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      ‘And Just Like That …’ Season 2 Episode 10 Recap: All Too Familiar

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      It seems maybe Carrie shouldn’t get her heart set on those spacious new Gramercy digs just yet.Season 2, Episode 10:Is Carrie going to have to buy back her old apartment yet again, after a third failed attempt to move on from that place and formally co-habitate with one of her two great loves? This is all feeling a little too familiar.Recall, if you will, “Sex and the City” Season 4, in which Carrie and Aidan break up after he buys Carrie’s original place, and she has to borrow Charlotte’s engagement ring to buy it back from him.Then, in “Sex and the City” movie No. 1, Carrie once again sells her apartment to funnel money into “heaven on Fifth” with Big, only to have him stand her up at the altar, leaving Miranda and Samantha to negotiate its repurchase from their lounge chairs in Mexico.Well, here we go again. Maybe, anyway. Although it isn’t explicitly stated, it is clear that the sale hasn’t closed on either Carrie’s new Gramercy Park place or her O.G. haunt. When Seema freaks out to Carrie over a “disaster,” Carrie immediately thinks it must be about the new apartment. It’s not, but that indicates something about the sale isn’t done.Likewise, Carrie is about to hold a swanky “Last Supper” event at her old place, so it must technically still be hers. (Also, Carrie and Seema still apparently hold the power to kick Carrie’s neighbor and buyer, Lisette, out of the place when they want to eat sushi and gossip on their own. It’s obviously not officially Lisette’s apartment yet.)All this may prove convenient if Aidan does, in fact, break our hearts one more time by deciding he simply can’t spend time in New York, or with Carrie, anymore. There’s no way Carrie is going to be stuck holding that four-bedroom bag.Carrie’s reason for worry is pretty heartbreaking. We find Aidan back in Virginia, sobbing in his car because his son Wyatt (Logan Souza) has broken several bones in a drunk-driving accident, which Aidan feels he could have prevented if he had been around. “I should have been there,” Aidan tells Carrie, weeping.It’s the most gut-punching scene in a whole series of them, from an episode that shines a light on just how unbearably hard it sometimes is to be a parent. It’s especially true if you’re a working mother.That’s a title Charlotte can finally claim for the first time, and at Kasabian Gallery, she is, as her Gen Z co-workers tell her, “slaying.” Charlotte is pouring herself into this job, staying late some nights and, for a change, is not at her family’s beck and call, at the ready to serve every meal and hand-deliver every forgotten notebook. When she makes a six-figure art sale to the singer Sam Smith, there is no way that isn’t being celebrated. So she properly parties with her work pals and stumbles home, sloshed, to her frazzled family.Charlotte may be lit, but she is with it enough to deliver a message that her family, and maybe every family across America, needs to hear: “I was a person before you. I was a person before all of you … You need to get that, OK? And get it together.”Eloquent? No. Poignant? Yes, indeed. Charlotte is done rescuing everyone in that house all day every day. This is her time.It’s exactly the “time” Lisa thought she was evolving into. She says exactly this to Herbert as she tosses and turns in bed. Her career is at its highest point. With a 10-episode deal with PBS on the horizon, she is about to step into a pinnacle moment.But she is unexpectedly pregnant, and as a mom of three already, she knows what that means. Despite Herbert’s promises to help, it simply won’t happen. The bulk of the child-rearing, and all the expectations that surround it, will fall to her because who in their right mind would expect the new city comptroller to interrupt his busy schedule to give a bottle? Despite Lisa’s work being just as worthy and as time-consuming as Herbert’s, she, just like Charlotte, will be the one called on whenever anyone in the family needs something. And babies have a lot of needs.It is worth emphasizing that Lisa apparently asked Herbert to get a vasectomy eight years ago, after their last child was born, but he didn’t. He says he thought Lisa might change her mind about wanting another baby. He thought he knew better than she did. He was wrong.Lighthearted as this show has mostly been in its sophomore season, it must be stated that the commentary laced throughout this episode about the patriarchal oppression faced by even wealthy, connected and variously privileged women at home feels especially pointed in the year of “Barbie.” I’ll be thinking about that all week. Along with these …Things still taking up space in my brainUsually, it’s the older people in relationships who think they have things to teach their younger partners, but in the case of Anthony and Giuseppe, the reverse is true. After a lifetime of playing a very specific role in bed, Anthony might soon be trying out something new.And speaking of trying new things, the trajectory that Stanford’s life has apparently taken is absolutely wild. I’m all for honoring the memory of Willie Garson, who so heartwarmingly and hilariously played Stanford before dying at age 57 during the production of Season 1. But I refuse to believe that the man who gleefully sipped Flirtinis and called himself Rick9+ in cybersex chat rooms became a monk. No.After that horrible stand-up set in which Che absolutely eviscerated Miranda and the integrity of their relationship, Carrie should have uninvited Che from the “Last Supper” dinner party. Sure, Che is a comedian, and Miranda wasn’t supposed to be at Che’s show. She wasn’t supposed to hear any of that. But she was, and she did, and Carrie shouldn’t expect one of her dearest friends to then sit across a table and break bread with someone who was willing to rip her to shreds in public.Buying that stroller for her estranged husband’s new baby is not the own Nya thinks it is. (And Miranda clearly knows that.)No matter how rich a character is, I will never find it believable when someone willingly destroys her own cellphone, as Charlotte does when she thoughtlessly flings hers into a pitcher of margaritas and then cracks up about it. Human beings in the real world just don’t do that.I couldn’t help but notice that the reason Steve now has a new little restaurant by the shore is because he was sitting on a bench in Coney Island wondering, “Where did my baby go?” If you know, you know. More

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      Can’t Hear the Dialogue in Your Streaming Show? You’re Not Alone.

