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      What Is … an Editing Game Show?

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      The newsroom recently hosted an internal game show to quiz editors on grammar rules and Times style. It was educational, exciting and all-around geeky.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.The clue appeared on a large blue screen: “In news writing, this punctuation mark is rarely needed except in quotations of shouted or deeply emotional phrases.”A buzzer went off and an editor answered: What is an exclamation point?“Yes!” Peter Blair responded. (The exclamation point is appropriate here. Mr. Blair did indeed shout.)“Reporters in the room,” he added, “take notice.”Perhaps Mr. Blair was excited because he was fulfilling something of a childhood dream by hosting a game show in the newsroom, to test contestants on their knowledge of The Times’s Manual of Style and Usage.The manual, known in the newsroom as the stylebook, helps journalists keep track of grammar rules and Times style. Entries cover guidance on punctuation and semantics, but also offer instruction around The Times’s specific practices, such as the paper’s stance on courtesy titles and how numbers should be rendered in headlines.The game was in the style of “Jeopardy!,” with categories such as “Quirks of The Times” and “Punctuation!” The contestants, the editors Danial Adkison, Christine Chun and Danielle Dowling, sat near the front of the room, buzzers in hand, and three other editors sat across from them, serving as the judges.No real money was wagered; on the line were Starbucks gift cards.Nonetheless, the pressure was on. The room was packed with a live audience, and about 170 Times staff members were watching the show via livestream.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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      ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ Is a Brutal but Poetic War Drama

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      Starring Jacob Elordi, this often agonizing series takes on life’s biggest questions, about the mind and the heart, human suffering and transcendence.Jacob Elordi stars in the brutalizing five-part Australian mini-series “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” available on Amazon Prime Video. The show is based on the novel by Richard Flanagan and combines a sweetly doomed romance, a layered domestic drama and a harrowing World War II tale.Elordi is terrific as Dorrigo, a young aspiring doctor heading off to war. Before he is deployed, he has a doting girlfriend, Ella (Olivia DeJonge), but he falls hard for his uncle’s young wife, Amy (Odessa Young), and it’s their taboo love that he visits in his mind during the darkest experiences of his life. Dorrigo is one of thousands of Commonwealth soldiers taken prisoner in the jungles of Thailand, where Japanese soldiers starve and torture them, work them to death, behead some, beat others for hours on end.We also see Dorrigo in the 1980s, now played by Ciaran Hinds; he’s a successful surgeon and a comfortable philanderer. He is haunted and hollowed-out in some ways, of course, but he has a life, a practice, and now a book of a fellow prisoner’s paintings is coming out, and he has been asked to speak about it.Each episode bounces around in time, and for once, split timelines come as a huge relief. The jungle scenes are agonizing, even by prestige-misery standards, and you, too, long to retreat, with Dorrigo, into sunny memory.Dorrigo is a poetry buff, and poems are woven into the whole show, as are painting and music, these expressions of humanity that surface during circumstances both mundane and depraved. A jolly woman plays tunes in bar; a skeletal soldier sings “The Prisoner’s Song” as he lies among his dysentery-stricken companions. The show depicts a dizzying variety of suffering, but it is also generous with its pity. There’s a visceral quality to most scenes — the clammy humidity, the golden warmth of a sandy beach, the icy sterility of a gray office — as the show teases out the pains and pleasures of the body along with its grander ideas about the mind, the heart, the world, war.“Narrow” is patient, but it isn’t slow. It is also sometimes so illegibly dark that I resorted to turning on the audio descriptions. More

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      ‘The Four Seasons’ Review: Tepid Trouble in Middle-Aged Paradise

