In 1997, 14-year-old Reena Virk was bullied and murdered by a group of fellow teenagers at a late-night gathering on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island. In this new limited series, Riley Keough and Oscar nominee Lily Gladstone co-star as a writer who returns to town to investigate the crime and a local police officer who’s also determined to resolve how the girls who bullied Virk could go so far. Keough portrays Rebecca Godfrey, whose book about the crime is the basis of the series. Wednesday, April 17, Hulu.

by Annie Jacobsen

Reading Annie Jacobsen's vivid new bestseller about how a nuclear conflict could play out, "it is possible to quibble with details," said The Economist. Would North Korea ever really take the suicidal step of targeting the U.S. with a nuclear missile launch? Would a U.S. president, even with a policy in place that calls for retaliation as soon as an enemy's nuclear launch is detected, actually escalate, knowing the consequences? But Jacobsen, a journalist who's already written several books on the U.S. military, interviewed dozens of experts to master the details of how such a conflict might play out, and the account she provides in Nuclear War: A Scenario is "at once methodical and vivid," conveying the reality of nuclear war in "sometimes stomach-churning detail." 

Chillingly, Jacobsen's world-ending scenario "could occur at any moment," said Josh Weiss in Forbes. In her "almost novel-like" account, North Korea strikes the Pentagon with a 1-megaton bomb that kills a million people in two minutes. Before the bomb even lands, a U.S. counterstrike is launched, and Russia misreads the intent because of a faulty detection system and targets the U.S. and Europe's capitals with more than 1,000 missiles. When those bombs land, "tens of thousands of years of progress are vaporized." Half a billion people die, some turned instantly to ash, and survivors who don't die later from radiation sickness face social chaos and a nuclear winter that makes food impossible to grow in the northern hemisphere. Because any number of triggering events could lead to such horrors, "Nuclear War: A Scenario should be required reading for everyone alive." 

As terrifying as Jacobsen's scenario is, it's also "somehow familiar," said Arthur Herman in The Wall Street Journal. Authors and Hollywood directors have imagined nuclear Armageddon before. Jacobsen's book, according to a recent report, will itself be adapted into a movie by Denis Villeneuve, director of the Dune blockbusters. But let's not assume that because nuclear annihilation is possible that the world is destined to fall into it. After all, the existence of several large nuclear arsenals has thus far successfully served as a deterrent to nuclear conflict. "History tells us that all weapons are subject to obsolescence, from the longbow to the battleship. The nuclear bomb is an exception so far, but who knows?" Until a new technology somehow renders nuclear bombs outmoded, "we may not like them, but we can't do without them."

The pot smoker who inspired John Lennon

With his long hair, mustache, and round glasses, poet and activist John Sinclair was the face of the effort to legalize pot. Sentenced to a decade in prison in 1969 for offering two marijuana cigarettes to an undercover cop, Sinclair became a cause célèbre in the counterculture movement. A 1971 protest concert for him in Detroit drew more than 15,000 people — including John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who took the stage at 3 a.m. to sing their new anthem: "It ain't fair, John Sinclair...let him be, set him free." Within days, the Michigan Supreme Court released him on bond and eventually overturned the verdict, ruling that he'd been entrapped. But he called his incarceration "the best thing that's ever happened to me," saying "it exposes the fascists who put me here." 

Born in Flint, Mich., to an autoworker father and teacher mother, Sinclair earned a literature degree at the University of Michigan but was expelled from a graduate program, he said later, for "being a dope fiend." Instead, he became a "troubadour of youth rebellion," said the Detroit Free Press, "gleefully proclaiming the joys of rock' n' roll, drugs, and sex in the streets." He managed the proto-punk rock band MC5, ran an alternative newspaper called Guerilla, and co-founded an anti-racist political group, the White Panther Party. All that activism attracted the attention of the Feds: In 1968, he was illegally wiretapped and charged with plotting to bomb a CIA office. The Supreme Court later threw out that case. 

After he was freed from prison, Sinclair generated a "huge body of work in the form of books and recorded poems and essays," said The Detroit News. These writings crackled with anarchic spirit, with lines like "The pig-death machine is anti-life by definition." Sinclair also "kept a toehold in the world of music," said The Washington Post. He helped establish the Detroit Artists Workshop and Detroit Jazz Center, taught blues history at Detroit's Wayne State University, and performed his spoken-word poetry with a backing band. And he never lost his love of pot — he was one of the first at the dispensary after Michigan legalized marijuana in 2018. When someone standing in line near him said things seemed to have come full circle, Sinclair replied: "It would be more full if they came and gave me back the weed that they took."