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      Many of us stream shows and movies with the subtitles on all the time — and not because it’s cool.“What did he just say?”Those are some of the most commonly uttered words in my home. No matter how much my wife and I crank up the TV volume, the actors in streaming movies and shows are becoming increasingly difficult to understand. We usually end up turning on the subtitles, even though we aren’t hard of hearing.We’re not alone. In the streaming era, as video consumption shifts from movie theaters toward content shrunk down for televisions, tablets and smartphones, making dialogue crisp and clear has become the entertainment world’s toughest technology challenge. About 50 percent of Americans — and the majority of young people — watch videos with subtitles on most of the time, according to surveys, in large part because they are struggling to decipher what actors are saying.“It’s getting worse,” said Si Lewis, who has run Hidden Connections, a home theater installation company in Alameda, Calif., for nearly 40 years. “All of my customers have issues with hearing the dialogue, and many of them use closed captions.”The garbled prattle in TV shows and movies is now a widely discussed problem that tech and media companies are just beginning to unravel with solutions such as speech-boosting software algorithms, which I tested. (More on this later.)The issue is complex because of myriad factors at play. In big movie productions, professional sound mixers calibrate audio levels for traditional theaters with robust speaker systems capable of delivering a wide range of sound, from spoken words to loud gunshots. But when you stream that content through an app on a TV, smartphone or tablet, the audio has been “down mixed,” or compressed, to carry the sounds through tiny, relatively weak speakers, said Marina Killion, an audio engineer at the media production company Optimus.It doesn’t help that TVs keep getting thinner and more minimal in design. To emphasize the picture, many modern flat-screen TVs hide their speakers, blasting sound away from the viewer’s ears, Mr. Lewis said.There are also issues specific to streaming. Unlike broadcast TV programs, which must adhere to regulations that forbid them from exceeding specific loudness levels, there are no such rules for streaming apps, Ms. Killion said. That means sound may be wildly inconsistent from app to app and program to program — so if you watch a show on Amazon Prime Video and then switch to a movie on Netflix, you probably have to repeatedly adjust your volume settings to hear what people are saying.“Online is kind of the wild, wild west,” Ms. Killion said.Subtitles are far from an ideal solution to all of this, so here are some remedies — including add-ons for your home entertainment setup and speech enhancers — to try.A speaker will helpDecades ago, TV dialogue could be heard loud and clear. It was obvious where the speakers lived on a television — behind a plastic grill embedded into the front of the set, where they could blast sound directly toward you. Nowadays, even on the most expensive TVs, the speakers are tiny and crammed into the back or the bottom of the display.“A TV is meant to be a TV, but it’s never going to present the sound,” said Paul Peace, a director of audio platform engineering at Sonos, the speaker technology company based in Santa Barbara, Calif. “They’re too thin, they’re downward and their exits aren’t directed at the audience.”Any owner of a modern television will benefit from plugging in a separate speaker such as a soundbar, a wide, stick-shaped speaker. I’ve tested many soundbars over the last decade, and they have greatly improved. With pricing of $80 to $900, they can be more budget friendly than a multispeaker surround-sound system, and they are simpler to set up.Last week, I tried the Sonos Arc, which I set up in minutes by plugging it into a power outlet, connecting it to my TV with an HDMI cable and using the Sonos app to calibrate the sound for my living room space. It delivered significantly richer sound quality, with deep bass and crisp dialogue, than my TV’s built-in speakers.At $900, the Sonos Arc is pricey. But it’s one of the few soundbars on the market with a speech enhancer, a button that can be pressed in the Sonos app to make spoken words easier to hear. It made a big difference in helping me understand the mumbly villain of the most recent James Bond movie, “No Time to Die.”But the Sonos soundbar’s speech enhancer ran into its limits with the jarring colloquialisms of the Netflix show “The Witcher.” It couldn’t make more fathomable lines like “We’re seeking a girl and a witcher — her with ashen hair and patrician countenance, him a mannerless, blanched brute.”Then again, I’m not sure any speaker could help with that. I left the subtitles on for that one.Dialogue enhancers in appsNot everyone wants to spend more money to fix sound on a TV that already costs hundreds of dollars. Fortunately, some tech companies are starting to build their own dialogue enhancers into their streaming apps.In April, Amazon began rolling out an accessibility feature, called dialogue boost, for a small number of shows and movies in its Prime Video streaming app. To use it, you open the language options and choose “English Dialogue Boost: High.” I tested the tool in “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” the spy thriller with a cast of especially unintelligible, deep-voiced men.With the dialogue boost turned on (and the Sonos soundbar turned off), I picked scenes that were hard to hear and jotted down what I thought the actors had said. Then I rewatched each scene with subtitles on to check my answers.In the opening of the show, I thought an actor said: “That’s right, you stuck the ring on her — I thought you two were trying to work it out.”The actor actually said, “Oh, sorry, you still had the ring on — I thought the two of you were trying to work it out.”Whoops.I had better luck with another scene involving a phone conversation between Jack Ryan and his former boss making plans to get together. After reviewing my results, I was delighted to realize that I had understood all the words correctly.But minutes later, Jack Ryan’s boss, James Greer, murmured a line that I could not even guess: “Yeah, they were using that in Karachi before I left.” Even dialogue enhancers can’t fix an actor’s lack of enunciation.In conclusionThe Sonos Arc soundbar was helpful for hearing dialogue without the speech enhancer turned on most of the time for movies and shows. The speech enhancer made words easier to hear in some situations, like scenes with very soft-spoken actors, which could be useful for those who are hearing-impaired. For everyone else, the good news is that installing even a cheaper speaker that lacks a dialogue mode can go a long way.Amazon’s dialogue booster was no magic bullet, but it’s better than nothing and a good start. I’d love to see more features like this from other streaming apps. A Netflix spokeswoman said the company had no plans to release a similar tool.My last piece of advice is counterintuitive: Don’t do anything with the sound settings on your TV. Mr. Lewis said that modern TVs have software that automatically calibrate the sound levels for you — and if you mess around with the settings for one show, the audio may be out of whack for the next one.And if all else fails, of course, there are subtitles. Those are foolproof. More

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      What Is ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ Doing to Soccer?

