A murder in the White House kicks off this new series, a waggish whodunit starring Uzo Aduba (Orange Is the New Black) as a brilliant D.C. detective called in to determine who killed the White House’s chief usher during a state dinner. The star-studded cast includes Giancarlo Esposito as the victim, Randall Park as an FBI agent, and Jane Curtin as the president’s mother-in-law. Thursday, March 20, Netflix.

by Omar El Akkad

Omar El Akkad’s new best-seller about the war on Gaza is “damn hard to put down,” said Dina Nayeri in The Guardian. “Powerful, angry, but always compelling in its moral logic,” it’s the anguished cry of a celebrated novelist and disillusioned U.S. citizen who has followed the daily horrors of the war from afar and couldn’t remain silent about the West’s complicity in the carnage. El Akkad, who was born in Egypt and raised in Qatar and Canada, worked as a foreign correspondent for Toronto’s Globe and Mail before he wrote the acclaimed novels American War and What Strange Paradise. Though he thoroughly condemns Hamas for its massacre of 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, he characterizes the response as eye-opening proof that the humanist ideals championed by the West have always been lies. I finished the book in two short sittings, and “by the end, my heart was drumming.” 

Even at just 200 pages, “it is a demanding read—not for its prose but for what it asks of us,” said Lawrence Hill in The Globe and Mail. While writing, El Akkad monitored the war daily and wants us to face the realities engendered by Western support of Israel’s indiscriminate war: Children mutilated. Others starved to death. Parents burying limbs. Cities razed. Tens of thousands of noncombatants dead and almost all of the region’s 2.2 million residents displaced. And “El Akkad is right. The genocide is happening before our eyes.” He’s asking readers to demand an end to the violence, arguing that to succumb instead to the pressures to remain silent is to fail not only the war’s direct victims but also one’s own soul. “You are being asked,” he writes, “to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice.” 

The book isn’t all polemic, said Fintan O’Toole in The New York Times. The personal memories El Akkad shares, “of family, of displacement, of being a suspect Muslim outsider in North America, of his years as a journalist covering, among other things, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” benefit from the time he’s had to reflect on them. They’re “wonderfully evoked.” But while his anger about Gaza leads him to portray the West as more hopeless than it is, his book is never just a one-note manifesto for the kind of U.S. voters who cited Gaza as a reason to sit out November’s presidential election. “One Day is much more than that. At its best, it is a probe into the murky depths of a collective consciousness shaped by the need to evade the daily evidence of political and environmental catastrophe.”

The glam rocker who was a godfather of punk

Sporting platform boots, red patent leather, and lipstick, David Johansen was a flashy pioneer of proto-punk. As frontman for the New York Dolls—a short-lived, off-the-walls, gender-bending band of the early 1970s—Johansen put a New York City spin on the burgeoning punk rock scene. After the band broke up in 1976, Johansen underwent a total transformation, morphing into Buster Poindexter: a pompadoured lounge singer of winking suavity. The alter ego brought Johansen his first real commercial success, when his cover of the calypso song “Hot Hot Hot” hit No. 11. His most impactful work, though, was with the Dolls, a band that influenced the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, and even the Smiths—as a teen, Morrissey was head of the Dolls’ British fan club. “Our total attitude towards art was, like, get up and do something,” Johansen said in 2006. “Quit sitting there whining.” 

Johansen was born on Staten Island to an Irish librarian mother and a Norwegian opera singer turned insurance salesman father. After high school, he “fell in with the New York City hipster scenes,” said The New York Times, and learned stagecraft working for an indie theater company. In 1971, at 21, he joined the newly formed Dolls. What they lacked in musical polish they made up for in “swagger, shock value, and song-writing.” Their first gig was at a homeless shelter; a year later, they were touring England as Rod Stewart’s opening act. But “drug addiction hobbled the band,” and it dissolved after releasing two albums. In the 1980s, Johansen as Poindexter “was known as a playful throwback to the Rat Pack era,” said The Washington Post, as he led conga lines and tossed out zingy one-liners. 

“His larger-than-life onstage persona soon drew the attention of Hollywood,” said Rolling Stone. Small parts on shows like Miami Vice and in films, led to a memorable role as the Ghost of Christmas Past in Scrooged (1988) and a close friendship with Bill Murray. Johansen spent his final years battling a brain tumor and a broken back, and he had to appeal for money through a musicians’ charity to pay his medical bills. He outlived his bandmates, though. The members had reunited just once, in 2004, for a music festival in London. “I started listening to the records to prepare for the show, and I was quite surprised how good they were,” Johansen recalled. “Pretty genius lyrics, if I do say so myself.”