Hal and Harper are brother and sister, and both are a bit broken. In this new dramedy series written by Cha Cha Real Smooth’s Cooper Raiff and co-starring Raiff and Lili Reinhart, the pair have weathered their mother’s suicide and made it to their 20s by leaning on each other. But their father, played by Mark Ruffalo, now wants to sell the family home and marry his girlfriend, played by Betty Gilpin, so it’s time to grow up. Sunday, Oct. 19, Mubi.

by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow “certainly knows how to make an idea memorable,” said Henry Mance in the Financial Times. While not everyone will appreciate his new book’s scatological title, the prolific author, blogger, and internet activist deserves thanks for bloodying the world’s biggest tech companies by succinctly diagnosing how they’re ruining users’ lives. “You could not ask for a clearer, more ambitious, or better-written business book than this one,” all of it expanding on a theory Doctorow put forward three years ago describing a three-step process of “enshittification.” In his view, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and others have become giants by first earning users’ trust. But in stage two, they abuse their users to benefit advertisers or other business customers, and in stage three, they abuse their business partners—because their dominance allows them to.

“This may sound merely like capitalism at work,” said Dan Piepenbring in Harper’s. “Doctorow thinks it’s closer to feudalism,” and it’s easy to see why. Where capitalists make things, today’s tech companies act like medieval rentiers, using land they control to extract wealth from and immiserate those who need the land. Google made its search results worse so that users would search again and see more ads. Tesla charges buyers monthly subscription fees for services they’ve already paid for. Amazon manufactures cheap imitations of the products shoppers truly want and makes the original products harder to find on its website. Doctorow builds these and other offenses into “a masterly polemic, its scope so sweeping that it does, finally, seem to explain every pungent odor wafting from Silicon Valley,” including the Foxconn sweatshops in China that are adorned with anti-suicide nets. Surprisingly, Doctorow believes such companies can one day be tamed by fed-up customers. “I hope he’s right.”

Though the book “covers a lot,” it “leaves the reader craving a grander application of his concept to other aspects of culture and society,” said Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker. Doctorow, for example, stops short of expanding his scope to national politics. And as brilliant as his analysis is, said Paul Krugman in his Substack newsletter, Doctorow neglects to mention how enshittification has “messed with the heads” of the people running the big tech companies. “They were loved when the public imagined, falsely, that they were the good guys. Now they aren’t. And it drives them crazy.” That’s bad for all of us. “The increasingly antidemocratic rage of tech bros is, I’d argue, in part driven by their awareness that people don’t love and admire them the way they used to.” That leaves the rest of us at their mercy both as consumers and citizens.

The Tuskegee Airman who overcame racism

George Hardy flew 136 combat missions in three American wars, battling not only enemies in Germany, Korea, and Vietnam but also racism from fellow servicemen. Commissioned as a lieutenant at just 19, Hardy was the youngest member of the fabled Tuskegee Airmen—an all-Black squadron in the segregated Army known for its sterling record of safely escorting bombers to their targets—to fly combat operations during World War II. In the war, he said, there was camaraderie between the Black and white pilots, but the goodwill didn’t last long. As soon as he docked back home after his deployment, he was greeted by a sign directing Black and white soldiers to exit the ship on different sides. “I used to say the Army’s No. 1 job was segregation,” he said. “Winning the war was No. 2.” 

Born in Philadelphia, George Edward Hardy was “a dedicated student who dreamed of becoming an engineer,” said the Associated Press. But the Army Air Force was recruiting young high school grads, and he scored high on the exam for pilot training. By age 19, he was flying a P-51 Mustang, escorting bombers and making low-altitude offensive runs on German trains and trucks. On one strafing mission, he saw a burst of light on the cockpit floor and realized it was coming through a bullet hole in the fuselage. The military was desegregated three years after the war ended, and Hardy soon joined the newly formed Air Force—where he had to deal with racist officers. Deployed to Korea, “he was removed from his first” B-29 bomber mission, said Air & Space Forces Magazine, “because his commander did not approve of Black pilots.” That plane was shot down over North Korea, and two of the airmen who bailed out later died in a prison camp. “If you’d been there,” a pilot on the mission told him, “I don’t think it would have happened.”

Hardy ultimately flew dozens of B-29 missions in Korea, said The New York Times; he also piloted an AC-119K gunship during the Vietnam War. In between deployments, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering yet “continued to face indignities,” at one point being refused housing on a Texas base. In later life, he lectured on the Tuskegee Airmen, accepting the National WWII Museum’s highest honor on the group’s behalf. “We walked through the door and had a great opportunity,” Hardy said. “And we took advantage of it.”