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      Hollywood has turned a perfectly good fourth-tier Welsh team into a TV show instead. That can’t be great.Last month, the Welsh soccer club Wrexham A.F.C. embarked on a buoyant tour of America that it called the Wrexham U.S.A. Invasion Summer ’23. The team packed stadiums from North Carolina to Southern California. It played against the megaclubs Chelsea and Manchester United. Its ticketholders enjoyed fan zones equipped with bustling merch stands and cardboard cutouts of Wrexham personalities — even a pop-up version of the Turf Hotel, a pub in the actual Wrexham, a city of 135,000 in the north of Wales. One popular activity was taking selfies with Wayne Jones, the Turf Hotel’s publican, a touring member of the summer jolly.Wrexham is a place with a familiar Rust Belt trajectory: mill and mine closures, job losses, economic depression. Before the season that began this month, its team played in the National League, the fifth tier of English soccer — a universe away from Chelsea and the top-flight Premier League. (The National League still includes a few teams that aren’t fully professional.) Typical attendance at Wrexham’s Racecourse Ground used to be less than 5,000 a game. In Chapel Hill, the team played in front of more than 50,000.The reason for the change is, of course, the FX docuseries “Welcome to Wrexham.” In 2021, the actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought the club and set about changing its fortunes, on camera. During the pandemic, the British actor Humphrey Ker had given McElhenney a viewing recommendation: “Sunderland ’Til I Die,” a docuseries about the decline of another soccer club in a postindustrial town. McElhenney loved it and, as Ker told The Athletic, formulated a plan to tell the same story in reverse: buy a struggling football team and turn it into a competitor. He wanted to reverse-engineer a feel-good sports documentary. He would also end up satisfying America’s love of underdog stories set in quaintly hard-up corners of Britain (like “The Full Monty,” recently revived as an FX series) and creating an odd real-life analog for the hugely popular “Ted Lasso.”The reverse-engineering project has, clearly, been a success. The show, with its portrait of the tight-knit community surrounding the club, attracted a devoted-enough audience that sales of the club’s jersey spiked wildly. (The team dropped its previous front-of-shirt sponsor, a Welsh trailer company, in favor of TikTok.) Wrexham matches — which, even in Britain, would have been considered obscure — can now play on ESPN. “It’s the real underdog thing,” one fan at the U.S.A. Invasion told The Evening Standard.It was an underdog thing. Since taking over, McElhenney and Reynolds have stocked Wrexham’s roster with players who are, frankly, too good to be playing in the National League. Paul Mullin, for instance, is a striker whose copious goal scoring helped get Cambridge United promoted a league; he instead jumped two tiers down to join Wrexham. (He was injured during the U.S.A. Invasion and stayed in the country to recuperate — in McElhenney’s Los Angeles home.) Last season, the four highest-paid players in the National League all played for Wrexham. At the season’s end, the club was promoted to League Two, the fourth tier of English soccer, for the first time since 2008. In the days that followed, Wayne Jones had to shut down the Turf Hotel: Despite his best efforts to prepare, he ran out of alcohol. When the show’s second season begins in September, streaming on Disney+, it’s a safe bet that every episode will be seen by far more people than will fill the Racehorse Ground for a whole season’s worth of Wrexham matches.In 2021, the sale of a different soccer club made international news. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund took a controlling interest in Newcastle United, a competitor in the Premier League. Unlike Wrexham’s story — which has been treated as a kind of homespun pushback to a world in which private-equity billions slosh around and sports teams are used as state propaganda — the Saudi purchase was castigated, internationally, as a new nadir in professional sports’ capitulation to the richest entity in the room. (The head of Amnesty International U.K. bashed the league for “allowing those implicated in serious human rights violations to walk into English football simply because they have deep pockets.”) Reynolds and McElhenney do not represent an autocratic petrostate and are implicated in no human rights violations, but the two takeovers do have one thing in common: Both the actors and the Saudi sovereign-wealth fund are operating in spaces where their wealth distorts everything around them.Longtime Wrexham supporters are certainly delighted by the team’s successes, but they must also recognize that the club has become something new and different: both an athletic behemoth and a pop-culture one. It’s not just that the roster is full of what are effectively ringers, being paid situationally outlandish amounts from what I can’t help imagining are the profits of the “Deadpool” franchise. Reynolds and McElhenney have created an ouroboros in which TV funnels fans and money to the team, leading to successes that in turn create more TV. It’s a clever gambit for endless expansion, but also one that, as the club’s U.S. tour underlined, risks turning Wrexham into more of a media project than a soccer team.It also feels directly opposed to the communitarian values that, ostensibly, made Reynolds and McElhenney interested in the team in the first place. For a decade before their arrival, Wrexham had been a community club owned by a coalition of fans called the Wrexham Supporters Trust. One of the club’s former board members, Spencer Harris, posted online this spring to take issue with the title of a BBC program about the club — “Wrexham: Hollywood or Bust” — and its suggestion that without the actors, Wrexham was doomed. “4,000 supporters trust members took over an insolvent business,” he wrote, “turned it around and handed over with cash in the bank after a global pandemic.” The trust didn’t even profit off the sale; in the interest of helping the club’s prospects, members essentially gave the team to Reynolds and McElhenney in exchange for a guarantee that they would add £2 million to the budget.That fan base now shares its connection to the team with all those who will binge-watch “Welcome to Wrexham” and feel their own sense of ownership — and with the actors, who sometimes overtake the club’s identity entirely. (One recent headline assessed the team’s prospects like this: “Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney are on track for the League Two points record!”) As a new television season begins, it will surely become untenable for “Welcome to Wrexham” to ignore its own impact on the club it’s documenting.For what it’s worth, English football is full of less complicated tales of resiliency. Luton Town, for instance, is a small club from just outside London. The team’s nickname is the Hatters. Their home ground, Kenilworth Road, has its modest entrance stitched through a row of terraced houses. While not self-owned, its ownership consortium is made up of local fans who willingly ceded a small share and a set of veto rights to the Luton Town Supporters Trust. At its lowest ebb, the club played in the fifth tier. It doesn’t spend a lot of money, because it doesn’t have a lot of money. But the team has scouted well and hired good coaches, and this coming season, having won its way up the ranks, it will compete in the Premier League. Someone should make a documentary about that. Or, honestly, maybe they shouldn’t.Opening illustration: Source photographs by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images; Christopher Furlong/Getty Images; Drew Hallowell/Getty Images; Jan Kruger/Getty Images. More

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      Morgan Wade Was Looking for the Spotlight. It Found Her.

