History hasn't minted many mothers more cynical than Mary Villiers, at least the one depicted here, in this raucous, raunchy new British series. Julianne Moore digs into the role of the 17th-century English countess, who grooms her handsome second son, George, to be a boy toy to the sexually ravenous King James I. As the scheme takes hold, the family's fortunes rise, and Mary goes to vicious lengths to defend their new standing. Nicholas Galitzine co-stars. Friday, April 5, at 9 p.m., Starz.

by Jonathan Haidt

"There's no doubt that young people today are in the throes of a mental health crisis unprecedented in scope and severity," said Judith Warner in The Washington Post. As Jonathan Haidt points out in his hit new book, depression among teenage girls rose 145 percent between 2010 and 2021. Depression among boys rose even faster. But Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University who's best known for co-authoring 2018's The Coddling of the American Mind, has picked up "a cadre of haters" as he's turned his focus to stirring alarm about smartphones and social media — to the point that he now argues without qualification that they are the cause of the adolescent mental health crisis. "With that one tricky word, 'cause,' he opens himself up to what's likely to be a world of pain." 

There's rising bipartisan agreement, however, that Haidt's argument is correct, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. He's "pushing on an open door" with his important new book, which calls for government action but focuses on persuading parents to prevent children under 13 from using smartphones and barring teens under 16 from social media. Already it was clear that the rise of these technologies best explain the sharp, sustained rise in teenage anxiety, depression, and suicide since 2012. Even the rise in teenage depression recorded during the isolation of the early Covid years looks less like its own spike than a slight intensification of the longer trend. In The Anxious Generation, "the studies Haidt cites — as well as the ones he debunks — should put to bed the notion that concern over kids and phones is just a modern moral panic akin to previous generations' hand-wringing over comic books and television." 

Haidt describes what technology has done to childhood as "the great rewiring," and that's not his only line that will stick with you, said Meghan Cox Gurdon in The Wall Street Journal. "In words that chill the parental heart, he writes that giving smartphones to young people en masse constitutes 'the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children.'" Clearly, "the experiment has been a disaster." The average teenager now devotes five hours a day to social media and an immeasurable amount of consciousness to the work of gaining online peer acceptance and avoiding online peer shaming. At least Haidt makes reform feel within parents' reach. That makes The Anxious Generation "a bitter read but also a galvanizing one."

The actor who specialized in offbeat lowlifes

Critic Roger Ebert called the actor M. Emmet Walsh "the poet of sleaze." With his paunchy build, receding hairline, fleshy face, and piercing eyes, Walsh was best known for playing unsavory, off-kilter characters, amassing more than 200 film credits over a six-decade career. Walsh was Dustin Hoffman's sleazy parole officer in Straight Time (1978), a maniacal sniper firing at Steve Martin ("Die, milkface!") in The Jerk (1979), and Nicolas Cage's chatty, gum-smacking machine-shop co-worker in Raising Arizona (1987). He was perhaps best known for playing a crooked private detective hired to catch a cheating spouse in the Coen brothers' Blood Simple (1984). His ability to shine in small roles led to Ebert's "Stanton-Walsh Rule" — that no movie "can be altogether bad" that features Walsh or Harry Dean Stanton. "People go and try to become the next Pacino," said Walsh. "I had to figure out who I was, and what I could do that no one else could do." 

Walsh grew up in rural Vermont, where his father, grandfather, and uncle worked as customs agents on the Quebec border, said The Guardian. He studied business administration at Clarkson University, "but enjoyed acting in university productions," and at the urging of his faculty adviser moved to New York after graduation. He spent a decade doing regional theater, then in 1969 began earning small movie roles, including one as an "overheated drill sergeant" in Arthur Penn's Alice's Restaurant. He got a boost when cast in Straight Time, earning favorable notice and catching the eye of aspiring auteurs Joel and Ethan Coen, who were writing their first feature script. "Blood Simple marked a turning point" for Walsh, said The Hollywood Reporter. The low-budget black comedy won Sundance's grand jury prize, and Walsh's chilling performance earned wide praise. "Suddenly, my price went up five times," he said. 

Walsh's "voracious appetite for roles of every genre" continued through his 70s and 80s, said The Washington Post. He did regional theater, performed dozens of TV roles, and played an elderly security guard in the comic mystery Knives Out (2019). A self-described "low-profile guy" who lived alone in rural Vermont, Walsh acknowledged he'd been in plenty of productions that were "not all Hamlet." But he disavowed none of it. "The parts are all your children," he said in 1989. "They'll be my epitaph when they throw in that last shovelful of dirt."