It wasn’t easy to become America’s first female astronaut. Sally Ride, a Stanford-trained physicist and former top college athlete, handled the pressures of fame, the demands of training, and the derision of NASA’s male astronauts with grace. This superb documentary retraces Ride’s journey, capturing how her love of space propelled her into history and how she kept private the decades-long relationship she shared with life partner Tam O’Shaughnessy. Monday, June 16, at 9 p.m., National Geographic.

by Patrick McGee

“Apple’s massive investment in China is beginning to look like a Faustian bargain,” said Alex Tapscott in the New York Post. The world’s first $3 trillion publicly traded company manufactures 80% of its products in the Communist Party–run nation, and while that level of dependence makes Apple itself vulnerable to political storms, the company’s enormous investment in the country over the past 30 years has also vastly accelerated China’s effort to overtake the U.S. as the world’s technological superpower. That’s the “gripping” story that Financial Times reporter Patrick McGee tells in his new best-seller about the alliance, which focuses on Apple’s missteps but “reserves some of his most pointed criticism for America’s policy elite.” Washington, after all, once encouraged such partnerships because it believed that enriching China would push the country toward democracy. 

Since the late 1990s, Apple has poured investments into China “on a scale that is difficult to imagine,” said Michael Brendan Dougherty in National Review. The 28-plus million Chinese workers the company has trained exceed California’s entire labor force. And McGee reports that in 2016, Apple CEO Tim Cook quietly pledged to spend $275 million in China across five years—double the investment, adjusted for inflation, that the U.S. poured into rebuilding Europe after World War II. The China-Apple alliance began in the 1990s, when Steve Jobs needed a hit to keep Apple alive, said Hannah Beech in The New York Times. Apple wound up turning to the Taiwan-based manufacturer Foxconn, which soon began building factories in China that exploited workers. McGee says Beijing intentionally allowed the abuses to build technical know-how. Because the exchange greatly benefited both parties, “what began as a feat of manufacturing has troubling consequences for the entire world.” 

Apple is now in a bind, said The Economist. It’s been reported that Cook is scrambling to move some production to India, and he’ll have to if President Trump follows through with his steepest threatened tariffs. “Can the company thrive without China?” McGee’s “timely” book raises that question. Apple already faces fierce competition from Chinese firms, said Drake Bennett in Bloomberg. Those rivals include the telecoms giant Huawei, whose state-of-the-art products are manifestations of the manufacturing knowledge that Apple developed and freely shared with its Chinese business allies as all parties pushed workers to produce innovative technology at scale. “It turns out that one way to transform insanely exacting ideas into reality is by treating the people who are part of the process as means to an end. The Chinese Communist Party, by definition, believes in this. Apple, in a different way, seems to as well.”

The actress who made Hot Lips human

Loretta Swit redeemed a character originally drawn as a cartoonish antagonist. Maj. Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan, an Army nurse in the hit sitcom M*A*S*H, was initially a by-the-book killjoy loathed by her subordinates and frequently pranked by cynical, anti-establishment doctors Hawkeye and Trapper John. That’s how Sally Kellerman played her in the 1970 movie, set at a Korean War surgical unit, and for the first few seasons of the 1972–83 TV adaptation, so did Swit. But thanks in part to her influence on the scriptwriters, that changed. Her sexpot character dumped the weaselly, married man she was having an affair with and became far more complex. By M*A*S*H’s finale, watched by a still unmatched 105 million viewers, she was an icon. “Remember this about the Korean War: The men were drafted, the women volunteered,” Swit said in 2010. “These were amazing women, brave, courageous—and I was the head nurse in charge of all these incredible women. That’s what I wanted to be. And little by little we revealed that.”

Born to Polish immigrant parents in Passaic, N.J., Loretta Jane Szwed “grew up on movies as a way to learn English,” said The Washington Post. She got to Broadway as an understudy in 1965, and soon other Broadway and touring roles followed. When her tour of Mame reached Los Angeles, she turned to TV, scoring guest spots on Hawaii Five-O, Mission: Impossible, and Gunsmoke before auditioning for M*A*S*H in 1972. “Swit stepped into the role and made it her own,” said The New York Times. Scripts started calling the character “Margaret” rather than “Hot Lips.” New plots revealed her to be a general’s kid, whose tough exterior masked the loneliness of the only woman officer in a rowdy boy’s club. No longer the butt of the joke, Margaret was “wrestling violent patients into submission and performing triage in her wedding dress.” 

Swit “might have had global recognition for a second TV role,” said The Guardian. She was Detective Christine Cagney in the 1981 TV movie of Cagney & Lacey but was contractually obligated to M*A*S*H, so she didn’t join the subsequent hit series. After M*A*S*H ended, she did a few films in the 1980s and then devoted most of her time to regional theater, touring for years in the one-woman play Shirley Valentine. Yet she didn’t mind being constantly asked about her time as Margaret. “Actors are always identified with certain parts,” she said. “That’s just how it is.”