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      The day before Morgan Wade was set to perform at Lollapalooza for the first time, the country singer-songwriter was in a Chicago hotel gym at around 10:30 a.m. It was arm day: regular curls, hammer curls, triceps pushdowns, lateral raises, dumbbell presses, face pulls and shoulder presses. She stopped after around 45 minutes, but only because it was actually her second session of the morning — she’d been up for hours, and had already done another 90-minute workout, and also ran three miles.“It’s just been something healthy for me to be addicted to,” Wade, 28 and slathered in tattoos, said of her fitness routine, sipping a chocolate Muscle Milk she’d grabbed from a vending machine for a quick boost of protein.For the last couple of years, Wade’s music career has been ascendant. Her 2021 album, “Reckless,” was a critical favorite in progressive country music circles, and “Wilder Days,” its stoutly aching breakout single, became an unlikely mainstream country crossover success. “Psychopath,” Wade’s second album and first on a major label, will be released on Aug. 25.In almost every other way, though, the last couple of years have been destabilizing: the erratic schedule, the increasing obligations to the music business, a slate of health struggles, the full-scale immersion into the public spotlight. And Wade, who has been sober for six years, has been finding ways to cope: therapy, fitness, clean eating, reading, journaling.In recent weeks, those tools have been stress-tested at a profound level, as Wade has found herself the subject of prurient tabloid interest regarding her seemingly unlikely connection with Kyle Richards, one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Online chatter that the women might share a romance has taken Wade from CMT to TMZ in record time.“Trust me, I’ve Googled it, man,” Wade said the prior night, backstage before a midnight gig at Reggie’s Rock Club. “I’ve Googled how to deal with the beginning stages of fame. The Wikipedia articles on that aren’t very helpful.”“I’m just a private person,” Wade said. “I’ve always been just kind of quiet. And so when all this kind of came out, I was just, it felt like everything had been stripped from me.”Lyndon French for The New York TimesWhen Wade was performing acoustic gigs at FloydFest, the roots music festival in her Floyd, Va., hometown, in the late 2010s, that she might someday be simultaneously navigating the rollout of her major label debut and the public dissection of her personal life might have seemed unfathomable.But even then, Wade was deeply disciplined. She took music seriously, writing and performing her own songs long before meeting Sadler Vaden, who plays guitar for Jason Isbell and has become her go-to producer.“She already had taken on the challenge of addiction when I met her. And she was in sobriety,” said Mary Sparr, Wade’s manager. “I saw in her that she had already had this huge challenge and chose to go ham, you know?”Vaden, who first saw Wade in a video performing her track “Mend” on a flatbed truck, described her as something akin to “a country Melissa Etheridge,” noting how the specificity of her gritty and reedy voice locates her in a country lineage, which frees her to make music that’s more eclectic and less hidebound.“Reckless,” which contained songs that Wade had written over several years, had the lightly bumpy texture of a scar that’s never quite healed. Wade’s voice is rich and sinewy, and it can sound like a scold and a plaint all at once. “Wilder Days,” which made it into the Top 40 on the Billboard country chart and was certified gold, got her signed to a Nashville major label, but she is in no way a country centrist. She has opened for Luke Combs, Chris Stapleton and Ashley McBryde, all on the genre’s more stylistically earthy side.Wade onstage at the Stagecoach Festival in Indio, Calif., in April. In August, she made her Lollapalooza debut.Monica Schipper/Getty Images for StagecoachWhen it came to beginning work on “Psychopath,” Wade was feeling pressure, self-imposed, to follow the success of “Wilder Days.” The first batch of songs was recorded last summer, but Vaden sensed she needed some more breathing space. “We have to just make an album that we are proud of,” he said he told her.Her manager was concerned, too. “She was burning herself out really bad,” Sparr said. “She’s the type that will say yes till the end of the world and work herself to the death until she hits that boiling point. We’ve had to mitigate her drive in those cases to give herself some more balance.”The songs from a second batch, recorded in January, are both heftier and more assured, playing with emotion, or genre, or both. The chirpy “Fall in Love With Me” is in this set, as is “Alanis,” which directly takes on the difficulties of a female performer enacting her whole self in public. “Losers Like Me” is an agitation about small-town life that recalls Kacey Musgraves’s debut single, “Merry Go ’Round.” And “27 Club” is a cutting song about dodging the worst fate, and still being unsure of what comes next.During that stretch of time, Wade and Richards were forming a friendship. Richards discovered Wade on the radio and followed her on Instagram. Wade, ever the skeptic (and who had never previously watched “Housewives”), messaged her to ask why. They got close quickly. Soon, they had a Wordle group chat, including fellow Housewife Teddi Mellencamp Arroyave and Richards’s friend Jenn Leipart. Richards began filming content for a documentary about Wade’s life, both onstage and off. The two posted photos together working out in the gym, and one of Wade sitting in Richards’s lap. Wade performed at a charity concert Richards had organized to benefit the National Alliance on Mental Illness. (Wade will also appear in the upcoming season of “Real Housewives.”)Wade, left, and Kyle Richards on a red carpet in late April. The two struck up a friendship after Richards followed the musician on Instagram.Ella Hovsepian/Getty ImagesThe public adjustments have not all come smoothly. “She told me at the NAMI event she almost wanted to leave at one point — she was like, This is so stressful,” Richards said in an interview. “I realized and appreciated