission. Then something goes south, just as the chopper reaches the stranded hiker: the Chinese military shows up out of nowhere, taking the man into custody and forcing Prince’s team to abort the mission lest they get involved in a shooting war with a foreign government.But here’s the thing: No one knows better than Andy that what Mike Prince wants, Mike Prince gets. If this rescue didn’t work, then, it’s because Mike didn’t want it to work. Confronted with this, Prince admits it: He tipped off the Chinese government and ended the mission after Fourth encouraged him to resolve the situation without provoking the Chinese government — or being seen as surrendering to them either.“You wanted him off the mountain,” he rationalizes half-heartedly. “He’s off the damn mountain.” The Himalayas are cold. Mike Prince is colder.Loose changeAs dark as this episode gets, there’s also a scene in which Kanakaredes and Rick Hoffman get on the floor and leg-wrestle with their shirts off. In general, when presented with two roads diverging in a wood, “Billions” takes the path more ridiculous, and that has made all the difference.To its credit, “Billions” has long presented sexual fetishism and kink not as a source of comedy (OK, not only as a source of comedy), let alone as a marker of deep psychological dysfunction. It has always been presented more as just a part of the sex lives of countless basically normal people (OK, normal by “Billions” standards). It picks up this torch again in a subplot involving Wags’s discovery that he has a certain scatological fetish that initially sends his wife, Chelz (Caroline Day), fleeing from the room. (“Stop saying words out of your mouth!” she stammers in one of the best lines of the night.) When Wendy explains to Chelz that the fetish represents Wags’s desire to be loved unconditionally, despite even the most repugnant parts of himself, Chelz is into it — but for Wags, the explanation kills the mood, like a magician revealing how the trick is done. And I call shenanigans! Figuring out why you’re into the weird stuff you’re into makes it more fun, not less.“I love breathing the same country air that Goldwater did.” Only Charles Rhoades Sr. could describe getting back to nature in these terms.“Ham can cram in with Woof,” says Charles at one point, referring to reshuffled sleeping arrangements among his Owl buddies. With nicknames like that, this is possibly the most “old-money Ivy League alumnus” thing anyone has ever said on television.When Prince learns the identity of Andy’s missing friend, whom he realizes is one of her open-marriage romances, he says flatly: “Ah, Derek. Good old Derek.” It’s good to hear the note of hurt and embarrassment in his voice; it’s an all-too-rare sign that he’s human.The episode ends with an image of hooded, chanting Owl members setting the towering wooden statue of their mascot ablaze. It’s a creepy image but also a gorgeous one. “Billions” is a very good-looking show; I can think of a few fantasy epics that could learn a thing or two from how it shot those cloaked figures in the torch-lit snow. More

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    in Theater

    In ‘Big Trip,’ an Exiled Russian Director Asks: What Makes Us Human?

