Even Barbara Walters would have told you that a woman with a funny Boston accent had little chance in the male-dominated news broad-casting world of the 1960s. This new documentary portrait revisits her rise to the status of a national icon while highlighting her probing celebrity interviews that were must-see events for several decades. Watching Walters, who died in 2022, disarm everyone from Vladimir Putin to Taylor Swift becomes a crash course in her unique talent for creating compelling television. Monday, June 23, Hulu.

by Sam Tanenhaus

Though William F. Buckley Jr. was often imitated, said Louis Menand in The New Yorker, “at heart he was inimitable.” Sam Tanenhaus’ long-awaited new biography of this key figure in the rise of postwar American conservatism is “a well-written and intelligent take on a complicated man,” and it reminds us that Buckley helped found and sustain the movement while being more an entertainer than a thinker. As a syndicated columnist, the founder of National Review, and the longtime host of PBS’s Firing Line, Buckley helped repopularize the moribund Republican Party, and he earned a crowning triumph when his friend Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. Even his foes tended to like him, thanks to his personal warmth and charm. Still, given his firm belief in rule by the elite and his opposition to democratic egalitarianism, “it seems fair to say that Buckley was, at bottom, anti-American.”

Tanenhaus’ “marvelous” 1,000-page book complicates the standard view of Buckley’s legacy, said Jack McCordick in The New Republic. While it’s common to credit the preppie pundit for having been a responsible leader who purged the conservative movement of its crazies, including the John Birch Society, Tanenhaus refuses to paint Buckley’s conservativism as sunnier than today’s. Though he provides an affectionate portrait of Buckley as a social figure and describes him as almost liberal in his openness to entertaining conflicting political views, he “also methodically surfaces the darker strains of the movement.” Whether Buckley was defending racial segregation, blasting university elites, or stirring up anti-Communist paranoia, the political vision that he helped forge “was, as it is now, concerned not primarily with advancing a particular set of principles but with defining and rooting out perceived enemies.”

Tanenhaus is without doubt “a gifted writer,” said Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. That’s probably why Buckley handpicked him as his biographer in 1997. But Tanenhaus, who later became the editor of The New York Times Book Review, is a left-leaning thinker who has assumed the role of explaining the Right to nonbelievers, and the Buckley he portrays here is “little more than a wasted talent: a man who put his stupendous gifts in the service of a perverse cause” and, in the end, “probably compounded the nation’s problems.” But he misreads Buckley’s views on key issues, including supply side economics and South African apartheid, and his decisions about what to mention and what to exclude “frequently mystify.” Unfortunately, Tanenhaus’ Buckley turns out to be “more or less the book conservatives feared it would be”— and proof that “Bill Buckley always was too trusting of people he liked.”

The funk-rock visionary who became an addict and recluse

Sly Stone was a musical alchemist, combining soul, funk, and psychedelic rock with elements of gospel, jazz, and Latin music to create the new sound of the 1960s. With his prodigious Afro and platform boots—a look that one critic described as “the wildest pimp on the block”—he was an onstage dynamo as leader of the multiracial, mixed-gender band Sly and the Family Stone. From 1968 to 1971, the group scored hits with buoyant songs such as “Dance to the Music,” “Everyday People,” “Hot Fun in the Summer-time,” and “I Want to Take You Higher,” and influenced artists such as Prince, Stevie Wonder, and Miles Davis. But Stone, an eccentric whose songs of uplift were tempered by darker themes of struggle and disillusionment, had a fall as steep as his rise. He descended into drug abuse and bankruptcy, spending most of his later years living in a camper van in Los Angeles. A New York Post reporter who located him in 2011 described him as paranoid and disheveled. “Tell everybody, please, to give me a job, play my music,” he said then. “I’m tired of all this shit, man.” 

Raised in Vallejo, Calif., Sylvester Stewart was a musical prodigy who “started making music with his siblings as a child,” said Rolling Stone. Their father, a janitor, was also a Pentecostal deacon, and the siblings sang gospel harmonies, recording their first single when Sylvester was 9. Adept at keyboards, guitar, bass, and drums, he studied music at a junior college and DJed at a local radio station under the name Sly Stone, breaking the R&B format by playing white acts like the Beatles along with soul and funk. He got a job as a staff producer for Autumn Records and “became a familiar voice in the Bay Area’s music scene” before starting the band in 1966 that would become Sly and the Family Stone. They were men and women, black and white—and two were Sly’s siblings.

Their 1967 debut album “vanished without a trace,” said The Telegraph (U.K.). Prodded by his label to make something more commercial, Stone released Dance to the Music, an “irresistibly pro-pulsive funk collage” whose eponymous single shot to the Top 10. The band became known for high-octane live shows, and “a string of Top 20 successes followed.” In 1969, they released a triumphant fourth album, said The Times (U.K.). “With its thrilling mix of rousing horns, acid-rock guitars, and funky bass lines,” Stand! yielded four hits, including the smash “Everyday People.” The band’s reputation soared further after their “ecstatic” 4 a.m. Woodstock performance, widely hailed as a festival highlight. 

“Then it all started to unravel,” said The Washington Post. Strung out on cocaine and PCP, Stone missed a third of his shows in 1970. They all moved into a Beverly Hills mansion where recording sessions became “nonstop parties,” with a drug-addled Stone flanked by “mobsters doubling as bodyguards.” Stone “obsessively” overdubbed and erased tracks, degrading the master tape—allegedly, he would often tell a girl she could record backing vocals and then, once he’d bedded her, tape over her track. The result, There’s a Riot Goin’ On (1971), had a “bleak, dissonant” sound, said the Los Angeles Times. It “was the last significant music Stone released.” He grew more isolated and erratic, and in 1974 married his 19-year-old girlfriend onstage at Madison Square Garden—she promptly divorced him, claiming abuse. Stone alternated drug arrests with stints in rehab and disappeared from the public eye.

In later years he “performed intermittently, and often bizarrely,” said The New York Times. He surfaced at the 2006 Grammys sporting a “towering bleach-blond Mohawk,” playing keyboards on “I Want to Take You Higher” but wandering offstage mid-song. In a shambolic 2010 appearance at Coachella, he told the audience he’d been kidnapped and would sue his manager. But in recent years “his musical legacy was fortified” when Questlove featured him in a 2021 documentary; another film followed this year. Finally drug-free, Stone moved into a house, wrote a memoir, and passed the time listening to records. Health problems had stopped him from recording, he said in 2023. But they “haven’t stopped me from hearing music.”