Guy Ritchie is channeling his inner Spielberg. In this star-studded new feature, the British director trades ultraviolent gangster clashes for Indiana Jones–style adventure. John Krasinski and Natalie Portman co-star as siblings hunting down art masterpieces around the world to piece together clues that may lead to the legendary fountain of youth. But a shadowy group is determined to keep the fountain’s location secret. With Eiza González, Stanley Tucci, and Domhnall Gleeson. Friday, May 23, Apple TV+.

by Amanda Hess

Amanda Hess is “exceptionally skilled at noticing things worth seeing,” said Meghan Cox Gurdon in The Wall Street Journal. In her new book, a hybrid of memoir and social critique, the New York Times critic at large recounts what it’s like to experience pregnancy and childbirth in our wired age, and she paints an amusing but unsettling picture. Early in her journey to motherhood, she became so dependent on a menstrual-cycle tracking app that she informed the app she was pregnant even before she told her husband. From there, she was pulled into an online world of mom-fluencers, disturbing Reddit threads, and so many anxiety-inducing ads that she concluded that more brands knew she was expecting than actual people. As the stakes rise in the retelling, Hess handles every detail “with wit, discernment, and candor.” 

“Hess starts her story with the unexpected,” said Hillary Kelly in The Atlantic. At her pregnancy’s seven-month mark, doctors saw something they didn’t like in the ultrasound, triggering a series of tests and worries leading to a diagnosis of Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, a growth disorder that will present risks to her child. But Hess treats even that rare aspect of her experience as a window on the promises that screen technologies dangle in front of every expecting mother but can’t keep. Hess happens to be an expert on online culture, “yet she also smartly paints herself as just another willing victim of the internet.” Like most of us, she turns to it for guidance and reassurance while knowing that each interaction can lead down hazardous paths or generate pitches for maternity body sprays, baby heart monitors, home births, and $2,000 smart cribs. In short, she “treats digital culture and the internet as it is: a character in our lives,” said Kathryn Jezer-Morton in NYMag.com.

It’s “part of how we make ourselves at home in the world.” “Hess can sometimes seem cavalier about the harms of the digital world,” said Joanna Scutts in The New Republic. But that’s because she sees them as less grave than the physical dangers pregnant people face in a country where abortions are outlawed and reproductive care is limited in many states. Meanwhile, her experience with her son has made her more alert to the threat that advancing technology presents for unborn children who are deemed to have chronic health challenges. Mostly, though, what comes across in Hess’ tale is that “there is ultimately no other way to parent than by sailing right off into it.” In the end, said Jessica Winter in The New Yorker, Second Life reads as “foremost a mash note to Hess’ firstborn son,” because he proves to be “a complete and ongoing joy.”

The political scientist who coined the term ‘soft power’

Joseph Nye believed that what helped the world helped America. A leading architect of U.S. foreign policy for six decades, he outlined this vision in one of the most enduring books in political science, 1990’s Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. Writing just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Nye proposed that the U.S. had an advantage that its adversaries lacked, something he called “soft power.” In addition to the stick of military force and the carrot of direct payments, the U.S. could also exert influence through humanitarian aid, the example of trustworthy institutions, and the promotion of human rights and democracy. Even cultural cachet was part of soft power, as the popularity of Hollywood movies and rock songs spread goodwill toward America. Nye spent his academic life advocating for the U.S. to use these tools. “When the Berlin Wall went down,” he said this month, “it didn’t go down under a barrage of artillery. It went down under hammers and bulldozers wielded by people whose minds had been changed by the Voice of America and the BBC.”

The son of a bond trader, Nye was born in South Orange, N.J., and grew up on a farm before attending Princeton, said The Washington Post. There “he briefly considered studying for the ministry—until he read the Bible all the way through.” He refocused his studies on economics, history, and political science and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. He earned a doctorate from Harvard in 1964 and joined its faculty soon after. In the 1970s, he served in the State Department in the Carter administration and co-wrote Power and Interdependence, which argued that international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization would grow in importance. When a British historian wrote a best-seller claiming that American decline was imminent, said The New York Times, “Nye did not accept that bleak conclusion” and countered with Bound to Lead.

Nye toggled between government and academia, said the Financial Times, serving in the Carter and Clinton administrations and then for a decade as dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, “a conveyor belt of leaders and policymakers.” Under President Clinton, he chaired the National Intelligence Council, working to halt nuclear proliferation and shore up the alliance with Japan. “Nye acknowledged the limitations of soft power alone,” said Agence France-Presse, and later renamed his cause “smart power”: the balance of military strength, economic muscle, and soft power. By the time the Obama administration came to office, Nye’s vision of American strength had been the prevailing wisdom for decades.

When President Trump began wielding a “bombastic, mercurial, and sometimes ruthless side of U.S. power,” Nye was dismayed, said Foreign Policy. He warned in Trump’s first term that such a bullying approach would weaken the country. When Trump in his second term canceled U.S. foreign aid programs and transformed VOA into a propaganda mouthpiece, Nye felt that the administration was effectively destroying the prosperous, democracy-promoting postwar order he had stood for and worked for. In the weeks before his death, he warned that the consequence would be the ceding of a U.S.-led world to one dominated by China. “Trump clearly does not understand soft power,” he wrote, but China does—and it “stands ready to fill the vacuum.”