Weeks after the announcement that Billy Joel is canceling all live shows while being treated for a brain disorder, this definitive, two-part documentary portrait arrives. And So It Goes covers the singer-songwriter’s 55-year career and is strongest when focused on Joel’s darkest chapters— including two suicide attempts following an affair with a bandmate’s wife in the early ’70s. Fellow musicians, loved ones, and a very candid Joel tell the story. Friday, July 18 on HBO and Max.

by Megan Greenwell

Several years ago, the four ordinary Americans profiled in Megan Greenwell’s new book “wanted only to raise their families and contribute to their communities,” said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. Instead, they became unwitting victims of the private equity industry, their jobs or security sacrificed to the profit imperatives of distant owners that can score wins while destroying the companies they acquire. Greenwell had seen the pattern up close herself in 2019, when she resigned as the editor in chief of Deadspin, an online sports magazine, after one such firm scooped up the outlet’s parent company and began running it into the ground. Bad Company is the result of her efforts to understand private equity, and it’s “definitely a critical take on the industry.” Still, “Greenwell offers stories that are textured, not one-note tales of woe,” and she writes about the sector’s troubling business model “with potent effect.” 

Think of Bad Company as “an essential guide” to an industry that now employs 8% of American workers yet “operates largely in the shadows,” said Ann Levin in the Associated Press. The book’s everyday heroes include a Wyoming doctor who watched LifePoint try to squeeze profits out of a hospital that wasn’t producing any, a Texas journalist who was working for Gannett newspapers when the chain cut its staff in half, and a Virginia housing advocate who wound up in a rat-infested apartment complex owned by a firm on the other side of the continent. The fourth, Liz Marin, worked as a floor supervisor at a Toys “R” Us as KKR and Mitt Romney’s former firm, Bain Capital, loaded it with debt and drove it to bankruptcy. These are grim stories, but Greenwell’s outlook “remains surprisingly optimistic.” After all, each of the people she profiles is an example of a victim who has fought back.

Unfortunately, Greenwell’s central thesis “doesn’t make much sense,” said Gary Sernovitz in Bloomberg. Sure, there are times when private equity owners mismanage an acquisition, harm employees and communities, and profit all the same. “If you want sad endings, find sad stories,” and that’s what Greenwell has done well here. After 20 years in private equity, “I appreciated much of the interesting, grim material in Bad Company.” But private equity firms usually lose if they can’t improve the performance of the companies they buy, and data shows that those run by private equity generally generate higher earnings than publicly traded companies do. “There are a lot of ways to govern a company, smart and stupid.” It’s no surprise that private equity is sometimes as stupid as a crony corporate board or a founder’s dim-witted oldest son.

The journalist who was the face of PBS

Bill Moyers was a legend in public broadcasting, known for deep dives into scandals like Watergate and the Iran-Contra affair. He’d always been idealistic: He started out in politics, working in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, where he helped create and run the Peace Corps and found the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. When he moved to journalism, his primary mission was still public service. Soft-spoken and cerebral, Moyers specialized in long-form documentaries and interviews delving into knotty issues such as inequality, race, crime, and government corruption. He did stints at CBS and NBC but spent most of his career at PBS, free from what he called the corrupting constraints of corporate media. “In a profit-seeking environment,” he said, “you do not get rewarded for telling the hard truths about America.”

Billy Don Moyers grew up in Marshall, Texas, where his father was a day laborer, said The Washington Post. A standout student “who pushed himself so hard” he got ulcers, he studied journalism at North Texas State College, then attended seminary and was ordained as a Baptist minister at age 20. While in college, Moyers took a summer job on the Senate campaign of fellow Texan Lyndon B. Johnson, and soon left the ministry to work for him. When Johnson rose to the presidency in 1963, “Moyers ascended as well,” said the Los Angeles Times. Dubbed “LBJ’s young man in charge of everything” by Time, he was a key policy aide, supervising Great Society legislation and serving as press secretary. But as he grew “disenchanted with the escalation of the Vietnam War,” he split with Johnson, and he left the administration in 1967.

Moyers worked as publisher of Newsday for a few years until he clashed with the conservative owner, said The New York Times. He launched his own weekly public affairs program, Bill Moyers Journal, at PBS in 1972. In the decades that followed, he “applied his earnest, deferential style to interviews with poets, philosophers, and educators, often on the subject of values and ideas.” He racked up more than 30 Emmy Awards, including for the Frontline series Two American Families. In later years, he warned starkly of the growing influence of billionaires on American politics. “We are so close to losing our democracy to the mercenary class,” he said in 2013. “The predators in Washington are only this far from monopoly control over government. They have bought the political system lock, stock, and pork barrel.”