later her hanging in there for me.”In the first week of July, news of Richards’s separation from her husband, Mauricio Umansky, hit the internet. Suddenly, Wade was being floated as a possible factor in the split. Strangers began dissecting her music, her lyrics, her past struggles with addiction and depression.Wade was at her family’s home in Virginia at the time. For three days, she didn’t get out of bed, she said. Sparr checked in like clockwork. “She was calling me like once an hour or every two hours and being like, What am I going to do? What are we going to do?” Sparr said. “She’s programmed to want to take an action. She wants to fix things. And, you know, sometimes there’s not anything to do but let time do the work.”Wade even skipped going to the gym. “For her to not go to the gym, I was like, OK, this is not good,” Richards said. “I’ve never seen her in two years not do that.”She continued, “I carried some guilt for having her be a victim of this because of me. I felt like it was collateral damage and I felt guilt about that, you know?”The gossip even traveled to Wade’s family; her grandfather suggested that land prices in their small town might go up. (“He has a damn flip phone!” Wade cackled.) Her 5-year-old half sister asked her why she was crying so much.“I seriously thought I was going to have to go to a rehab just preventively, to keep me from doing something stupid,” Wade said.Slowly, she got back on her feet. She returned to the gym, and set up twice-weekly therapy sessions. Getting a taste of public scrutiny, she said, made her regretful of the judgment she used to hold about celebrities. She tried to encourage her family and friends to see that she had now become the object of the kind of dismissiveness with which they had once regarded the famous. “You have to give people a little bit of grace,” Wade said.Wade said she’s going to go “Back to basics,” to articulate her post-fame version of herself on her next album.Lyndon French for The New York Times“I’m just a private person. I’ve always been just kind of quiet. And so when all this kind of came out, I was just, it felt like everything had been stripped from me,” Wade said anxiously, but with a touch of resentment. “And then too, your orientation, your sexuality, all that is just being discussed online by random people that don’t even know. It’s heartbreaking.”Sparr encouraged Wade to get offline, and to treat her relationship with social media “with a similar urgency and with a similar seriousness that she did with sobriety.”But Wade also had, depending on your perspective, either an ace up her sleeve, or a liter of gasoline about to spill onto the fire. In June, she had filmed a video for “Fall in Love With Me,” the cheeriest and poppiest song on “Psychopath.” The video features a slowly unfolding romantic rapport in a shiny “Desperate Housewives”-ish exurb between Wade, depicted in tight workout gear, and an infatuated neighbor, who watches longingly from a window in the house next door.The neighbor is played by Richards.It was inspired, in part, by avid Housewives fans who had already been speculating about their friendship online. “There was already a little bit of Reddit fodder — I call it fan fiction — about Kyle and Morgan,” before any of the “TMZ stuff happened,” Sparr said.The clip is playful, cheeky, a welcome blast of good mischief. “I’ve actually, my entire life, weaseled my way out of kissing someone on camera,” Richards said. Even though there’s a strategic millimeter between their mouths in the video’s most steamy moments, “This is the closest I’ve ever gotten, and it’s, spicy enough, I guess, that I would consider that breaking that streak.”The power of the video, far beyond the tabloid tease, is the conventional frankness with which it depicts same-sex attraction. Coming from an artist signed to a Nashville major label, it is deeply striking.“There was never any pushback from the label,” Sparr said. “But the greater feeling of everyone I talked to was like, I can’t believe you guys are going to pull this off.”There, again, is Wade’s discipline at work, steadily walking a path few before her have tried, emphasizing the representational value of the video while also toying with the story, real or imaginary, of her and Richards’s bond. And having been on the receiving end of scrutiny for the last several weeks, Wade has finally emerged on the other side, emboldened.“I don’t know why we’re in this day and time where we have to speculate about people’s sexuality,” she said, emphatically. “That is not appropriate at all. Like, let anybody be what they want to be — it’s none of your damn business.”She has more pressing things in front of her — an ultramarathon in November, just a couple of weeks before she is scheduled to undergo a double mastectomy (following a positive test for a BRCA mutation, a genetic risk for breast cancer). And she has already written a dozen songs for her next album.“Back to basics,” she said of the challenge of articulating the new, post-spotlight version of herself. “Taking elements of who I used to be and those core fundamental things and finding out like, Hmm. What I believed then and thought then, that part of me doesn’t exist anymore.” But, she added, there are some things “that I’m going to keep that didn’t die.” More

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      This Netflix Anime Uses Alt-History to Explore Gender Norms

