Beautiful, strong-willed, and temperamental, Elizabeth Taylor spent nearly seven decades in the public eye. Nanette Burstein, co-director of The Kid Stays in the Picture, builds this new documentary around a set of unreleased recordings made by Taylor in 1964 for a ghostwritten memoir, pairing segments with dazzling images and clips from Taylor’s life and career. The result is a comprehensive and enchanting portrait of a 20th-century icon. Saturday, Aug. 3, Max.

by Anne Applebaum

"Autocracy, Inc. is deeply disturbing; it couldn't be anything else," said John Simpson in The Guardian. Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum, who won a Pulitzer for her 2003 book on Soviet gulags, is warning us now that corrupt tyrants around the globe have recently learned to work in concert to undermine liberal democracies everywhere. Vladimir Putin has been so good at spreading lies about moral corruption in the West that other despots are imitating him. Xi Jinping is meanwhile modeling how to use intermediaries such as Dubai to control weak countries that are up for sale. Little else binds together players such as Russia, China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Hungary besides their leaders' focus on enriching themselves and shared belief that liberal democracy is the enemy. Because Applebaum understands the threat so well, her "clear-eyed and fearless" précis proves "a lively pleasure to read." 

"Anti-democratic strongmen have rarely had it so good," said Romesh Ratnesar in Air Mail, and Applebaum exposes the misdeeds of many of them. At the same time, she's "unsparing in her criticism of Western elites for enabling the rise of antidemocratic forces." She displays "particular contempt" for Bill Clinton and other U.S. leaders who argued that the world's despots would be toppled by new information technologies rather than use them to expand their power. But she also highlights how U.S. and U.K. financial institutions enabled the spread of autocracy by helping corrupt regimes launder their riches, whether through investments in Donald Trump's condos or in humbler properties spread across America's heartland. "By the end of Autocracy, Inc., it's hard not to be resigned to a future in which sinister forces increasingly dictate events." 

"To her credit," Applebaum has recognized a major shortcoming of the neoliberalist creed she once espoused, said Sam Adler-Bell in The New York Times. "Globalization did work, only not how she and her friends assumed it would," strengthening tyrants rather than freedom. But while she offers "concrete and admirable" ideas about how to reform the financial system to thwart kleptocrats, she's somewhat blind to the corrupt behavior of certain longtime U.S. allies and, "in her zeal to connect the enemies of the free world," makes a few wild, unbacked claims that "make it harder for her readers to see the world clearly." Some readers may at least be thankful that she still sees the U.S. as the leader of the free world. Unfortunately, "it's a smaller world than it used to be."

The comedy legend who was the king of deadpan

Bob Newhart was no one's idea of a stand-up comedian. He came along just as old-school vaudeville patter was giving way to edgier, politically aware material, but he fit neither style. Instead, the balding, soft-spoken former accountant was the calm in the comic storm: a befuddled everyman enduring wacky situations. That was his persona in his chart-topping 1960 debut album of one-sided conversations. In one bit, a commander of a nuclear submarine gingerly addresses his crew: "Uh, looking back on the mutiny..." And it was his role in his two hit sitcoms, The Bob Newhart Show (1972–78) and Newhart (1982–90). His fidelity to the character was absolute. When one TV producer asked him to make his delivery smoother, he replied: "This stammer got me a home in Beverly Hills, and I'm not about to change it."

The son of a Chicago-area plumbing supplier, George Robert Newhart "never dreamed of being in show business," said The Hollywood Reporter. But after Army service and a stint in accounting, he found himself in a boring advertising job and began improvising absurdist phone calls. He sent tapes of the routines to radio stations and landed his first nightclub gig in Houston in 1960. Recorded and released as The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, it sold 1.5 million copies and became the first spoken-word record to win Album of the Year at the Grammys. Newhart then "transitioned quickly and easily into television," said The New York Times, becoming a frequent variety-show guest and, in 1972, starring as befuddled psychologist Dr. Bob Hartley in The Bob Newhart Show, which co-starred Suzanne Pleshette. He then played a Vermont innkeeper in Newhart for eight years, a show that produced "one of the greatest finales in television history" when his character wakes up in bed next to Pleshette after being clocked by a golf ball and says he just had a dream he was an innkeeper.

"Newhart worked nearly to the end of his life," said the Chicago Tribune. A recurring role as Professor Proton in The Big Bang Theory earned him his first Emmy in 2013, and he "continued to perform 20-some stand-up gigs a year" well into his 80s. "As long as you're able to physically do it, I can't imagine ever not doing it," he said in 2018. "Why would anyone say, 'You know, I'm really tired of making people laugh?'"