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      In this Netflix series created by Tina Fey, among others, old friends contend with the fallout from a surprising breakup.“The Four Seasons” follows three couples on four vacations, two episodes per trip. Everyone is thinking about his or her middle-aged ennui and the routines — ruts? — of marriage, what companionship and friendship and sex look like in this chapter and the next.The show is based on a 1981 movie with the same premise, written and directed by Alan Alda, who also starred. (He has a brief cameo here.) This Netflix version was created by Tina Fey, Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield, with Fey and Will Forte as Kate and Jack, the roles played originally by Carol Burnett and Alda. Their friend group is filled out by Steve Carell, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani, and the series’s plot is similar but not identical to that of the movie. The biggest change is that the prickly, talky humor and depth have been sanded down into mild, featherweight Netflix chow.“The Four Seasons,” which arrived on Thursday, is pleasant enough, but it never shakes the fact that most people would rather listen to the cast than the characters. Such talent; such humor; such icons! Anyway, here’s a show where all of those lights are under a bushel basket.In the first outing, everyone is at a lake house for the 25th wedding anniversary of Anne and Nick (Kenney-Silver and Carell). After a night of toasting one another and congratulating themselves on finding their soul mates, Nick shocks the guys by telling them that he plans to leave Anne. He isn’t happy, and she’s too stagnant.Every marriage goes through phases when the spouses feel more like roommates than romantic partners, Jack says.“I wish we were roommates,” Nick says. “Roommates hang out together. There’s porn about roommates. We’re like co-workers at a nuclear facility: We sit in the same room all night monitoring different screens.”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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      ‘The Eternaut’ Review: Netflix Gives a Genre Classic New Life

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      An archetypal Argentine sci-fi graphic novel comes to the screen seven decades after its debut.One true thing to say about Netflix’s perfectly decent alien-invasion series “The Eternaut”: It’s not bad, but you really should read the book first. If you can find a copy, that is.I discovered “El Eternauta,” a bit of pulp perfection published as a comic strip in Argentina beginning in 1957, when Fantagraphics Books put it out as a deluxe graphic novel in 2015 (the first time it was translated into English). The beautifully packaged volume cost $50, so I got mine from the library.Jump to this year, when Netflix announced its live-action “Eternaut” adaptation and I went looking for the book again. Already out of print, it was now $350 a copy from online resellers. And in a no doubt related development, the New York Public Library no longer had any on its shelves.(A Fantagraphics representative said that a reissue is being considered but no decision has been made.) English-only readers unwilling to drop $350 for a used copy are out of luck.That scarcity is surely a sign of the hold “El Eternauta” can exert on eager imaginations. Written by Héctor Germán Oesterheld with artwork by Francisco Solano López, the comic takes place in a Buenos Aires hit by a sudden, mysterious snowfall that kills people on contact, dropping them where they stand. Some friends gathered for a card game survive, holed up in their host’s house, and gradually devise ways to go out into the snow to obtain supplies and increasingly alarming information.Oesterheld’s ingenuity and Solano López’s deceptively simple, darkly expressive drawing and shading produce a science-fiction horror tale of rare distinctiveness. As the survivors venture out and scramble back, the images oscillate between nervous claustrophobia and eerie, wide-open desolation; between the overly familiar and the radically strange. In the underwater breathing gear the heroes adapt into survival suits, they look like divers slowly navigating a dry, deadly sea.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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      How ‘Government Cheese’ Creates a Dream World in the Valley

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      Set in late 1960s California, this magical realist comedy takes place in a fanciful, aesthetically distinctive world that reflects the spirit of its characters.In a scene early in the Apple TV+ period comedy “Government Cheese,” the show’s Chambers family watches an episode of “The Addams Family” in which a neighbor remarks, “Addamses, you are kooks!”The sentiment applies to both clans, as well as to the family upon which the Chambers are based: that of Paul Hunter, a creator and showrunner of “Government Cheese.”“They called us odd,” Hunter said in a video interview from Mexico City. “They said, ‘Oh, you guys are always in the clouds. Do you know what’s going on?’ We knew what was going on. We just really were in our own world.”Set in the late 1960s San Fernando Valley, “Government Cheese” follows the Chambers, a Black family pursuing idiosyncratic interests — inventions, pole vaulting, eagle feather hunting — with little concern for the realities of the outside world. (The title, taken from the processed foodstuff once distributed to low-income families, also refers to the delicious sandwiches Hampton’s mother made from it, and to the sense of invention and aspiration they embodied.)Matthew J. Lloyd, the show’s cinematographer, called the Chambers family — the parents, Hampton (David Oyelowo) and Astoria (Simone Missick), and sons, Einstein (Evan Ellison) and Harrison (Jahi Di’Allo Winston) — and their adventures a “fable-ized version” of Hunter’s upbringing. Magical, fantastical things happen to Hampton, in particular, and the audience is asked to believe them.From left, Jahi Di’Allo Winston, Oyelowo, Simone Missick and Evan Ellison in “Government Cheese,” based on the family of Paul Hunter, one of the creators.Apple TV+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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      Seth Meyers Recaps Trump’s Latest Revisionist History