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      “Ōoku: The Inner Chambers” tells a complex love story in an alternate-reality Edo Japan in which an illness upends gender roles.Gender is a trap. The binary is a lie. And flexible sexual politics can lead to real change.That’s some of the subtext in the fascinating Netflix anime series “Ōoku: The Inner Chambers,” which tells a complex love story in an alternate-reality Edo Japan in which an illness upends society’s gender norms and expectations.The show’s story, adapted from a popular manga that also spawned several live-action series and movies in Japan, is framed as a historical record of how this alt-Japan and the shogunate came to be.When the shogun, the last male heir to the Tokugawa clan, dies from an aggressive strain of smallpox that targets young men, he is secretly replaced by an illegitimate daughter, Iemitsu, who is taken to the palace and raised as a man. (Iemitsu is based on the real-life shogun of the Tokugawa clan with the same name; “Ōoku” cleverly builds up its world from select real historical characters and events.)As the male population dwindles and the economy fails, Iemitsu lives a life secluded in the palace with the ōoku, or the “inner chambers,” where thousands of beautiful men live as concubines for her. Forced to present herself as a man, Iemitsu grows into a brutal, violent misogynist. And although Iemitsu wants to live her life as a woman, she also resents her body; a few years into her reign, she is a victim of sexual assault, and a subsequent miscarriage debilitates her with rage and grief. She struggles to find her place within the limitations of the gender binary. Her manhood and womanhood are never in service to her understanding of her own identity; whether she’s passing as a male ruler or having a child to secure the Tokugawa bloodline, her actions must always be in service to the shogunate.Then a handsome monk, Arikoto, is abducted and forced to forsake his sacred vows so he can become the groom of Iemitsu’s bedchamber. Arikoto eventually becomes content with his lifetime sentence in the ōoku and falls in love with Iemitsu, who softens under Arikoto’s patient affections.Abduction, coercion, abuse, assault: Arikoto and Iemitsu’s romance isn’t exactly a Hallmark love story. Arikoto is not the traditional gallant prince; he is deeply dedicated to his life of chastity and charity until that life is upended and his spirit is broken in the ōoku. Nor is Iemitsu the lovely damsel; she’s embittered by the ways her station has dictated how she must see and use her body.But the most affecting moment in the love story between her and Arikoto is when they realize their love for each other while both in drag. Iemitsu doles out gendered punishments to the men around her: She gives the grooms of the ōoku women’s names and demands they dress up as women for her entertainment. But when she sees Arikoto, who isn’t shamed but instead embraces his femininity while dressed as a beautiful woman, she is dazzled by his fairness and grace. They hold each other, him as a woman and her as a man. The difference between their gender expression and biological identity is irrelevant; they are two people who have come to an understanding based not on gender but on love.What could have easily been a more traditional love story is instead an intriguing look at how two people are forced to negotiate their ideals, their identity, their politics, their relationships — sexual and platonic — and their position in a government hierarchy as the expectations of them as man and woman, as consort and shogun, bear down on them.The show also ventures beyond the ōoku to depict how different strata of society respond to the decreasing male population. Women adjust to being the workers and breadwinners. Lords who have lost their sons to the epidemic force their daughters to pass as their male heirs but then resent them for learning, perhaps even enjoying, stereotypically masculine activities like horseback riding and swordsmanship. The remaining young men, considered too valuable and fragile to work, are expected to stay home and lounge. For money they may prostitute themselves to women desperate to be impregnated.At first the series seems to be leading us in the direction of a completely gender-swapped society, but in one episode the voice-over narration declares outright: “It wasn’t that the status of men and women was reversed. To be precise, men ceased to do anything besides father children. Including child-rearing and house chores, all the labor in the world was placed on women’s shoulders.”So even though the shogun is a woman, she is still surrounded by advisers who are men. Though women keep the economy afloat with their labors and the realm going with their child-rearing, the men retain their titles and social superiority, reaping society’s rewards even as they are rendered impotent in every non-procreative sense of the word.“Ōoku” isn’t so fantastical that it completely sloughs off the ways gender and sex dictate how individuals live in a society, often for bad. Antiquated notions of gender roles are so entrenched, the show suggests, that society is determined to preserve them even as they become less and less feasible.So perhaps “Ōoku” can just serve as a thought exercise, particularly for Americans right now, as transgender rights and women’s rights are under threat: What might it look like when we decide our notions of gender no longer serve us? That may be the real love story waiting to happen. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: The Weeknd in Concert and ‘Praise Petey’

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      HBO airs the concert filmed in Los Angeles and the animated Freeform show wraps up its first season.Between 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, Aug. 14-20. Details and times are subject to change.MondayLaurence Olivier and Greer Garson in “Pride and Prejudice.”Everett CollectionPRIDE AND PREJUDICE (1940) 4 p.m. on TCM. Before we were introduced to Colin Firth or Matthew Macfadyen as the moody but endlessly charming Mr. Darcy, there was Laurence Olivier in the role. The story, based on the novel by Jane Austen, follows the Bennet family, who are excited by the prospect of two wealthy and eligible bachelors coming to town. Upon meeting, Elizabeth Bennet (Greer Garson) and Mr. Darcy fall into one of the most memorable enemies-to-lovers arcs of all time.TuesdayTHE LOVE EXPERIMENT 10 p.m. on MTV. If the many dating reality shows that already exist (see: “Love Island,” “Love is Blind,” “The Ultimatum,” “Are You the One?” “Bachelor in Paradise”) don’t tickle your fancy, MTV has a new one. This show is as if you were in a dating app and all the men are actually ready for relationships: the three best friends Marcia, Paige, and Tamara (who are in their 20s and 30s) are put inside a “dating utopia” where they go on dates, test compatibility and do some challenges to try to find their lifelong partners.WednesdayGORDON RAMSAY’S FOOD STARS 9 p.m. on Fox. On this show you can’t just be good at cooking — you also have to be an entrepreneur in the making. As this season wraps up, the three final contestants compete for Gordon Ramsay to make a personal $250,000 investment. Who knows, the person who wins this season could also have six restaurants in Las Vegas, just like Ramsay himself.TEMPTATION ISLAND: SECRETS REVEALED 9 p.m. on USA. Just like “Love Island” has its unseen bits episode or how “Big Brother” lets you watch livestreams inside of the house even when episodes aren’t airing, “Temptation Island” is releasing their own version of that. The finale of the fifth season will air later in August, but before that happens, they are showing bloopers and some interesting moments that happened between couples that were left out of the final edit of the show.Saycon Sengbloh in “The Wonder Years.”ABC/Matt MillerTHE WONDER YEARS 9:30 p.m. on ABC. This remake of the 1980s sitcom about a Black middle-class family in Montgomery, Ala., is wrapping up its second season this week. In the hour long finale, there is a birthday celebration, a trip to Florida and some classic family squabbles.ThursdayTHE WEEKND: LIVE AT SOFI STADIUM (2023) 8 p.m. on HBO. On Netflix you can throw on Taylor Swift’s “Reputation” tour. On Disney+, you can watch the BTS “Permission to Dance” concert. And now, The Weeknd has joined the ranks of many artists to come before him who have released televised versions of their concerts. Filmed in Los Angeles in November 2022, his set includes a pretty intense light show and performances of some of his most famous songs.FridayA still from “Praise Petey.”FreeformPRAISE PETEY 10 p.m. on Freeform. This show could be “Schitt’s Creek” in an alternate, cartoon universe. In this show, Petey learns that she has inherited a small town from her dead father, but it turns out he is still alive and running a cult in the town. The kicker is that both shows star Annie Murphy. The cartoon is wrapping up its first season and has not yet been renewed for a second.Saturday50 FIRST DATES (2004) 6:30 p.m. on TBS. Set in Hawaii, this movie follows Henry (Adam Sandler), a marine veterinarian, as he tries to woo Lucy (Drew Barrymore) every day. The problem? Lucy has short-term memory loss and relives every day over and over, which obviously makes it hard for Henry who has to reintroduce himself to her every single day. The movie is a comedy but a Psychology Today article points out that it is a pretty realistic interpretation of a condition called “anterograde amnesia.”HER NAME WAS GRACE KELLY 7 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Grace Kelly captured the attention of the world as she lived what seemed to be a real life fairy tale: After starring in popular films, she married Prince Rainier III and became the Princess of Monaco. A car accident in 1982 took her life, but she has remained in the public’s imagination ever since. This documentary features archival footage and home videos of Kelly, with tapes going back to three years old.BRIDESMAIDS (2011) 8 p.m. on Bravo. “I’m ready to party with the best of them” is what Annie (Kristen Wiig) says after she takes an Ambien and a glass of whiskey on the plane ride to the bachelorette party of her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph), before wreaking absolute havoc on the flight. (I say the same thing every time I watch this movie.) The story follows Annie as she reaches emotional rock bottom, all while trying to support her childhood best friend during her pre-wedding festivities. The plot almost takes a back seat to the amazing chemistry between Wiig and Rudolph.SundayFROZEN MARATHON 4:35 p.m. on Freeform. As we settle into the mid-August heat, I wouldn’t hate a trip to Arendelle. If you want to be transported to Elsa’s frozen land full of amazingly catchy songs, sisterly drama and, more important, sisterly love, you can catch both FROZEN (2013) and FROZEN II (2019) back to back on Freeform. More

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      Baratunde Thurston Eats His Feelings (With Ice Cream)

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      The host and executive producer of “America Outdoors With Baratunde Thurston” talks about revolutionary librarians, vibe-setting music and the city he thinks is underestimated.The writer and cultural critic Baratunde Thurston wasn’t exactly a shoo-in for the PBS nature series that now bears his name.“I was known for race and technology and comedy,” he said in a video interview from his home in Los Angeles. “I had been at ‘The Daily Show.’ I was a very progressive political pot stirrer on the internet.”Still, Thurston — who hikes and surfs and still remembers his Boy Scout knots — was like, “Yo, they’re trying to have a Black person host a show about the outdoors,” he said. “I’ve never seen that show.”“America Outdoors With Baratunde Thurston” begins its second season on Sept. 6, and while there’s plenty of flora, fauna and water to behold, the focus is on the people who live, work and play in it. And Thurston gets to tag along: swimming and jet skiing on the Suwannee River in Georgia and Florida, riding with cowboys in Oregon, harvesting ice in Maine, even turkey hunting in New Mexico.Not that he bagged anything. “I think the turkeys got a memo that there was a newbie out on the hills,” he said while elaborating on Black men’s support groups and the healing powers of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams. “They weren’t trying to go out in a blaze of videotaped glory.