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    What’s Next for ‘Love Island’ Contestant Jeremiah Brown? A Book Club.

    Jeremiah Brown asked his 2 million TikTok followers what to do after being voted off the hit series. The answer has him, and his fans, reading “The Song of Achilles.”After he was voted off the dating show “Love Island USA” last month, Jeremiah Brown wasn’t sure what to do with his newfound fame.During his 16 days as a contestant, he’d gained more than two million followers on TikTok, up from just 44 before he went on the show. Shortly after his exit, a suggestion from a follower on social media immediately grabbed him.“Somebody said, you should start a book club, and I was like, oh my gosh, lightbulb,” Brown said in an interview. “The second I read this idea, I was like yeah, we got to do this.”When Brown posted about his book club in early July, the announcement generated wild enthusiasm. Soon, the club had around 120,000 members.“Y’all some nerds,” Brown told his followers.After polling club members on what genre they wanted to read (romance, naturally), Brown gave them a list of books to vote on, which included BookTok favorites like “It Ends With Us,” “Beach Read,” “Twisted Love” and “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.” The winner, by several thousand votes, was “The Song of Achilles,” by Madeline Miller.The novel, which is more of an epic tragedy than a romance, has already attracted a wide audience, selling more than 4 million copies since its release in 2012. Set during the Trojan War, it imagines a doomed love affair between the warrior Achilles and his devoted companion Patroclus.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Was Murderbot Smiling in the Finale? Only the Creators Know for Sure.

    This interview includes spoilers for the Season 1 finale of “Murderbot.”On the surface, Chris and Paul Weitz were in unfamiliar territory when they set about creating “Murderbot,” the darkly comic Apple TV+ series, which just wrapped its first season on Friday. After all, they hadn’t adapted a science-fiction story together before.But as the Weitz brothers noted in a joint video call last month, the cynical, soap-opera-obsessed cyborg at that show’s center (Alexander Skarsgard) isn’t entirely dissimilar from the carefree, selfish cad played by Hugh Grant in their 2002 film “About a Boy,” which they directed and co-wrote (with Peter Hedges).Like that man, the cyborg of “Murderbot” is inconvenienced by some of the messier aspects of human existence — particularly emotions. And like him, it must learn to resemble a responsible, loving human being.“Hugh Grant’s character was essentially self-medicating with television and didn’t really want to deal with people, and was kind of forced to by a hippie mom and her son,” Chris said. The title character — Murderbot is a name the cyborg privately gives itself — finds itself in a similar dynamic after it is hired to protect a motley group of scientists on an expedition to survey a distant planet.In “Murderbot,” Noma Dumezweni plays the leader of a freethinking group of scientists and Alexander Skarsgard plays the freethinking deadly cyborg charged with protecting them.Apple TV+“I think there’s a theme in both our work of people who aren’t actually equipped to provide emotional support for other people but who nonetheless figure out a way to do so,” Paul said — even if, strictly speaking, the cyborg’s pronouns are it/its.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Rage’ Is a Wild Spanish Dramedy About Women Who Are Pushed Too Far

    The behaviors are extreme and exciting, but the show itself isn’t bleak. It is bright and funny, colorful and surprising.The Spanish dramedy “Rage” (in Spanish, with subtitles), debuting on Friday night at 8 on HBO Latino, is a distinctive anthology of female anger. Each episode includes a true plate-smashing meltdown, the culmination of decades of frustration and neglect. People rip cabinets off the wall, light fires, destroy entire kitchens. And while the show has an amped-up soapy lilt, all the indignation is grounded in real despair and grief.The stories connect and coincide; some of the women are neighbors, or catch glimpses of each other on television. Some of the women are rich and impulsive while others scrounge for each rent check, but disappointment knows no tax bracket. A prized pig wanders through the chapters connecting the arcs, too.Marga (Carmen Machi) is a visual artist and hobbyist markswoman whose slick husband is sleeping with their housekeeper, Tina (Claudia Salas). Tina’s mom, Adela (Nathalie Poza), struggles to make ends meet while taking care of her own ailing mother. Nat (Candela Peña), prim and stylish, loves her job at a high-end department store … until she is forced out by a blasé boss who prefers to hire less-qualified Instagram influencers.Vera (Pilar Castro), a celebrity chef, vents to her pal Marga about how hopeless she feels, how sinister the world seems to her. But it isn’t just perception, it is also projection: She winds up torturing a journalist who antagonizes her. “We’re all just selfishness, meanness and madness,” she tells him while he’s tied to a table.When Victoria (Cecilia Roth) realizes the award she is getting is sponsorship nonsense and not a belated recognition of her work, the humiliation overwhelms her, and we watch this tidal wave of self-recrimination crash on shore. Have I been a fool this whole time? How much of my life have I wasted operating under these misapprehensions about myself, about the world?Everything on “Rage” escalates, quickly, and the behaviors are extreme — and exciting. While the characters are motivated by pain, the show itself is bright and funny, colorful and surprising. Two episodes air on Friday and the remaining six air weekly after that. More