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      Meyers said the president’s ABC News interview “changed his mind” about Trump’s first 100 days in office.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.Revisionist Recent HistoryPresident Donald Trump sat down for an interview with the ABC News reporter Terry Moran to discuss his first 100 days in office.“And you know what? He changed my mind,” Seth Meyers said on Wednesday.“Before the interview, I thought the first 100 days had been really bad, but after the interview, I thought, ‘Oh, I see the plan, the next 100 days are going to make the first 100 days look amazing.’” — SETH MEYERS“Trump claimed that egg prices are down, gasoline is down, and groceries are down. Then a staffer said, ‘Sir, those charts are your approval rating.’” — JIMMY FALLON“[Imitating Trump] I mean, what kind of an interview is this? I thought you were going to ask me if 100 men could beat a gorilla, not about the tariffs. I don’t know about the tariffs.” — JIMMY FALLON“Trump said that the Declaration of Independence meant unity. Unity is the opposite of independence. How did Trump find the one time that ‘unity and love’ is the wrong answer?” — DESI LYDIC“What makes this even more sad is that the Declaration of Independence is basically the colonies filing for divorce. It’s the one thing Trump should absolutely recognize. And all of that was supposed to be the softball part of the interview.” — DESI LYDICThe Punchiest Punchlines (Shrinkage Edition)“Meanwhile, it just came out today that for the first three months of this year, the U.S. economy shrank. Trump was, like, ‘Well, it was the three coldest months — of course it was shrinkage.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Yes, the U.S. economy is undergoing what economists refer to as a ‘George Costanza.’” — DESI LYDIC“Now, obviously, the economy is a complex interaction of multiple markets, so it’s difficult to point to any one factor, but it’s all Trump.” — DESI LYDIC“A hundred days in, we’re already going to loan sharks for Lunchables with this guy.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“All the experts say the economy is in pretty rough shape. However, Trump’s doctor says it’s the healthiest economy he’s ever seen.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingSpoofing Bill Belichick’s recent CBS interview, Richard Kind introduced his new girlfriend on Wednesday’s “Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightPenn Badgley, the star of the Netflix series “You,” will appear on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutPhoto Illustration by The New York Times; Background: Brian Rea; Inset: Dana Scruggs for The New York TimesOn this week’s Modern Love, Miranda July discussed her plot to get older women talking about desire with her novel, “All Fours.” More

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      ‘Andor’ Season 2, Episodes 4-6 Recap: The Revolution Will Be Televised

