Good golf comedies come around about as frequently as holes in one for a weekend duffer. This new series takes a swing at it, with Owen Wilson playing a former PGA star who’s stuck in life’s sand trap after the messy end of his playing career. His fortunes change when he discovers a grip-it-and-rip-it prodigy and offers to play mentor. With Judy Greer and Marc Maron in supporting roles. Wednesday, June 4, Apple TV+.

by Rutger Bregman

Rutger Bregman’s latest book “makes profound change look easy,” said Isabel Berwick in Financial Times. The Dutch author of the best-seller Humankind: A Hopeful History has set his sights on today’s educated elite, urging each of his readers to reject the allure of high-paying but damaging or pointless careers and choose instead to devote their careers to doing good for the world. While the suggestion may sound unrealistic, “there’s a playbook here,” as Bregman shares stories about the successes achieved when individual idealists have banded together in teams, such as the army of young lawyers Ralph Nader assembled in the 1960s and ’70s to rewrite U.S. environmental and consumer protection law. The great challenges of our own time are many, and Bregman’s “brisk and persuasive” argument stands a chance of waking many readers to the role they can play in meeting them. 

His opening idea “may sound like a promising point of departure,” said Helmer Stoel in Jacobin. He puts people into four categories: those who are neither idealistic nor ambitious, those who are ambitious but unidealistic, those who are idealistic but unambitious, and those who get the mix right. Sure, few of us want to fall into any of the first three categories. The first group, in his moral cosmos, winds up in “bullshit jobs,” and he dismisses the sorry third cohort as “noble losers.” But Bregman is so focused on coaching readers how to find individual satisfaction that he makes the heroic individual efforts to do good more important than the righteousness of any collective cause. “It is not clear what the ‘good’ is that needs doing.” 

Still, “the stories that Bregman tells are vivid and often genuinely inspiring,” said Rowan Williams in The Guardian. He writes of a young Cambridge University graduate deciding in 1785 at age 24 to commit his life to ending slavery worldwide—and largely succeeding. He writes about Dutch and French families who sheltered their Jewish neighbors during the Nazi occupation, and of the strategic thinking that made the 1955 Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott so effective. Beyond all that, he also acknowledges his heroes’ errors, such as when a messianic streak led Nader to stay in the 2000 presidential election even though that choice put a free-market Republican in the White House. Should you remain skeptical, maybe Bregman will turn you around at the end of the book, when he argues that doubting that an individual can make a difference is essentially egotistical because doing so rejects how interwoven one’s actions are with those of all other humans. “Oversimplified? Perhaps. But calls to arms often have to be.”

The everyman actor who was Norm on Cheers

When George Wendt’s agent sent him to audition for a new sitcom set in a Boston bar, she warned him the part was small. He was to speak just one word: “Beer.” But the producers of Cheers saw something in the portly actor with the regular-joe air, and they hatched another plan. Wendt was cast as fan favorite Norm Peterson, the beer-quaffing barfly who was glued to a barstool in every one of the smash show’s 275 episodes, from 1982 to 1993. An underemployed accountant, the stoic Norm dodged his wife, bantered with fellow regular Cliff Clavin, and with unerring comic timing dropped deadpan one-liners on barkeeps Sam and Woody. (“How’s a beer sound?” “I dunno, I usually finish them before they get a word in.”) Wendt, who received six Emmy nominations, allowed that playing an average guy who loves cold ones didn’t exactly require heroic shape-shifting from him. “Norm is just me with better writing,” he said in 2021. 

One of nine children, Wendt grew up in Chicago, where his father ran a real estate agency, said The Washington Post. After Jesuit prep school he attended Notre Dame, where he “was invited to leave because of hard partying, lack of focus, and poor grades.” He fared better at Rockhurst College, earning an economics degree. But a straight job held little interest, and with virtually no experience, he decided to pursue acting. Returning to Chicago, he did “years of training” at workshops run by the storied Second City comedy troupe before finally joining both the resident and touring companies. In 1980, he moved to Hollywood, finding favor with “his easy charm and lunch pail demeanor,” said The New York Times. He appeared on shows such as Taxi and Alice before attending the fateful Cheers audition. 

After Cheers, Wendt landed his own sitcom, said The Times (U.K.). The George Wendt Show, in which he played a mechanic, “bombed and was canceled after a few episodes.” Still, in later years he was “rarely out of work.” He appeared in numerous films, on Broadway in Elf and Hairspray, and on TV series such as Portlandia and Seinfeld. Over the years he reprised Norm on shows like The Simpsons and the Cheers spin-off Frasier. He co-wrote a 2009 book, Drinking With George, that was part memoir, part love letter to his favorite beverage. “Will Rogers once said he never met a man he didn’t like,” he wrote. “I feel the same about beer.”