Sound the battle cry. Man-mountain Jason Momoa wrote and stars in this new historical action series about the unification of Hawaii in the late 18th century. Momoa headlines a primarily Polynesian cast, portraying Ka’iana, an imposing warrior who seeks to unite warring tribes to face the threat of approaching Western colonizers. Temuera Morrison co-stars as a fierce chief who’s determined to wipe out his rivals. Friday, Aug. 1, Apple TV+.

by Tim Weiner

“Nobody has unlocked more CIA secrets than Tim Weiner,” said Kevin Canfield in The Minnesota Star Tribune. The long-time national security correspondent won a National Book Award for 2007’s Legacy of Ashes, “a vital text” that dissected the agency’s first half-century. Now comes the sequel, “an absorbing portrait of an embattled organization that is facing formidable challenges.” Picking up where Ashes left off, The Mission covers a bumpy stretch that includes the 9/11 attacks, the agency’s resort to torture, and the false CIA assessments that justified the disastrous U.S. war in Iraq. Weiner’s accounts “add fascinating details to what we know about the CIA’s role in those events.” But he’s mindful of the agency’s triumphs and details several of those, including its scotching of a Pakistani physicist’s rogue efforts to disseminate nuclear weapons technology. 

“The story of the CIA that Weiner tells closely resembles the one he told in Legacy of Ashes,” said Keith Gessen in The New Yorker. At the start of both the Cold War and the War on Terror, the CIA’s importance spiked because information on the enemy was critical, and both conflicts grew into global adventures that greatly expanded the CIA’s portfolio. Prior to 9/11, with the Soviet threat gone, the agency had been adrift. After 9/11, it embraced its new mission so fervently that it wrongly declared Iraq in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Maybe the truth wouldn’t have swayed the Bush White House anyway. As one former CIA Iraq operations chief told Weiner, “These guys would have gone to war if Saddam had a rubber band and a paper clip.” The CIA also helped President Obama expand overseas drone strikes, but its image shifted when Donald Trump took office in 2017 and several former agency officials went public with concerns that he was a national security threat. “Were CIA agents now the good guys?” 

Weiner would never suggest as much, said Scott Anderson in The New York Times. Besides showing that the politicization of the CIA is only accelerating, he reports that nearly every director leaves the agency worse off than it was. The organization we come to know in The Mission is “repeatedly blinded by its sense of American supremacy,” making mistake after mistake. Weiner doesn’t present his mountain of material in the clearest form, making “scant” effort to shape his narrative as names and situations pile up. “Still, there is something simultaneously illuminating and saddening in contemplating the course the CIA has traveled,” because its deterioration is evident. In light of the way current CIA director John Ratcliffe backed Trump’s unprovoked recent bombing of Iran, “Weiner’s warnings about the peril facing both the CIA and the U.S. seem prophetic.”

The ‘Stupid Cupid’ singer who ruled the charts

Connie Francis’ crystalline, emotion-laden voice epitomized an age of innocence. The most popular female singer of the late 1950s and early ’60s, she ruled the pop charts with sobbing ballads such as “Who’s Sorry Now?” and finger-snapping tales of teenage love like “Stupid Cupid” and “Lipstick on Your Collar.” By 1964—when the arrival of the Beatles and a brasher pop sound ended her era of chart domination— Francis had sold 40 million records and scored 35 Top 40 hits. In later life, she voiced frustration at being defined by those “teenybopper songs” and not by her more serious dabblings in jazz, country, and other genres. Still, she said of those early songs in 2006, “I enjoy seeing the reaction of people when I do them.” 

Born Concetta Franconero in Newark, N.J., she was 3 when her dockworker father “put an accordion in his daughter’s hands,” said The New York Times. He was soon shepherding her around TV talent contests; one host advised her to lose the accordion and change her name to something “easy and Irish.” Renamed Connie Francis, she signed with MGM in 1955 and released a string of flop singles. Ready to quit music, she reluctantly agreed to cut one of her father’s favorite songs, the 1923 standard “Who’s Sorry Now?” as a peace offering—the two had fallen out after he chased off her then-boyfriend, a pre-fame Bobby Darin, with a shotgun. Championed by American Bandstand’s Dick Clark, the song sold more than 1 million copies in 1958, turning Francis into the “queen of the charts.” 

When the pop hits “dried up in the mid-’60s,” Francis kept busy on “a showbiz circuit that encompassed Las Vegas, television variety shows, and singing for troops in Vietnam,” said the Los Angeles Times. A comeback attempt was “derailed by tragedy” in 1974, when an assailant broke into her hotel room in a New York suburb and raped her. She successfully sued the hotel for $2.5 million over its security failures, but “decades of mental health struggles followed” and for a time she quit performing, said the Miami Herald. She picked up the mic again in the ’80s and this year saw a lesser-known track, 1962’s “Pretty Little Baby,” go viral with more than 17 million people posting lip-synch videos on social media. “To think that a song I recorded 63 years ago is touching the hearts of millions of people,” Francis said, “is an amazing feeling.”