    Dmitry Krymov’s two shows at La MaMa thrillingly stress the porosity of the line between life and storytelling.The Russian theatermaker Dmitry Krymov’s “Big Trip,” two shows in repertory through mid-October at La MaMa, in Manhattan, is in love with the very essence of theater: how we tell stories, how we make art, how we live.The productions have no sets to speak of. The costumes and props look as if they have been sourced from thrift shops and Home Depot — one piece makes extensive use of cardboard. Yet we are far from the usual Off Off Broadway seen at incubators like the Brick. The framework here — Pushkin, Hemingway and O’Neill — is drawn from high art, or at least classics some might deem musty. Flares of whimsy, as when the actors don red clown noses, might feel rather European to locals more accustomed to irony. It is safe to say there is nothing else like this on New York stages right now.This is all very much of a piece for Krymov, but also new territory for him.Back in Moscow, this acclaimed writer, director and visual artist had access to fairly generous budgets, presented work at fancy institutions and taught his craft to avid students. He earned accolades and traveled the world, including to our shores to present “Opus No. 7” at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn (2013), “The Square Root of Three Sisters” at Yale University (2016) and “The Cherry Orchard” at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. After that last production’s run ended in spring 2022, Krymov refused to return home because Russia had attacked Ukraine.Now living in New York, he runs Krymov Lab NYC, an iteration of his Moscow workshop, and collaborates with an English-speaking ensemble. “Big Trip,” their first official outing, consists of the distinct pieces “Pushkin ‘Eugene Onegin’ in Our Own Words,” a retooling of one of his Moscow productions; and “Three Love Stories Near the Railroad,” based on two of Hemingway’s short stories, “Hills Like White Elephants” and “A Canary for One,” and scenes from Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms.”Krymov does not so much stage classic works as filter them through prisms like memory, notions of cultural heritage and identity, and the very process of theatermaking. (It’s mind-boggling that, according to Tatyana Khaikin, a lead producer of Krymov Lab NYC, none of the city’s established companies have invited him to do a show.)In “Onegin,” the stronger of the two works, Russian immigrants (Jeremy Radin, Jackson Scott, Elizabeth Stahlmann and Anya Zicer) guide the audience through a retelling of Pushkin’s 19th-century masterpiece about high-society youths facing the demands of love.Kwesiu Jones, left, and Tim Eliot in “Three Love Stories Near the Railroad,” in a segment that adapts Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms.”Steven PisanoThey begin by explaining the basics of theater then re-enact scenes from “Eugene Onegin” while essentially annotating the text (throughout both shows, Krymov repeatedly breaks the fourth wall to stress the porosity of the line between life and theater). The central character is a dandy afflicted with spleen, which “is like having American blues,” we are told. “But even worse — it’s having the Russian blues.” (Reflecting on such differences is a Krymov forte: His astonishing memory play “Everyone Is Here,” which is on the streaming platform Stage Russia, intersperses scenes from “Our Town” with the impact a touring American production had on him in the 1970s.)The issue of watching an exiled Russian director’s work while his country is waging war against Ukraine is actually raised in “Onegin,” which is interrupted by a harangue directed at the cast: “You can’t hide behind your beautiful Russian ‘culture’ anymore. Your culture means destruction and death, and all of your Pushkins, your Dostoevskys and Chekhovs cannot save you.” The show resumes, but the trouble among theatergoers feels real, and so are the questions that have been raised. Should Thomas Mann not have been able to publish in America after he fled Nazi Germany, for example?The outburst is also representative of the constant interrogation of the source material, all the while reaching deep into its core and extracting the marrow — what makes us human.The trickiest of the three segments in “Three Love Stories Near the Railroad” is O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms,” which will be cryptic for those unfamiliar with the play’s premise and characters. Yet the action is magnetic because of the director’s ability to create absorbing theater in an elemental way, often through deceivingly simple devices. The father and son Ephraim and Eben (Kwesiu Jones and Tim Eliot), using stilts, tower over Abbie (Shelby Flannery), the woman who has upended their lives. It’s a stark representation of power and its often illusory appearance that peaks in a stunning visualization (that I won’t spoil) of Abbie and Eben’s tortured relationship.In the same show’s “A Canary for One,” the unrolling of a painted sheet suggests passing scenery seen from a train. It’s easy to get lost in the action, despite the fourth-wall breaking. Introducing “Desire,” Radin wondered where the train was. A whistle blew. “It’s very far away, and behind you,” he told us. I knew the train could not possibly be there, and yet I turned around and looked. I’d bought it all. More

