The gods are getting restless in this fantastical and funny update of Greek myth. Jeff Goldblum stars as a tracksuit-wearing Zeus who rules from a gilded mansion high on Mount Olympus but has become paranoid that his power is slipping away as he ages. He’s not wrong. The humans are unhappy, and an old friend is planning a revolt. With Janet McTeer as Zeus’ wife, Hera, Nabhaan Rizwan as Dionysus, and Stephen Dillane as Prometheus.  Thursday, Aug. 29, Netflix

by Nate Silver

Although professional gambling can sometimes seem like an oddball occupation, said Tim Wu in The New York Times, “the decision-making methods of the professional gambler have spread to encompass a wide swath of human activities.” In Nate Silver’s “engaging and entertaining new book,” the founder of the political forecasting website FiveThirtyEight offers a tour of the corners of contemporary America where probabilistic thinking rules. The statistician argues that venture capitalists, cryptocurrency investors, and semiprofessional poker players like himself belong to a tribe that is often winning big as its mode of risk-friendly decisionmaking transforms the economy. In general, Silver celebrates the ways of his tribe. But part of what makes On the Edge worth reading is that it presents, in the end, “an unsympathetic vision of capitalism’s future, one in which the spoils disproportionately belong to those who understand risk.”

On the Edge, as it’s structured, is “really two books mashed into one,” said Sam Freedman in The Times (U.K.). In the first half, Silver focuses on poker dens, casinos, and online betting sites to explain the odds at play in various games and how the pros make good bets. “If you, like me, find gambling irresistible, then this section of the book is utterly compelling,” with “colorful eccentrics” populating anecdotes that make the statistical insights easier to absorb. After a “wholly unnecessary” interlude in which he spells out 13 habits of successful risk takers, Silver then turns to Silicon Valley, home to a breed of risk taker whose bets have a greater effect on us all. While Peter Thiel and Elon Musk make appearances, the focus is on crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, whose flawed gambler’s psychology led to a downfall. 

“In its flibbertigibbet way,” On the Edge then “swerves to large gambling-adjacent matters,” said Steven Poole in The Guardian. Silver eventually weighs in on nuclear deterrence, game theory, effective altruism, and the promise and threat of artificial intelligence. When he talks to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, he doesn’t accept Altman’s entire pro-AI pitch, but nor does he ever entertain the idea that “gambling might be, for some people or for the culture as a whole, a wellspring of toxicity.” It may be that he’s simply too much a member of the tribe. “At one point, Silver describes himself as ‘someone who has been around plenty of smart nerds who didn’t know their own limitations.’ Has he ever asked himself whether he’s one of them, too?”

The talk-show host who unleashed the audience

Phil Donahue invented a new TV genre almost by accident. On the 1967 day when he taped his first talk show for a local station in Dayton, Ohio, a variety show had just been canceled. Donahue proposed letting that show’s audience watch his taping and soon progressed to letting audience members ask questions. As it gained national reach, The Phil Donahue Show became a ratings powerhouse with a format that held steady for 29 years: a single guest holding forth on political and social issues while the silver-haired host prowled the aisles with a microphone, pulling audience members into the discussion. Donahue discussed AIDS and abusive priests; he hosted Nelson Mandela and six U.S. presidents. But it wasn’t all highbrow— he also featured orgy enthusiasts and lesbian go-go dancers and once donned a dress for a show on cross-dressing. Donahue, who paved the way for both the relatable Oprah Winfrey and the trashy Jerry Springer, made no apologies for straddling the serious and the salacious. “This is a medium that rewards popularity,” he said in 1984. “Besides, it doesn’t do any good to talk if nobody’s listening.” 

Donahue grew up in Cleveland in a middle-class Irish Catholic family, said the Los Angeles Times, though he “later rebelled against and left the Catholic Church.” He earned a degree in business administration from the University of Notre Dame, where he worked as an assistant at a university radio station. He then took a series of jobs in radio and TV, serving as a news reader and street reporter; eventually, he became a morning news anchor at a station in Dayton, then host of an afternoon talk radio show. His big break came when a rival Dayton station, WLWD, recruited him “to repackage his call-in program for local TV,” said USA Today. 

From the start, the show “dispensed with familiar trappings,” said The New York Times. There was no monologue, no band, “just the host and the guest, focused on a single topic.” While chatting with audience members on breaks, Donahue found that some “asked sharper questions than he did,” so he began to make them part of the show. Drawn to controversial subject matter—his first guest was a reviled atheist activist who’d fought school prayer—he asked “questions that were deliberately provocative, sometimes to the point of shamelessness.” Syndicated in 1970, the show moved to Chicago and later New York, and was reaching 9 million views by 1979, said the Associated Press. As its popularity grew, “a stop on Donahue became a must for important politicians, activists, athletes, business leaders, and entertainers.” When he interviewed actress Marlo Thomas in 1977, it was love at first sight, and the two “did a poor job of hiding it.” Donahue gushed, “You are really wonderful,” while Thomas answered, “You like women, and it’s a pleasure, and whoever the woman in your life is, is very lucky.” The two soon married. 

Donahue’s overt feminism and rapport with women, who made up the overwhelming majority of his audience, were “key to his appeal,” said Variety. But by the mid-1990s, he “had become a victim of his own success.” Tawdrier shows ate into his ratings, even as he amped up the sensationalism to compete, while Oprah, his chief rival, “diluted his female base.” With viewership dwindling, Donahue retired in 1996 after more than 6,000 shows. He briefly returned in 2002 with a talk show on MSNBC, but it was canceled after six months; the outspoken liberal claimed that was due to his opposition to the Iraq War. Donahue went on to write and produce a documentary, Body of War, about a paralyzed veteran and to host a podcast about marriage with Thomas. In May, he was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Biden. Donahue left behind his own proposed epitaph: “Here lies Phil. Occasionally he went too far.”