Why settle for one Italian grandmother’s cooking when you can have four? Vince Vaughn leads a deep cast in this comedy feature, playing a man mourning his mother who decides to open an Italian restaurant in Staten Island with the insurance money she left him. Missing the love his mom and nonna poured into their cooking, he recruits a quartet of grandmas to run the kitchen. Lorraine Bracco, Talia Shire, Brenda Vaccaro, Susan Sarandon, and Linda Cardellini co-star. Friday, May 9, Netflix.

by Greg Grandin

Greg Grandin’s “stirring” new history puts forth a surprising argument, said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. While demonstrating across 737 pages that the story of the United States can’t be separated from that of the nations and territories that share the Western Hemisphere, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Yale historian presents Latin America as a beacon of human rights that has found the U.S. to be an at-best contentious New World ally. Grandin isn’t blind to the genocidal violence of Spain’s and Portugal’s conquistadors. But he claims that the horrors of the conquest prompted a moral revolution that Latin America has carried into the present in its commitment to universal equality and international cooperation. While Grandin’s devotion to this theme “sometimes verges on the sentimental,” he’s “such a terrific writer and perceptive historian that I was swept along by his enthralling narrative.” 

The first true hero of Grandin’s account is Bartolomé de las Casas, said Patrick Iber in The New Republic. The future Dominican priest landed in Hispaniola as a colonizer just 10 years after Christopher Columbus, but he evolved into a fierce advocate for the rights of Indigenous people, and the theological debate he initiated is “as plausible an origin story for global human rights and international law as any.” Grandin’s award-winning previous book, The End of the Myth, examined the role of the frontier in the U.S. expansionist mindset, and he argues here that Las Casas and his heirs had a starkly different understanding of the world because the Spanish had encountered occupied territories, not lands already emptied out by European-borne disease. Influenced by that experience, the Spanish-American republics that emerged in the decades after the American Revolution put far greater emphasis in their constitutions on providing universal goods. But while much of this neglected history should be shared, Grandin is so eager to paint the U.S. as the relative moral laggard that the conclusions he reaches are “plagued by exaggerations.” 

For starters, “the U.S. hasn’t always been the bully of the hemisphere,” said Ieva Jusionyte in the Los Angeles Review of Books. The nation truly was a good neighbor during Franklin Roosevelt’s reign. Grandin acknowledges that, said Daniel Geary in The Irish Times. But he justifiably also revisits the many occasions when the U.S. has aided in the overthrow of democratically elected Latin American governments. His “extraordinarily ambitious” book doesn’t provide the entire history of the New World, as its subtitle promises. Even such key events as 1846–48’s Mexican-American War “happen offstage.” But the story he tells is so dramatic and far-reaching that it “reads at times as the historical equivalent of the great epic novels of a Gabriel García Márquez.”

The survivor who spoke out against Epstein

At first, Virginia Giuffre preferred to be known publicly only as “Jane Doe 102.” Groomed at 16 by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell to join a sex-trafficking ring, she was one of dozens of victims who sued Epstein in 2009. She said the jet-setting millionaire had coerced her into providing massages and sexual services, first to him and then to his rich and influential friends. She escaped in 2002 by marrying a martial arts trainer and for a time lived a quiet life in Australia. But in 2011, after seeing a photo of Epstein out of prison after just 13 months and once again hobnobbing with Prince Andrew, she went public—the first of Epstein’s victims to do so—and named her alleged rapists, including the prince. Epstein had her “passed around like a platter of fruit,” she said, “a prostitute for him and his friends who shared his interest in young girls.” 

Raised largely in Palm Beach County, Florida, Virginia Louise Roberts had a dismal childhood, said The New York Times. After being molested at 7, she shuttled between foster homes, “lived on the streets when she was 14,” and spent six months with a 65-year-old sex trafficker before an FBI raid led to her reunion with her family. Her father was working at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and got her a job there in the spa. That’s where Maxwell recruited her to be a masseuse for Epstein. During her first encounter, the two coaxed her into a sex act and paid her $200. These visits “became a daily routine,” said The Times (U.K.). Epstein flew her around the world for encounters with his friends, and she was photographed with Prince Andrew when she was 17. The prince denied Giuffre’s allegations but paid $16 million to settle her 2021 lawsuit; he was later stripped of his royal title. 

“But the pressure of going up against Goliath forces took its toll,” said the Miami Herald. Giuffre separated from her husband, and he filed a restraining order against her in February. The order prevented her from seeing her three teenage children, and her family said the loss of her kids had devastated her. The following month, Giuffre said on Instagram that a car accident had left her so severely injured that she had four days to live—although police labeled the crash minor. Before she died by suicide, she said she and Epstein’s other victims “continue to find ourselves trapped in a system that overlooks our struggles until it’s convenient for those in power.”