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Public LibrariesLibrarians are heroes, and libraries are some of our last truly democratic public spaces, literally open to all. I first encountered the ferocious power that is a librarian in the early 2000s. With the Patriot Act and surveillance, librarians were on the forefront of fighting for our liberties.2Jeni’s Ice CreamThe Blackout Chocolate Cake flavor, oh my God. It’s chocolate within chocolate within chocolate. It makes me go a little crazy because you can’t just have a scoop. But if you’re feeling like maybe your society is tending toward fascism, Jeni’s ice cream can help you process that feeling.3Hydro FlaskI’m deeply committed to my water bottle. I can’t be having four-ounce, plastic, single-use bottles. If I check into a hotel and they don’t have a refilling station, I’m like, “Just so you know, I judge places based on this.”4Kings CornerOur culture doesn’t have many spaces for men to be vulnerable out loud or with each other. And for Black men, at times it can be even tougher. We carry a lot. And some of what we carry that is overly burdensome is the image of us that’s been promoted throughout the world: that we are always tough, that we are violent, that we can’t show emotion. Kings Corner is a safe space for us to check in with each other, to hold ourselves high and hold ourselves accountable. We have cried so much.5Being in WaterEvery Thanksgiving we would go to a body of water — the Chesapeake Bay, the Outer Banks, the eastern shore of Maryland. When my mom was dying in Portland, Ore., my sister and I took her out to Astoria Beach as the kind of last hurrah. Every time I’m near the ocean, I have to touch it.6Lofi Study BeatsLofi has emerged as the Muzak of now. To take old-school hip-hop and slow it down or to remix things — it’s about vibe setting. There’s one I watch that’s like, what if 1990s hip-hop stars all hung out together in a diner? It’s got Tupac and Biggie and Nas all chilling. It helps me open up when I’m in a creative space.7CompostingComposting is cocktails with soil and dirt and leaves and grass — you make a mix and you get something delicious out of it. Composting takes allegedly useless things and turns them into useful things. That action becomes symbolic when you apply it to human beings.8Old FashionedsIt is not my first experience of a cocktail, but it’s the first experience that made me say, “Oh. Yeah.” It blew my mind when I learned you could make an old fashioned with rye, as is classic, or bourbon or scotch or gin or tequila or rum. Just spirit plus sugar and bitter. That’s it. People muddling cherries in them are committing a sacrilege.9Washington, D.C.It is so much more than the seat of the federal government. Despite economic development and gentrification and displacement, it’s still a very Black city. There is a texture to D.C. — to the architecture, to the physical layout, to the fashion, to the street names and signs. It loves New Balance to a totally unreasonable degree and has go-go music that has never really achieved escape velocity from the planet of D.C. No one in Los Angeles has ever or will ever rock go-go music, and that makes it even more special.10adrienne maree brownShe is this extraordinarily intelligent and experienced political organizer, and she is spiritually aware and developed and enlightened. She appreciates the power of rest and self-care in the midst of a struggle. She reminds me of my mother. More

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      ‘Big Brother’ Expels Luke Valentine For Using Racial Slur

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      “Well, I’m in trouble now,” Luke Valentine said after using a slur for Black people in a conversation on the reality show.“Big Brother,” CBS’s long-running reality competition, has kicked off a contestant for using a racial slur.The contestant, Luke Valentine, used a slur for Black people this week while chatting with other men in the compound where houseguests are filmed 24 hours a day as they compete for a large cash prize. Valentine is white, and one of the other men in the conversation is Black.The incident, broadcast during the show’s live online feed, was addressed on Thursday night’s episode, in which highlights from the feed are interspersed with contestants’ reflections on recent events in the house.“It’s been an emotional 24 hours in the ‘Big Brother’ house as the houseguests learned that one of their own broke the ‘Big Brother’ code of conduct and was removed from the game,” the show’s longtime host, Julie Chen Moonves, said during the episode.After Valentine, an illustrator from Florida, used the slur, he immediately apologized to the three other men in the room and tried to backtrack. Clearly shocked, two of the men quickly left. Jared Fields, who is Black, mostly stayed quiet but responded to Valentine by saying that the slur can make white people more uncomfortable than Black people.“Well, I’m in trouble now,” Valentine said to Fields.In an interview aired on Thursday’s episode, Fields said: “My nonreaction in the moment, being the only Black male in this house, I don’t know what to say. Anything I say or do can come across wrong or aggressive.”“I don’t associate ignorance with malice,” he later added.On an Instagram account that is followed by verified accounts of other “Big Brother” contestants, Valentine posted an apology to his story, along with a photo of himself and a prayer hands emoji. “Luke made a big mistake,” it read, “please forgive him.”Andy Herren, the show’s Season 15 winner, said CBS did the right thing by expelling Valentine. “YEARS of problematic behavior and language in the Big Brother house going unpunished led to fans and former houseguests speaking up,” Herren posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. He added, “This is huge and will change things moving forward!”“Big Brother,” now in its 25th season, has a history of racism among its contestants.In 2019, shortly before winning Season 21, Jackson Michie was asked on live television to answer for accusations that some of his behavior during the season had been racist and sexist. He defended himself in the moment but later apologized, admitting blame. Aaryn Gries, a Season 15 contestant, was questioned by Chen Moonves after being filmed making racist and homophobic remarks.Black contestants have also struggled to advance on “Big Brother,” often getting voted out early. The show’s first Black winner, Xavier Prather, was not crowned until Season 23. The next season featured the show’s first Black female winner, Taylor Hale.“It was something I was cognizant of,” Prather told The New York Times this year. “I am a 6-2, 200-pound athletic Black man — I can’t approach the game the same way that a slim, 5-10 white man can, because we’re perceived differently.”“To assume that I could approach the game the same way would be to assume that I could approach life the same way,” he continued. “‘Big Brother’ is literally a reflection of our society.”Calum Marsh More