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      Book Review: ‘The Rulebreaker,’ by Susan Page

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      In “The Rulebreaker,” Susan Page pays tribute to a pioneering journalist who survived being both a punchline and an icon.THE RULEBREAKER: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters, by Susan PageMuch of the material in “The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters” has been told before, with persuasive narrative control, by the late television journalist herself in her dishy 2008 memoir, “Audition.” Don’t let that stop the reader of this thorough, compassionate biography by Susan Page: It’s a valuable document, sobering where “Audition” aimed for sassy.If anything, the 16 long years between autobiography and biography endow the two books, taken together, with a memento mori gravitas for any student of Walters, or of television journalism, or of the past, present and future of women in the TV workplace — or, for that matter, of Monica Lewinsky. More on her in a moment.Walters called her autobiography “Audition” to emphasize the need she always felt to prove herself, pushing her way to professional success in a world that never made it easy for her. Nearly 80 then and still in the game, she acknowledged that personal contentment — love, marriage, meaningful family connections — lagged far behind. She wrote of being the daughter of an erratic father, who bounced — sometimes suicidally — between flush times and financial failure as a nightclub owner and impresario.She told of her fearful mother, and of the mentally disabled older sister to whose welfare she felt yoked. She wrote of the three unsatisfying marriages, and of her strained relationship with the daughter she adopted as an infant.She breezily acknowledged the ease she felt throughout her life with complicated men of elastic ethics like Roy Cohn and Donald Trump. She leaned into her reputation as a “pushy cookie.”Page, the Washington bureau chief of USA Today, who has also written books about Barbara Bush and Nancy Pelosi, tells many of the same stories. (“Audition” is an outsize presence in the endnotes.) But in placing the emphasis on all the rule-breaking Barbara Jill Walters had to do over her long life — she died in 2022 at 93 — the biographer pays respect to a toughness easy to undervalue today, when the collective memory may see only the well-connected woman with the instantly recognizable (thanks to Gilda Radner’s “SNL” impression) speech impediment.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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      What’s on TV This Week: N.F.L. Draft and ‘Bridget Jones’ Marathon

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      Football players get their chance to play in the national league. HBO airs all three movies staring Renée Zellweger.For TV viewers who still haven’t cut the cord, here is a selection of cable and network shows, movies and specials broadcasting Monday through Sunday, April 22-28. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE SYNANON FIX 9 p.m. on HBO. In 1958, Synanon opened their doors in California as drug rehabilitation center. But the center started using a kind of attack therapy, in which patients are verbally abused and degraded in front of a group, and several members were later charged with child abuse, assault and attempted murder. This documentary series, which had its premiere at Sundance this year, is airing its fourth and final episode this week.TuesdayTHE EXPRESS WAY WITH DULÉ HILL 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). In each of the four episodes of this documentary series, the actor Dulé Hill speaks to people across the country who are making art in nontraditional ways. In the first episode, Hill heads to California to meet a deaf dancer, a gay Mariachi and a cabaret group of senior citizens. The other episodes take place in Appalachia, Texas and Chicago.Anna Sawai in “Shogun.”Katie Yu/FXSHOGUN 10 p.m. on FX. This mini series, based on the 1980s NBC show and book of the same name, is wrapping up. In an interview with The New York Times, Anna Sawai, who plays Lady Mariko on the show, said that the “the last two episodes are very special” and that “the men have been physically fighting. The women are fighting their own battles.”WednesdayAMERICAN HORROR STORY: DELICATE 10 p.m. on FX. The last few episodes of the 12th season of this Ryan Murphy anthology has followed the fallout of Anna (Emma Roberts) losing a Golden Globe and Siobhan (Kim Kardashian) perhaps killing off her competition. Will Anna get all she has dreamed about? Will Siobhan face any consequences to her actions? This season finale will bring answers.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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      Climate Doom Is Out. ‘Apocalyptic Optimism’ Is In.