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    As Climate Change Heats Up Europe’s Summers, Avignon Festival Tries to Adapt

    Rising temperatures pose an existential threat to the theater extravaganza, where extreme heat is making it tough for the audience.As a punishing heat wave swept through Europe last week, some cultural events had to carry on with the show. The Avignon Festival, one of Europe’s largest theater extravaganzas, was just days from opening. And even as temperatures hit 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit, the festival’s venues — many of them outdoors — still needed to be prepped.“Within 12 hours, we had adapted,” said Eve Lombart, who has been the festival’s general administrator since 2019. Working hours for technicians building stages and sets were adjusted, with longer breaks in the afternoon; to compensate, technical teams started as early as 6 a.m. at some of the event’s 40 venues.The swift adjustments were the result, Lombart said, of years of behind-the-scenes effort to adapt the festival to climate change.For Avignon and other events in the south of France, rising summer temperatures have become an existential threat. Days over 100 degrees Fahrenheit are no longer a rarity, with serious effects on audiences and workers. While air conditioning — less common in Europe than in other parts of the world — has been installed at most indoor venues, crowds typically walk from show to show throughout the day to catch as many productions as possible.Visitors in Avignon find ways to protect themselves from the sun during the day.Pierre Gondard for The New York TimesFlorent Masse, a Princeton University professor who is the director of the Princeton French Theater Festival, said that conditions had worsened significantly since he first traveled to Avignon, in 2002. Masse noted that on the opening day of this year’s event, the 30-minute walk back to the city center after a performance at La Fabrica, a venue in Avignon’s suburbs, was arduous.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Meet the French Game Show Contestant Who Won 646 Times in a Row (and 23 Cars)

    He also won TVs, musical instruments, a parachuting session, makeup, household appliances and much, much more. “It’s a lot,” he acknowledged.Much feels in flux in France these days. Will yo-yoing tariffs hit businesses? Is Perrier really that natural? And don’t even get started on the volatile summer heat.But for the past 21 months, fans of a popular French game show have lived by a simple, ironclad certainty. Tune in at noon on any given day, and without fail, there he was: a soft-spoken young man named Émilien, with wiry round glasses and an astonishing depth of trivia knowledge.Just as reliably, Émilien beat the other contestants. Again, and again, and again.Although he has declined to reveal his last name for privacy reasons, Émilien is now a celebrity of sorts in France for his record-breaking winning streak on a show called “Les Douze Coups de Midi,” or “The Twelve Strokes of Noon.” Starting on Sept. 25, 2023, he competed 647 times and netted 2.56 million euros, about $3 million, in cash and prizes.But it came to an end on Sunday, when a single defeat ended his reign.Émilien, now 22, is as incredulous as the rest of us that he got that far.“It’s a crazy story,” he said by phone this week. “I never expected it to last that long.”Broadcast on the TF1 television network, each day’s show has four contestants compete in a series of trivia quizzes. The winner — le Maître de Midi, or Master of Noon — defends that title the next day.“My goal was always the same,” Émilien said. “Every day, from the first to the 647th, to still be there at the end of the show, to do my best and come back the next day.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    From a Chaotic Childhood to the Control of a Michelin-Starred Kitchen

    It was hard to tell if Curtis Duffy was about to cry. The Chicago chef who loves both heavy metal and tweezering tiny herbs is not someone you would call effusive.We were on the sidewalk outside the Lincoln Park townhouse that was once home to Charlie Trotter’s, the seminal restaurant where Mr. Duffy learned what fine dining meant. He was trying to explain his father, Robert Duffy, who was 18 when his son was born.The elder Duffy was a longhaired Army vet and a tattoo artist who practiced a style of parenting that involved regular applications of a leather strap. His biker buddies nicknamed him Bear.That’s also the name of the television series in which Ever, Mr. Duffy’s Michelin-starred temple to the tasting menu, appears as the fictionalized greatest restaurant in the world. His intricate dishes, including a magic trick that makes a puff of cotton candy disappear into hibiscus soup, star as the work of the show’s chefs.Mr. Duffy is quick to point out that “The Bear” — which just started its fourth season — is not based on Ever and that he is not Carmy Berzatto, the tortured, talented chef at its center. But the emotional mess at the heart of the show is not far off.Mr. Duffy sometimes stages informal competitions with the cooks on the line to see if they can beat him finishing dishes. Lyndon French for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Ronny Chieng Ponders Iran’s Threat to Kill a Sunbathing Trump