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    in Television

    Netflix’s ‘One Piece’ Shines Brightest With Its Casting

    Netflix’s breakout global hit does right by its characters by getting actors who capture the spirit of the original.When Iñaki Godoy smiles as Monkey D. Luffy in Netflix’s live-action adaptation of the beloved anime “One Piece,” his face broadens and brightens and his eyes pop with boyish delight. No combination of physical attributes and fancy effects could replicate Luffy’s doofy 2D ear-to-ear half-moon grin in the animated original. But Godoy gets pretty damn close.Say what you will about the show overall (I’d say it’s a perfectly tolerable reimagining of an overrated series), “One Piece” excels at capturing the spirit of the original, primarily through the depictions of its motley crew of pirate-protagonists in a quest for a treasure called the One Piece. This success is indicative of a wider trend that might help anime fans — who’ve been traumatized with years of godawful adaptations of their favorite series — sleep better at night. Recent live-action anime adaptations like “One Piece” are slowly but surely improving the genre, and it all starts with casting.Emily Rudd, who plays Nami, a cunning thief who hates pirates yet still joins Luffy’s crew, channels the wit and relentlessness of the original character — with more bite. Mackenyu Arata, as the cantankerous, heavy-drinking swordsman Roronoa Zoro, masters the fighter’s disaffected glare and confidence, while also pulling off the identical bang-arrangement of his animated counterpart’s green hair. (Mackenyu’s emerald mane isn’t quite the same shade as Zoro’s mint ’do, but potato-potahto.) Jacob Romero Gibson brings emotional grounding to the silly pathological liar Usopp, and Taz Skylar, who had no martial arts training before filming, performed all of his own kicks as the flirtatious cook Sanji.Godoy as Monkey D. Luffy in “One Piece.”NetflixGood casting in live-action anime adaptations shouldn’t be taken for granted; in fact, it’s been the reason that several have crashed and burned. The most notorious example may be the “Ghost in the Shell” film from 2017, starring Scarlett Johansson as a whitewashed version of the protagonist, Major Motoko Kusanagi. But that casting flub was about more than just skin color; the choice was an erasure of a foundational element of the original, in which the character, setting and philosophy are all based in East Asian culture and ideas. And there have been many others: “Dragonball: Evolution,” “The Last Airbender” and Netflix’s 2017 “Death Note” film. In each movie, the casting revealed how the adaptation only showed a cursory understanding of the context around the original series.Totally reinterpreting the characters or opting for unconventional casting can be especially problematic in shonen (the popular, typically mainstream anime targeted toward young boys, e.g., “One Piece,” “Dragonball,” “Naruto,” “Pokémon”). These series, which often feature fantastical lands, repetitive arcs and steadily escalating boss battles, are ultimately centered around the colorful protagonists and their sense of kinship and camaraderie.Netflix’s last big anime adaptation, “Cowboy Bebop,” made several missteps, but the show’s lead cast was not one of them. John Cho, Mustafa Shakir and Daniella Pineda not only embodied their characters aesthetically — as in Cho’s impressive coiffure matching Spike’s mad mop of hair — but also in the way they spoke and even walked. (Just look at Cho sauntering through the dusty western-style towns in space.)Monkey D. Luffy in a scene from the anime series “One Piece,” created by Eiichiro Oda.Shueisha/Toei AnimationThe bungled anime adaptations represent an unfortunate hangup of American studios and creators: distrust that these stories can translate unless they’re westernized. Settings change. Characters’ back stories are altered. Recurring jokes, anime tropes and cultural references are lost for being too inside-baseball for an American audience. The result, like “Cowboy Bebop,” is too often a perverted version of the anime, both too distant from the original story and too literal an approximation of an animated medium whose visual style and humor become cheesy when brought to life.The hopeful view is that “One Piece” is marking a change in the tide — yes, ocean pun intended — for American adaptations. Netflix in particular is trying to reach anime fans with an impressive list of live-action adaptations slated for the future: “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” a new “Death Note,” “Yu Yu Hakusho,” “My Hero Academia” and, of course, more “One Piece,” after the show rose to the top of Netflix’s charts immediately upon its release.Perhaps by the time the straw hat pirates return in Season 2 there will be more good adaptations to speak of, not just in terms of casting but in the writing, filming, world-building and everything else that brought fans to the original series in the first place. If not — well, there’s about a century worth of cute, horrifying, sad, funny, surreal anime to watch out there. Take your pick. More