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      The philanthropist Kathryn Murdoch has prioritized donations to environmental causes for more than a decade. She has, she said, a deep understanding of how inhospitable the planet will become if climate change is not addressed. And she and her colleagues have spent years trying to communicate that.“We have been screaming,” she said. “But screaming only gets you so far.”This was on a morning in early spring. Murdoch and Ari Wallach, an author, producer and self-proclaimed futurist, had just released their new PBS docuseries, “A Brief History of the Future,” and had hopped onto a video call to promote it — politely, no screaming required. Shot cinematically, in some never-ending golden hour, the six-episode show follows Wallach around the world as he meets with scientists, activists and the occasional artist and athlete, all of whom are optimistic about the future. An episode might include a visit to a floating village or a conversation about artificial intelligence with the musician Grimes. In one sequence, marine biologists lovingly restore a rehabbed coral polyp to a reef. The mood throughout is mellow, hopeful, even dreamy. Which is deliberate.“There’s room for screaming,” Wallach said. “And there’s room for dreaming.”“A Brief History of the Future” joins some recent books and shows that offer a rosier vision of what a world in the throes — or just past the throes — of global catastrophe might look like. Climate optimism as opposed to climate fatalism.Hannah Ritchie’s “Not the End of the World: How We Can be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet” argues that many markers of disaster are less bad than the public imagines (deforestation, overfishing) or easily solvable (plastics in the oceans). In “Fallout,” the television adaptation of the popular video game that recently debuted on Amazon Prime Video, the apocalypse (nuclear, not climate-related) makes for a devastated earth, sundry mutants and plenty of goofy, kitschy fun — apocalypse lite.“Life as We Know It (Can Be),” a book by Bill Weir, CNN’s chief climate correspondent, that is structured as a series of letters to his son, centers on human potential and resilience. And Dana R. Fisher’s “Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action” contends that the disruptions of climate change may finally create a mass movement that will lead to better global outcomes. Fisher, a sociologist, coined the term “apocalyptic optimism” to describe a belief that humans can still avoid the worst ravages of climate change.In confronting the apocalypse, these works all insist that hope matters. They believe that optimism, however qualified or hard-won, may be what finally moves us to action. While Americans are less likely than their counterparts in the developed world to appreciate the threats that climate change poses, recent polls show that a significant majority of Americans now agree that climate change is real and a smaller majority agree that it is human-caused and harmful. And yet almost no expert believes that we are doing enough — in terms of technology, legislation or political pressure — to alleviate those harms.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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      ‘Catfish,’ the TV Show That Predicted America’s Disorienting Digital Future

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      MTVThis is Danny. He fell in love with a woman he’d met online. When he saw her photo, he called it love at first sight.He and Rosa talked on the phone daily for months and exchanged reams of texts in Spanglish. They bonded over being Puerto Rican.“You’re so funny, Daddy,” she once texted him. “You’re so sexy, my love,” Danny replied. Though they’d never met, he was making big plans: marriage and family.When the red flags started to pile up, Danny contacted “Catfish,” on MTV, for help. The truth was far from what he’d hoped. Rosa was secretly Jose.The TV Show That Predicted America’s Lonely, Disorienting Digital FutureSince its first episode aired in 2012, “Catfish: The TV Show” has held up a mirror to our online lives, reflecting how we present ourselves and make sense of love, lust, trust, companionship and loneliness in an increasingly digital world. Each episode unfolds like a detective show, with the host Nev Schulman summoned to untangle truth from lies, to take relationships that exist only on computers and phones and drag them into our three-dimensional reality.Listen to this article with reporter commentaryThe saga of Danny and Jose, which aired in 2017, is emblematic of the deception, dashed hopes and complicated situations regularly featured on the show.Danny contacted “Catfish” for help, believing Rosa had moved from Connecticut to Orlando, where he lived, but still would not meet him. Rosa had warned Danny that she had anger issues, in part because she had been molested as a child. When meeting with Schulman and his co-host Max Joseph, Danny said he wanted to help her by bringing more faith into her life. “I think I could make her a better person,” he said. “We plan to have a family.”In their research, Schulman and Joseph quickly discovered the so-called mask, meaning the unwitting person whose photos had been sent to Danny: a woman named Natalie. But Rosa’s real identity was harder to pin down. “This is the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me,” Danny said when shown the evidence. “I never had anybody send me fake pictures.”Schulman called Rosa to inform her that Danny was now aware she’d lied about the photos. Though combative, she agreed to meet in Connecticut. It became clear that she had never moved.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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      Original ‘Star Trek’ Enterprise Model From Opening Credits Is Found