    The “Daily Show” host called the threat “an attack on all of America, because now we all have to picture him with his bare belly glistening in the sun.”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.Navel GrazingA senior adviser to Iran’s supreme leader issued an assassination threat against President Trump on Wednesday, remarking that Trump should be careful while sunbathing at Mar-a-Lago, because a small drone might hit him in the navel.Ronny Chieng called the threat “an attack on all of America, because now we all have to picture him with his bare belly glistening in the sun.”“Is this really a threat, though? What, you’re going to hit his navel with a small drone? Like, Iran went from building a nuclear bomb to ‘We’re going to turn his outie into an innie.’” — RONNY CHIENG“Are they threatening to assassinate him or poke him like he’s the Pillsbury Doughboy?” — RONNY CHIENG“Also, Iran, are you the only people in the world that can’t tell Donald Trump uses spray tan? He’s not in the sun, OK? Are you looking at pictures of him, like, ‘Damn, this guy must have spent all week at the beach.’?” — RONNY CHIENG“Wow, I didn’t think a threat like that would unlock his core childhood memories. Maybe keep asking him about this stuff. Like, he might have an emotional breakthrough: ‘Yeah, last time I sunbathed was when I was 7, and my mom said she didn’t love me. And I forgive her. Oh, my God, I’m healed! Let the immigrants stay!’” — RONNY CHIENG, riffing on Trump’s responding to a question about the threat by recalling that he last sunbathed around age 7The Punchiest Punchlines (Back to Biden Edition)“Joe Biden’s former doctor refused to answer a single question about the ex-president’s poor health. Wow, he seems like the perfect doctor to treat my secret warts.” — GREG GUTFELD“Yep, he pled the Fifth to all questions, claiming doctor-patient privilege, which I get. It’s the only thing stopping my doctor from telling the world about my birthmark that looks like Brit Hume.” — GREG GUTFELD“When asked about Biden’s decline, he simply referred them to the coroner’s report.” — GREG GUTFELDThe Bits Worth WatchingAnthony Anderson’s mother celebrated her 72nd birthday in style during her son’s last night as guest host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This Out“Self-Portrait” by Beauford Delaney. In a 1964 self-portrait, the artist renders himself as a coloring book come to life. Estate of Beauford Delaney and Derek L. Spratley; Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLCA new exhibition of Beauford Delaney’s work on paper showcases the paradox at the heart of his art. More

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    ‘And Just Like That …’ Season 3, Episode 7 Recap: Double Standards

    Guiseppe’s mother has opinions about her son’s new relationship with Anthony. Carrie gets defensive about seeming to flirt with her neighbor.Season 3, Episode 7: ‘They Wanna Have Fun’The woman wondered if she should have invited him to the party.In this scenario, that woman is me, and the man in question is Aidan. Why, pray tell, did Carrie not invite him to “their” house for Charlotte’s birthday party? Last we left our lovers, Carrie had agreed not to return to Virginia, but Aidan was still free to come to New York. (I can’t believe I just typed that sentence as if this were a normal relationship dynamic, but here we are.)Perhaps Carrie was more interested in inviting Duncan, her downstairs neighbor, to the soiree instead of her “boyfriend” (still using quotes!). If Aidan isn’t there, she is free to flirt with Duncan. And she does. But more on that in a bit.The big birthday party that is the center of this week’s episode is really just a ruse to get Charlotte to have a little fun and forget, at least for a night, about Harry’s prostate cancer — which, at this point, no one else knows about but Carrie. After a lunchtime chat in which Charlotte alludes to having a lot on her plate, and a subsequent near-slip of the secret by Carrie, Miranda gets suspicious. So Carrie tells Miranda she wants to throw a big shindig for Charlotte because her dog, Richard Burton, is terminally ill.Miranda — now a huge dog person, apparently, after the introduction of Sappho and Socrates into her life — is simply heartbroken for Charlotte, and goes wild with the party planning. Decked in a silver jumpsuit and toting pink confetti balloons and a karaoke machine no one asked for, Miranda shows up to Carrie’s house ready to party like it’s 1999. To borrow a phrase from O.G. Carrie, I couldn’t help but wonder, how much more over the top would Miranda’s party favors have been if she knew it was Harry who had cancer?By the end of the episode, though, she does. Rumors begin flying among party guests until Harry can’t take it, and he summons Carrie, Miranda and Lisa into a back room to confess his diagnosis. (Yes, Carrie already knows, Charlotte admits to Harry; but Harry told his personal shopper! He has no room to be mad!)Ultimately, Charlotte says, this is the best birthday gift Harry could have given her. That, and the public admission that asking her to keep the secret in the first place was wildly unfair. Because it was.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More