You just can’t trust a cyborg. In this new action-comedy series based on Martha Wells’ award-winning novels, Alexander Skarsgard plays a semi-outdated security android who has developed rogue sentience and a disturbing interior life. He (it?) has secretly dubbed himself Murderbot but isn’t bent on killing his human overseers so much as he’s disgusted by them and prefers bingeing soap operas under the cover of his helmet when he’s supposed to be working. His dangerous disdain gradually softens as he gets to know the humans on his current mission. Friday, May 16, Apple TV+.

by Sophie Gilbert

“If you came of age around the late 1990s and early aughts, prepare to have the balloon string of sentimentality pried from your grip,” said Maya Salam in The New York Times. Those years were cruel to American women in ways that warped the culture we live with still, and Atlantic critic Sophie Gilbert appears “intent on snapping Millennials out of any instinct to idealize the decades that shaped us.” At the movies, as Gilbert points out, hits like American Pie and The Hangover made sexism a joke. In music, opinion-free pop idols like Britney Spears replaced outspoken rebels like Madonna. Degrading online porn, meanwhile, became ubiquitous, and all these strands contributed to a disdain for women that women themselves were taught to internalize. Gilbert’s “blistering, sobering” book connects the dots, revealing “a previously uncharted map.”

One of Gilbert’s principle insights proves “so clear-eyed, it’s startling,” said Maggie Lange in The Washington Post. By the aughts, she argues, looking at women was America’s most popular pastime. And troublingly, we resented the women who made us look. Gilbert shows “a particular talent” for spotting “galling” examples. In 2008, Esquire ran a photo of a topless Jessica Simpson on its cover and openly declared that the image was merely bait to draw readers to an unrelated story about the death of an Iraq War soldier. Simpson was nothing but a joke, and the best she could do was present herself as in on the gag. “What differentiates Gilbert from the recent reappraisals of the turn-of-the-21st-century misogyny is her objective.” She’s less interested in how this behavior affected celebrities like Simpson than how it harmed the rest of us, beginning with all the young women who were taught, in Gilbert’s words, “that sex was our currency, and we were a joke.”

Despite Girl on Girl’s many strengths, I finished the book “looking for a bolder claim about where the real problem lies and what can be done about it,” said Kate Womersley in The Guardian. Gilbert praises authors Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti, among others, for raising their voices to combat misogyny, but gives such voices too little room. And because she didn’t want her book to lean heavily on anecdotal first-person writing, she “retreats from voicing her full indignation.” Still, Gilbert’s “skillful marshaling of evidence” is impressive, and her account of women’s degradation since the late ’90s “sounds a crescendo of doom toward this present moment,” when women’s rights are vanishing. Don’t misread Gilbert’s wry title as suggesting that women themselves are the problem. “It’s the patriarchy, stupid.”

The comic actress who packed a wallop

Ruth Buzzi thwacked her way to comedy stardom. As the frumpy, paranoid Gladys Ormphby on the NBC sketch show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, she was swathed in dowdy brown clothes, her hair parted severely down the center and a hairnet knotted at her forehead. A woman with no patience for lecherous men, Gladys was both a joke and a feminist symbol, clutching her purse as a weapon to swat any cad who got too fresh. Buzzi played plenty of other characters during her 1968–73 Laugh-In run, earning a Golden Globe award and five Emmy nominations. But Gladys was the most popular, and Buzzi appeared in that persona on other variety and talk shows as well—with the handbag. “It looked vicious, but it was just a felt purse lined and filled with old pantyhose and cotton,” she said. “I was able to swing it with all my might and it still wouldn’t hurt anyone. Although it sounded great with a thud when it landed.” 

Raised in Connecticut, Buzzi was the daughter of a renowned Swiss sculptor. Though she was head cheerleader in high school, she struggled in ballet class, said The Hollywood Reporter. Her teacher suggested making the dance comical, and “it was a big hit!” she said. “I continued to do funny dances and funny this and funny that.” After graduation, she “boldly moved across the country to enroll at the Pasadena Playhouse,” studying alongside Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman. Playing clumsy housekeeper Agnes Gooch in the play Auntie Mame inspired her to experiment with slumping posture and bad hair—the beginnings of what would become Gladys. After making her Broadway debut in 1966’s Sweet Charity, she found her niche as an absurd outsider starting with a role on ABC’s That Girl. 

Yet she wouldn’t be typecast. Her “restless creativity” had her taking roles all over, said The Washington Post, in off-Broadway shows, movies like 1976’s Freaky Friday, sitcoms, and commercials. She even had a recurring role on Sesame Street in the 1990s, as shopkeeper Ruthie. She only fully retired in 2021 to spend time on her Texas ranch. “Nothing in her career, however, had the enduring appeal of her determinedly unappealing” Gladys, said The New York Times. “So many people ask me to hit them with my purse”—even Elton John, she said in 2016. “He immediately made his way over to me and said, ‘For God’s sakes, Ruth, please hit me with your purse. That’s been on my bucket list for years!’”