Welcome back, Vince Vaughn. The motormouthed actor returns to form as the star of this new comic crime series about a suspended Miami police detective who sees his chance to redeem himself when fishing tourists reel in a human arm. As in the 2013 Carl Hiaasen best-seller the show is based on, our hero's off-the-books investigation soon puts him in contact with some of South Florida's strangest characters, including an incorrigible monkey. Wednesday, Aug. 14, Apple TV+.

"It's like 2016 all over again," said Tracy Moore in Vanity Fair. JD Vance's memoir from that year, Hillbilly Elegy, is once again selling by the palette-load. And once again it is generating dozens of essays about why the people of Appalachia appear to be mired in poverty and what kind of spokesman they have in the book's author, who is now Donald Trump's running mate. As a person who grew up poor in rural Appalachia myself, it angers me that the region "never fails to stoke the liberal intellectual's sense of superiority." Liberal commentators were more than happy in 2016 to accept Vance's contention that too many of his family members and neighbors were lazy and looking to blame others for their troubles. But those same critics are not unjustified today in mocking Vance, who remains, as he was in 2016, "among the cruelest manifestations of bootstrapper I've come across."

When Hillbilly Elegy appeared, said Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post, Vance self-identified as an anti-Trump Republican, and his book was "hailed as a nuanced explanation for Trump's otherwise baffling allure." The author had escaped whatever was holding his neighbors back: After joining the Marines, he earned a law degree at Yale and, by 31, was a married, successful Silicon Valley executive. "At its core," his memoir was "a standard-issue conservative screed," celebrating his own rise while blaming his neighbors for what he labeled their "learned helplessness." But for people who wonder why Vance now blames white poverty on open borders and government scheming, "the signs of his eventual pivot were legible all along." Both versions of Vance doubt that traditional politics has any answers. What's new is that he now champions more authoritarian solutions. 

Since entering politics, Vance has "shamelessly jettisoned" all the qualities that made Hillbilly Elegy "one of the best books I read in 2016," said Laura Miller in Slate. The memoir remains admirable, particularly for its "brutal honesty" about the self-defeating features of hillbilly culture. Alas, in Vance's subsequent career as a U.S. senator and national candidate, "all complexity has disappeared from his rhetoric," replaced by "peacocking certainty" that he and Trump are the answer to all problems. Not that Vance's liberal critics have better answers, said Ron Currie in The Hill. Though he will prove himself "a base opportunist" every time he tells rural white Americans this fall to resent progressive elites for looking down on them and offering them too little reason for hope, "he will not be wrong."

The officer who led the My Lai massacre

Little about Lt. William Calley suggested he would make history as an Army officer. Fellow soldiers described him as an insecure leader who struggled to read a map. But Calley earned infamy on March 16, 1968, when he led some 100 soldiers into a South Vietnamese village to confront enemy fighters supposedly ensconced there. When they found unarmed villagers instead, Calley and his men slaughtered hundreds in a spree that became known as the My Lai massacre. They gang-raped women, bayoneted children, burned huts; they herded sobbing families into ditches and shot them as they pleaded for their lives. After the atrocities came to light, Calley was the only person convicted. He said he was simply following orders — and being made the scapegoat for a war in which horrors were commonplace. "The government couldn't say, 'Oh, that's how it is in Vietnam,'" he wrote. "It had to tell everyone, 'A mad killer did it.'"

Calley was born in Miami, where his Navy veteran father sold building equipment, said The Telegraph (U.K.). A poor student in high school, he left junior college after failing most of his courses and worked as a bellhop, dishwasher, and railroad switchman before enlisting in the Army. He was admitted for officer training despite low scores on aptitude tests and deployed to Vietnam in 1967. While Calley's immediate superiors knew the basic outline of what happened at My Lai, the atrocity "was covered up in military reports," said The New York Times. It took dogged efforts by a few soldier whistleblowers and investigative journalist Seymour Hersh for "the story to reach a stunned world" 18 months after the fact.

At the trial, witnesses recounted seeing Calley shoot a praying monk and a 2-year-old boy, said the Los Angeles Times. Convicted of murdering 22 civilians, he was given a life sentence. But after intervention from President Richard Nixon — who was bombarded with citizens' complaints that Calley had been unfairly singled out — he served only three days, then was released to house arrest. After being paroled in 1974, he moved to Ohio and worked in a jewelry shop, for years refusing "countless requests for interviews." In 2009, he finally broke his silence to speak to a local Kiwanis Club. "There is not a day that goes by when I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai," he said. "I am very sorry."