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      This week’s trio of episodes includes visceral kicks while digging into the meat of the new season’s plot and themes.Season 2, Episodes 4-6Last week’s set of “Andor” episodes opened with a thrilling star-fighter chase and ended with a daring rescue, but otherwise the action was noticeably light. Yes, “Andor” is an imaginatively designed and richly detailed drama, filled with political intrigue. But it is also supposed to be a “Star Wars” show, with blasters, stormtroopers and narrow escapes. Season 2’s first arc, while mostly great, leaned more toward soap opera than space opera.This week’s trio of episodes brings back the visceral genre kicks, with more cloak-and-dagger and cat-and-mouse. It also digs deeply into the meat of this season’s plot and themes.Even more than last week, this particular three-part arc has been thoughtfully broken down into TV episodes rather than feeling like a movie roughly snapped into three segments. The first episode is all stage-setting, introducing the main plot, which involves the Empire’s appalling treatment of the planet Ghorman and Luthen’s attempt to lend aid to the Ghor. The second episode is a slick and stylish spy thriller, as Cassian assesses Ghorman’s rebels by going undercover as the fashionista Varian Sky (complete with snazzy clothes and a stylish mullet).The third episode is one of the most exciting of the series so far, cutting between two Luthen operations: one on Ghorman and another on Coruscant. While the Ghor rebels are hijacking an imperial supply vehicle — in order to reveal to the galaxy that the Empire is lying about its intentions for the planet — Kleya is at a fancy party, trying to remove one of her listening devices from an antique artifact in an aristocrat’s personal gallery. This is white-knuckle, edge-of-the seat stuff.I want to start, though, with an odd subplot that runs through just the first two episodes and at times seems out of place, until its electrifying ending. The story involves Wilmon, who is on D’Qar, helping the militant rebel Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) by teaching one of his soldiers, Pulti (Marc Rissmann), how to operate a complicated piece of tech. Ultimately, the strongman Saw kills Pulti (who turns out to be a traitor) and orders Wilmon to join him on a mission, to operate the big machine himself.Saw gives a rousing speech (made more effective by Whitaker’s whispery rasp) about how he grew up as a child laborer, breathing in toxic starship fumes. He encourages Wilmon to toss off his protective gear and huff some fumes himself. He says revolution is not for the sane, given that they will all be dead before a new republic is established. But with this insanity comes a kind of freedom.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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      Late Night Grades Trump’s First 100 Days in Office

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      “It’s been an historic 100 days — some would say prehistoric,” said Jimmy Kimmel.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.100 Down, Roughly 1,300 to GoPresident Trump’s 100th day in office was the talk of late night on Tuesday.On “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” the host said (perhaps not sincerely) that he’d had “a day of revelry and jubilation.”“We have 100 days behind us and only 13 more hundred days to go. It’s been an historic 100 days — some would say prehistoric.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Today was President Trump’s 100th day in office. Well, 100th day as president, fourth day in office.” — SETH MEYERS“Yes, it has been 100 days of Trump in the Oval Office. I mean that figuratively. Obviously, he spent lots of those days in the steam room at Mar-a-Lago.” — JORDAN KLEPPER“It is difficult to give Trump’s first 100 days a grade, but if I had to, I’d say it falls somewhere between ‘F’ and ‘U.’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Let’s be honest: It’s been a bumpy ride. I mean, who knew renaming the Gulf of Mexico might actually be his high point?” — JIMMY FALLON“To mark 100 days in office, Trump kicked off a multiday media blitz that the White House is framing as a victory lap. Yep, and now all he needs is a victory.” — JIMMY FALLON“And the whole 100 days thing started back in 1933, right, when F.D.R.’s extraordinary productivity set a first-100-days standard against which all future presidents would be measured. And I think it’s appropriate to compare him to F.D.R., because Trump is well on his way to bringing back polio.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Mark Carney Edition)“With Carney’s victory, Canadians rejected his younger, much Trumpier opponent, Pierre Poilievre, which must be a relief for Trump, ’cause now he never has to try to say that guy’s name.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Don’t mess with Canada. They may be polite. You tick them off, they’re like John Wick after they killed his dog.” — JIMMY KIMMEL”You take that, Trump. That’s what happens when you mess with a country whose national pastime is ‘bar fight on ice.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But, yes, thanks to Trump, the Liberal Party just pulled off a historic comeback, winning all the major Canadian demographics: hockey moms, hockey dads, hockey non-binaries, hockey seniors, hockey hockey players, and, of course, hot Ryans.” — JORDAN KLEPPERThe Bits Worth WatchingWill Ferrell and Stephen Colbert “Rickrolled” viewers during Tuesday’s “Late Show.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightJohn Cale and Maggie Rogers will perform together on “Everybody’s Live With Mulaney.”Also, Check This OutNearly three hours long, the concert was a characteristic Beyoncé epic.The New York TimesBeyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour, kicking off on Monday night in Inglewood, Calif., transformed the star’s personal and musical reclamation into a joyful extravaganza. More