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      The 33-inch model surfaced on eBay after disappearing around 1979. An auction house is giving it to the son of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of “Star Trek.”The first model of the U.S.S. Enterprise, the starship that appeared in the opening credits of the original “Star Trek” television series, has been returned to Eugene Roddenberry Jr., the son of the creator of the series, decades after it went missing.“After a long journey, she’s home,” Mr. Roddenberry wrote on social media on Thursday.For die-hard Trekkies, the model’s disappearance had become the subject of folklore, so an eBay listing last fall, with a starting bid of $1,000, didn’t go unnoticed.“Red alert,” someone in an online costume and prop-making forum wrote, linking to the listing.Mr. Roddenberry’s father, Gene Roddenberry, created the television series, which first aired in 1966 and ran for three seasons. It spawned numerous spinoffs, several films and a franchise that has included conventions and legions of devoted fans with an avid interest in memorabilia.The seller of the model was bombarded with inquiries and quickly took the listing down.Joe Maddalena, left, the executive vice president of Heritage Auctions, and Eugene Roddenberry, the son of “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry.Josh David Jordan/Heritage Auctions, via Associated PressThe seller contacted Heritage Auctions to authenticate it, the auction house’s executive vice president, Joe Maddalena, said on Saturday. As soon as the seller, who said he had found it in a storage unit, brought it to the auction house’s office in Beverly Hills, Calif., Mr. Maddalena said he knew it was real.“That’s when I reached out to Rod to say, ‘We’ve got this. This is it,’” he said, adding that the model was being transferred to Mr. Roddenberry.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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      Riley Keough and Lily Gladstone Discuss ‘Under the Bridge’

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      In a joint interview, the actors discuss “Under the Bridge,” their new true-crime series based on a teenager’s brutal killing in British Columbia.“We’ve been teenage girls,” Lily Gladstone said. Which means that Gladstone and her co-star, Riley Keough, know what teenage girls can do.In “Under the Bridge,” a limited series now streaming on Hulu, Keough and Gladstone play a writer and a cop investigating the 1997 beating and murder of Reena Virk, a 14-year-old Indo-Canadian girl. Six teenage girls and one teenage boy, many of them Virk’s classmates, were eventually convicted.The case has inspired plays, poems, documentaries and several books, including Rebecca Godfrey’s 2005 literary nonfiction work “Under the Bridge,” which gives the series its shape and name. (The show also relies on a memoir by Virk’s father, Manjit Virk.) Though Godfrey died in 2022, before filming began, she worked closely with the show’s creator, Quinn Shephard, on its development. Keough, who also produced the series, plays a version of Godfrey. Gladstone plays Cam, an invented character, a Native law enforcement officer who was adopted as a child by a white family.While “Under the Bridge” centers these women as adults, it includes scenes of the same characters as teenagers, drawing lines between the girls they were and the women they are.Earlier this month, Keough, who was filming in London, and Gladstone, who was in Seattle, met for a video call. In an hourlong chat, they discussed girlhood, violence and making a true-crime series that sidesteps sensationalism. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What were you like as teenagers?LILY GLADSTONE Whenever I meet anybody from high school, “Oh my God, you’re the same person” is pretty much what I hear. That version of Lily really built the foundation for who I am now. She had this sense of where she wanted to go. She cracks me up a little bit. Riley, I get the sense that you had a lot of energy, though I don’t want to say you were ever too much to handle because you don’t really have that vibe.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 Mocks Republicans for Trying to Oust Their Speaker

