Every generation is looking for its own Friends. Gen Zers may have found theirs with Adults. This new series follows five besties living in one friend’s childhood home in outer-borough New York City. The economic concerns that never seemed to faze Rachel or Joey are front and center for Samir, Billie, and the rest, but so are laughs, thanks to solid writing and a talented young cast. Wednesday, May 28, at 9 p.m., FX.

by Rachel Cockerell

Melting Point is “a book unlike anything I’ve ever read,” said Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker. It tells the story of a little-known attempt to build an American homeland for European Jews by encouraging thousands to sail to Galveston, Texas, and it places that endeavor in the context of the broader early-20th-century effort to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine or elsewhere. Because author Rachel Cockerell tells the tale entirely through snippets from primary sources, such as diary entries, newspaper reports, and interview transcripts, the characters and events “feel startlingly present.” Besides, “only so vast a chorus of voices could do justice to the larger story: the history of an imperiled people and their courageous, blinkered, desperate effort to find a place to call home.” 

Cockerell’s great-grandfather was a pivotal figure in launching the Galveston plan, and she relies on him to make her story cohere, said Lucy Hughes-Hallett in The Guardian. That “doesn’t quite work,” because David Jochelman, her forebear, is a less striking figure than his main allies, Theodor Herzl and Israel Zangwill. Herzl was the dashing Hungarian Jewish journalist who predicted the devastation of European Jewry and died at 44, just eight years after fathering the movement to create a Jewish state. Zangwill, a playwright, was the most popular Jewish writer working in English, and he and Jochelman split from mainline Zionism to advocate for alternatives to Palestine. East Africa, Western Australia, Mexico, and Libya were all explored as possibilities before Galveston emerged as their faction’s favored option. By 1914, 10,000 European Jews had arrived at the Texas port, and the “most compelling” section of Cockerell’s “formally ingenious” book is over.

But the family story continues, and in a book “with many distinct voices,” it’s Cockerell’s half-aunt Jo who proves most engaging, said Alice Kaplan in The New York Review of Books. Jo helps tie eras together, enabling Cockerell to create a personal connection, through a relative who moved to Palestine, to the clashes of the late 1940s that displaced some 800,000 Palestinian Arabs and established the nation of Israel. Because Cockerell never voices an opinion, she “avoids the question that will occur to most of her readers today: What if Zion had been established somewhere else?” But the reports she provides of the Palestinian Arabs’ displacement are “every bit as horrendous” as the accounts of a 1903 anti-Jewish pogrom she cites earlier. In the end, her “deeply satisfying” book “makes us hear how the yearning for a homeland, an essential part of Jewish history, is mirrored in Palestinian suffering. ‘Where can we go? What can we do?’ Even the words are the same.”

The Broadway composer who wrote Annie

Stop anyone on the street, and chances are they know at least one of Charles Strouse’s tunes by heart. The Tony Award–winning composer wrote songs for over a dozen Broadway musicals, and his two biggest hits, Bye Bye Birdie and Annie, are still mainstays of high school and community theaters. He could credibly imitate rock ’n’ roll in “One Last Kiss” from Birdie and Tin Pan Alley panache in Annie’s “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile.” The theme song to All in the Family, “Those Were the Days,” might have sounded like something from a 1940s revue, but Strouse wrote it with lyricist and frequent collaborator Lee Adams in 1971. Still, Strouse’s catchy, compulsively singable melodies didn’t please everyone. In his 2008 memoir Put On a Happy Face (also the title of one of his hit songs from Birdie), he recalled being cornered by an irate stranger. “If I have to hear my daughter sing ‘Tomorrow’ one more time,” the man barked at Strouse, “I’m going to kill myself—and you!” 

The New York City–born son of an ailing tobacco salesman and a deeply depressive mother, Strouse felt “obliged to lighten his dark household” with music, said The New York Times. He studied classical composition under the greats, including Aaron Copland and Nadia Boulanger. But after Boulanger pronounced him more suited for popular music, he “made ends meet by playing piano wherever he could,” including for strip clubs and movie newsreels. He and lyricist Adams collaborated on several off-Broadway revues in the 1950s before capitalizing on the hubbub surrounding Elvis Presley’s being drafted into the military with Birdie. The hit show was adapted into a 1963 film and made a star out of Dick Van Dyke. A series of “flops, middling successes, and all-out triumphs” followed with Adams, said The Washington Post. But he also had other collaborators. He won his second Tony, for 1970’s Applause, working with Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and his third for 1977’s Annie, with lyrics by Martin Charnin. A musical adaptation of the Little Orphan Annie comic strip, Annie was “a crowd-pleaser for the ages,” spawning two Broadway revivals, two films, and a 2021 live-TV version.

Although the hits dried up, Strouse “kept working into his 80s,” said NPR.org. Between shows he would teach, telling students that flops shouldn’t stop them: “You’ve done your best, it didn’t work, what’s next?” He simply couldn’t quit. “If I’m not composing,” he said, “I’m rather at a loss of what to do.”