Peter Dinklage. Josh Brolin. Glenn Close. Brendan Fraser. Marisa Tomei. You’d watch that cast in anything, right? How about a violent, raunchy caper rich with laughs? Brolin and Dinklage play twin brothers (yes, you read that right) whose prior thieving ended with a bust that sent one to prison. The ex-con talks his brother into risking one last heist, but family tensions could derail the scheme. Thursday, Oct. 17, Prime.

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

“What stands out most about The Message is who wrote it,” said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of America’s most celebrated public intellectuals, has returned to nonfiction, and “the rolling, elegiac cadences of much of his earlier work have yielded to a fury that’s harder-edged.” His new best-seller is “several things at once.” Coates includes an exhortation to journalism students as well as reports from a symbolic former slave-trading site in Senegal and from South Carolina, where a local school temporarily banned his award-winning 2015 book about being Black in America. “But all of this is a prelude to the last half of The Message, which is the part bound to attract the most attention”: Coates’ reflection on a 10-day trip he took last summer to East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank, which he compares to the Jim Crow South. 

“Beneath the essay’s unremitting argument runs a set of powerful emotional forces,” said Daniel Bergner in The Atlantic. Having previously accepted others’ framing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as immensely complex, Coates confesses to being ashamed when he visits Israel and sees how obvious it is that Palestinians are oppressed in a way that mirrors the experience of Black Americans in the segregation era. But despite his success in providing a “harrowing” list of injustices committed against Palestinians, “the more relentless Coates becomes in his prosecution of Israel, the more he loses his way.” The oppression he describes can only be understood in the context of Palestinian leaders’ ongoing endorsement of wiping Israel from the map, and their serial failures across decades to accept a two-state solution for sharing the region’s land. Coates doesn’t even note that context, and his “staggering” omission of any mention of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack and the subsequent war proves he’s more committed to the purity of his argument than to moral truth. 

To expect a more comprehensive political argument from The Message is to misunderstand it, said Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post. In reality, “it’s an inward-looking book that has been aggressively mischaracterized as something more polemical.” Much of it is a meditation on the relationship between aesthetics and politics that disappoints in its own way, because “it is disjointed, heavy-handed, and frequently clichéd.” As for the book’s Israel section, don’t expect it to be a paradigm-shifting argument, said Constance Grady in Vox. “What Coates is trying to capture, more than anything, is the experience of being an ordinary Palestinian living in Israel under the vicious disdain of the state. In that, he succeeds. The Message is haunting. It gets under your skin.”

The baseball great who was banned for betting

Pete Rose was one of the greatest players in baseball, and one of the most polarizing. Dubbed Charlie Hustle for his aggressive play and fierce work ethic, the pugnacious switch-hitter lacked the natural gifts of a Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle. Yet through sheer competitive drive, he racked up one of the top records in baseball. Over 24 seasons, 19 of them with the Cincinnati Reds, he won three batting titles and three World Series and was a 17-time All-Star. Most famously, in 1985 he broke Ty Cobb’s hitting record, retiring the next year with 4,256 hits, an enduring record. But in 1989, an investigation by the baseball commissioner’s office found that he’d repeatedly bet on games while managing the Reds. Banned from baseball for life—and barred from the Hall of Fame—Rose denied the allegation for 15 years, finally coming clean in 2004. He offered little contrition, but stressed he had never bet against his own team. “I would rather die,” he said, “than lose a baseball game.” 

Rose grew up on Cincinnati’s “hardscrabble West Side,” where his bank teller father, a former semi-pro football player, began tossing him a baseball when Pete was 2, said The Washington Post. A poor student, he left school his senior year to turn semi-pro, and an uncle who was a part-time scout “begged the Reds to give him a shot.” Signed in 1960, he arrived in the minor leagues “with a crew cut, a big mouth, and a knack for getting on base.” Moving to the Reds three years later, he won Rookie of the Year, said the Los Angeles Times. A utility player who covered five different positions, he became a key part of the “Big Red Machine” teams of the 1970s. And he racked up hits year after year until, on Sept. 11, 1985, he broke Cobb’s record in a game against the San Diego Padres, receiving an eight-minute ovation as he “stood crying at first base.” Four years later, he was banned from baseball. 

Rose moved to Las Vegas and “continued profiting off his name,” said USA Today. He signed autographs at shows, sold Pete Rose posters and pennants, and did stints as a radio and TV commentator. He “often professed his worthiness to return to baseball,” but subsequent commissioners upheld the ban, and Rose died under its cloud. Betting calls “the integrity of the game into question,” and “there’s no excuse for that,” he wrote in 2004. “But there’s also no reason to punish me forever.”