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      “Being the speaker of the House nowadays is like being Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend — you hang on as long as you can,” Jimmy Kimmel said.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.Not Right EnoughThe Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is facing significant backlash from conservatives after pushing to advance an aid package for Ukraine.“Somehow Mike Johnson, a man who called Planned Parenthood part of an ‘American holocaust,’ isn’t right-wing enough for these people,” Jimmy Kimmel said on Thursday.“They formed what they call a ‘Floor Action Response Team’ or F-A-R-T for short. So, you know these are very serious people.’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Being the speaker of the House nowadays is like being Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend — you hang on as long as you can.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Mike Johnson — a climate change-denying, homophobic religious fanatic — knows that getting Ukraine these weapons is the right thing to do and even though his party is terrified of Jell-O Putin-lover Trump, he’s doing it anyway, and that’s why they’re going to destroy him. They can’t have that! If they let him do the right thing on Ukraine, he might do the right thing on other stuff. It’s a very slippery slope.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Jury Duty Edition)“They had a really productive day today. Matter of fact, right before I came out here to do the show, we learned that a full jury has now been picked for Donald Trump’s New York trial. Plus, one alternate has been seated, too. So 13 — also known as a Stormy dozen.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Each prospective juror had to answer questions about what they think about Trump, which meant he had to sit there and listen to comments like this one, from a woman who said — she said, ‘I wouldn’t believe Trump if his tongue were notarized.’ You know, that woman — she did not get picked as a juror, but I would like to hire her as a writer if she’s interested.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Juror No. 2 told the judge that people in her life had figured out she’d been selected and then had started to try to influence her. That frustrated Judge Merchan, who admonished the press for reporting juror descriptions and gave this example: ‘There was really no need to mention that one of the jurors had an Irish accent.’ That’s true — that little detail allowed me to positively identify him as the Lucky Charms guy. [imitating Lucky Charms leprechaun] ‘They’re after me home address!’” — STEPHEN COLBERTWe 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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      What to Watch This Weekend: ‘The Jinx’ Is Back

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      HBO’s “The Jinx — Part Two” offers six more episodes detailing the stranger-than-fiction saga of Robert Durst.Robert Durst, as seen in prison footage in “The Jinx — Part Two.”HBOWhen “The Jinx” premiered in 2015, it was one of the pillars of the new true-crime wave — high-end but sufficiently lurid, with soap-opera twists but also documentary legitimacy. In the absence of criminal justice, maybe entertainment justice could suffice.Now the director Andrew Jarecki is back with “The Jinx — Part Two,” six more episodes detailing the stranger-than-fiction saga of the real estate scion and convicted murderer Robert Durst. (Only the first four episodes were made available for review. Hmm!) This “Jinx” isn’t just about Durst, though; it’s a “Jinx” about “The Jinx,” folding the story back in on itself yet again, additional layers of narratives and truths and maybe-truths, all getting rolled out together as delicious, buttery true-crime dough.The first episode, which airs Sunday at 10 p.m. on HBO, includes footage of dozens of people connected to the case all gathering to watch the original finale together. That was indeed a shocking episode of television, with Durst’s hot-mic bathroom confession as its astounding yet fitting conclusion. (The filmmakers later faced criticism for significantly editing Durst’s remarks, but maintained that the edits were representative of what he said.) The reaction scene plays out not with churning pathos but instead like TikToks of people watching Ned Stark meet his surprising fate or videos of fans in a sports bar groaning in unison. Even subjects of “The Jinx” experience it as a show, as fandom of one’s own life.Over and over, this “Jinx” includes people discussing original “Jinx.” Some describe it directly to Jarecki in interviews, or they mention it in recorded phone calls Durst made from prison, or they say on the witness stand that they watched the show, that they learned details of the case from TV. Actual courthouse footage blends together with hazy re-creation images, and we hear real audio but over fake visuals. And as the show turns its attention to Durst’s long-delayed trial, “The Jinx” takes on a behind-the-scenes quality as much as a true-crime one.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