Kate Hudson has been given the keys to a pro basketball kingdom in this new drama series created by Mindy Kaling. Hudson plays Isla Gordon, a character modeled after Los Angeles Lakers president Jeanie Buss, who takes over her family’s storied team after a scandal forces her brother to step down. Then comes the hard part: building another championship team. Thursday, Feb. 27, Netflix.

by Susan Morrison

With her 650-page first book, journalist Susan Morrison “has built Lorne Michaels the kind of biographical monument usually consecrated to founding fathers, canonical authors, and world-historical scientific geniuses,” said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. Perhaps surprisingly, the volume might also convince you that the 80-year-old creator of Saturday Night Live deserves such treatment. Morrison, a top editor at The New Yorker, breaks her account into sections corresponding to a day a week leading up to showtime, then cuts from the nuts-and-bolts of that typical one-week marathon to the story of how Michaels built his TV institution, which has just celebrated its 50th season on air. “By the end of the book, you know a lot about him without quite knowing what he’s all about.” But you do develop an understanding of how he has kept SNL afloat and relevant, “which is no small achievement.” 

“Some of his tactics for managing creative people have much broader applicability,” said Joe Berkowitz in Fast Company. Michaels has, of course, launched the careers of countless comedy legends—Bill Murray, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey—who were nobodies before he hired them for SNL. But beyond his apparent talent for spotting talent, he has a knack for mixing contrasting sensibilities. And he trusts that he’ll wring the most creativity out of his team by letting his writers shape their own skits from concept to performance. Not that Michaels is a hands-off leader. Thanks to the taxing six-day work week he’s devised, “any sketch that makes it to air has survived a comedy gauntlet,” including a pitch meeting, an all-night writing session, a read-through, initial stagings, a Saturday night dress rehearsal, and the final rush before airtime when Michaels himself slashes his purposefully overstuffed lineup in his pursuit of balance and flow. Ultimately, working for the man “seems as agonizing as it does rewarding.” 

Getting Michaels to open up has long been a challenge, said Brian Steinberg in Variety. Getting to watch the making of a single SNL episode from start to finish has been “the Holy Grail for any journalist hoping to crack the show.” Morrison has managed to do both, and “the Michaels we meet in Lorne is ambitious but flawed.” We see that he failed in endeavors that didn’t suit his talents, and when he makes those final cuts to each SNL lineup, “he is caring and yet merciless, all at once.” Most importantly, perhaps, though he pushes for excellence, he never expects perfection. “In Morrison’s book, the show is simply the result of what Michaels has been doing all along—trying to convene talent in hopes of gaining a fortuitous result.”

The nurse who broke the Army’s color barrier

It took Nancy Leftenant-Colon seven years to persuade the Army to accept her. The Black nurse tried to enlist right after nursing school in 1941, but was rejected because of her race. She was admitted into a segregated unit in the Army Reserve in 1945, as military medics were facing an onslaught of wounded soldiers returning from World War II, and finally joined the regular U.S. Army Nurse Corps as its first Black soldier in 1948, a few months before President Truman desegregated the Army. By the time she retired as an Air Force major 20 years later, she had traveled the world, setting up hospital wards in Japan and helping evacuate wounded French legionnaires from Vietnam. “Lefty,” as she was known, said she was always conscious that she was a role model. “I had to be the best,” she said, “because I knew whatever I did, other Blacks after me would be judged by what I did and how I did it.” 

The grandchild of enslaved people, Leftenant-Colon was raised in a poor family of 12 children in Amityville, N.Y. While she always wanted to be a nurse, “she battled racial discrimination” at every step, said The Washington Post. At her first Army posting, part of a desegregation experiment at Massachusetts’ Fort Devens, the white head nurse said Black nurses were not wanted and would be kicked out for any infraction. At a base in Ohio, where she cared for the all-Black Tuskegee Airmen pilots and their families, she and a pregnant Black patient were denied entrance to a white Ohio hospital, and she helped deliver the baby herself. Throughout her Army time, “she repeatedly faced hostile supervisors,” said The New York Times. Dreaming of becoming a flight nurse and traveling, she moved to the Air Force in 1952. Over the next 13 years, she was posted all over, and met Bob Hope and Marilyn Monroe on their USO tours. 

After retiring from the military, she had a second career as a nurse at her old Amityville high school, said The Times (U.K.). Later, from 1989 to 1991, she “broke one more taboo,” becoming the first woman to lead the veterans’ association for the Tuskegee Airmen. In that role, she worked to highlight the role of Black service members in the military. “We know that we’ve contributed,” she said. “They need to add this to history books.”