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What’s happening now? Members of the Lyons family try to catch up. (Image: via HBO.)

Other than saying that Years and Years is a relatively new show on HBO, co-produced with the BBC, it’s hard to know what to call it. For now, I’ll just call it a near-future drama.

The first episode—which aired in the U.S. at the end of June, though I saw it only a couple of days ago—takes us neatly, in its opening section, from something like the present to a few years in the future. It places in the foregro...

Lately it’s become common to remark on the togetherness effect of humankind’s first moon landing. A good example comes from :

Yesterday’s 50th anniversary…was a fleeting chance…for the country to rally around something that was exciting and important, brought us together, and ultimately produced the biggest single historic moment ever.��

I’m pausing to honor this moment because they’re so rare, outside the Olympics. The last truly unifying national moment was the tra...

Henrik Ibsen, during a period in which he kept a scorpion in a glass on his desk (somehow it seems perfect that Ibsen would keep a scorpion on his desk), noticed that the insect would sometimes become agitated. If he dropped a small piece of fruit in the glass, the scorpion would sting it and then settle down. The conclusion, drawn either by Ibsen in a journal or by the biographer who reported this, was that an occasional discharge of venom helps restore one’s equanimity, or something to that...

Decisions: it’s what’s for breakfast. (Screencap via Netflix)

Much of what we’ve seen in previous releases of Black Mirror, an anthology series offered by Netflix, is supposed to make us uncomfortable and does. In “Nosedive,�� the eagerness of the central character to participate in a social-ranking system that seems destined to slap her down becomes more and more distressing to watch. In “Metalhead,�� our anxiety grows as we watch a woman trying to evade what seems at first to be a very persis...

In a private forum on the Authors Guild website, a contributor recently posted a link to bearing the provocative headline “New York Should Say No to Amazon.�� The op-ed began by reminding readers, “This week, to set up a major operation in Long Island City, Queens�� (the link is in the original), and it went on to subject Amazon itself as well as its possible New York expansion to withering criticism. The f...

The 9/24/18 issue of The New Yorker contains by John Lahr, called “Showman�� in the printed edition. It reports this, which I had never noticed:

Much to his union’s chagrin, Mendes refuses to benefit from the hard-fought battle for “possessory credit”—you won’t find “A film by Sam Mendes�� in the credits for any of his movies. A film, he said, “is written by someone else, shot by someone else. It’s not all me. It’s because of me.��

That comes off as a...

One: During the confirmation hearings for the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, disagreements arose over what would seem to be basic facts, such as whether Kavanaugh assaulted Christine Blasey Ford at a party or whether Kavanaugh even attended a party where Ford was present. One thing that’s important to keep in mind while wrestling with questions of what really happened and what it means is that memory can be an unreliable witness. It’s possible that Ford and Kavanaug...

This blog has been on vacation. If I had a greater sense of responsibility, I would’ve hung a sign over the image at the top of the landing page saying, “Gone fission—back sooner or later,�� but making that look right would’ve taken some work, which is just what I’ve been trying to avoid lately. Are we still on vacation? The Magic 8 Ball prognosticator says, “Ask again later.�� Meanwhile, there’s this.

Over the weekend I found myself thinking of how R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe gave a shout-out...

Killer looks: Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys as Elizabeth and Philip Jennings in a somewhat stylized promotional image for The Americans. (Photo: via FX)

The Americans, an FX drama about two undercover Soviet agents living with their two children near Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, is hurtling toward the conclusion of its sixth and final season. Though it has always kept its hand in the action and intrigue of the spy game, its recent seasons have become more moody, brooding, punctuated with a...

Not the farmer’s daughter anymore: Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) in Season 1, Episode 5, of Westworld. (Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO)

In 1973, a movie called Westworld, written and directed by Michael Crichton, was released. It’s easy to say what it was about: two visitors to an Old West amusement park that’s mostly populated by androids are terrorized by a robot gunslinger run amok. It was straightforward, so simple as to seem nearly crude now, and nearly mindless (in comparison to the sophistica...