The expansion of The Big Bang Theory’s universe continues with this outlandishly funny spin-off series centered on Kevin Sussman’s character, comic-book-store owner Stuart Bloom. When Stuart breaks a machine built by Sheldon and Leonard, he triggers a multiverse apocalypse and attempts to undo the damage by venturing into sundry bizarro alternate dimensions, engaging in battles, suffering humiliation, and generally winging it with the help of his girlfriend, Denise; his geologist buddy, Bert; and quantum physicist Barry. Lauren Lapkus, Brian Posehn, and John Ross Bowie co-star.
Thursday, July 23, HBO Max

by Samuel Moyn

“It is a safe bet that the AARP will not be promoting Gerontocracy in America to its 38 million members,” said Alexander Zaitchik in The New Republic. The explosive growth of America’s over-65 population over the past several decades so alarms author Samuel Moyn that his dark prognosis of its consequences “casts a shadow on the very medical advances that enabled it.” The U.S. will soon be home for the first time to as many people over 65 as under 18. Meanwhile, those seniors are six times more likely to vote than 18-to-34-year-olds, and they tend to put their own interests first. Moyn, a Yale law professor, proposes a series of policies aimed at trimming back elder Americans’ political and financial clout. Unfortunately, compared with other variables affecting our politics, age “turns out to hold little explanatory power,” and many seniors are struggling themselves.

“Despite the sometimes acerbic tone of his book, Moyn’s aim isn’t to stick it to the old,” said Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker. Among his suggestions for rebalancing a system that seems to favor the old is to expand entitlements for seniors so that they don’t feel they must cling to housing and jobs to secure a comfortable final chapter in life. But Moyn does want the power of younger voters amplified. Currently, the median age for members of Congress is over 60 and the median age of voters in primaries is 65. To shift the balance toward youth, Moyn offers a range of potential remedies, including making voting a requirement, as Australia does, and even allowing young people to vote twice: once for themselves and a second time for fellow citizens who haven’t yet hit legal voting age.

When he focuses on the elderly’s domination of politics, “Moyn has a point,” said The Economist. There remains no good mechanism for getting rid of lawmakers such as former senator Dianne Feinstein, who was struggling to fulfill the basic demands of her job when she died in office at 90. But Moyn favors mandatory retirement ages in all professions, a policy that may make sense in academia, where some tenured professors hang onto their posts long after their productivity spirals, but less so in other fields, where employers tend to keep paying only those who remain top performers. Also, for a book that claims to stand for youth and progress, American Gerontocracy “often seems oddly conservative,” said Noah Berlatsky in Washington Monthly. Moyn is so certain that concentrated power in the hands of the elderly is unnatural that he’s willing to curtail seniors’ individual rights to restore what he sees as society’s natural order. Because of such radicalism, his is “not a book that will age well.”

The Senate hawk who embraced Trump

Few modern-day senators can claim to have wielded the influence that Lindsey Graham did. A prominent Republican voice in Congress for more than three decades, Graham was one of its most consistent foreign policy hawks, supporting the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran and lobbying strenuously on behalf of Israel and Ukraine. Popular among Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike for his amiability and wit, Graham was seen for most of his career as a consummate politician, willing to reach across the aisle for ambitious policy goals. But his final decade was largely defined by his pivot to Donald Trump. Abandoning his earlier criticism of Trump as a “race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot,” Graham made up with him just months after the 2016 presidential election, helping cement a MAGA takeover of the Republican Party. On that point, Graham was unapologetic. “This is the party of Donald Trump,” he said earlier this year. “There’s no room in this party to destroy his agenda.”

Lindsey Olin Graham was born in Central, S.C., a small town where his parents ran a pool hall. He later joked that he “learned everything he really needed to know about politics there,” said The Washington Post. His family lived in a room at the back of the bar, and as a youngster he sneaked beer and cigarettes between hunting and fishing trips. A mediocre student, Graham was the first in his family to attend college, earning a law degree from the University of South Carolina. When his parents died 15 months apart, Graham, then 22, assumed responsibility for his 13-year-old sister Darline, traveling home from college on weekends to care for her. After graduating, he joined the Air Force as a lawyer and rose to become the branch’s chief prosecutor in Europe.

Returning to South Carolina in 1989, Graham served one term in the statehouse before entering national politics in 1994’s “Republican Revolution,” said The Guardian (U.K.). His profile rose in 1998, when he filed the first impeachment papers against President Bill Clinton, and when longtime senator Strom Thurmond retired in 2002, Graham ran unopposed in the Republican primary to succeed him. As a senator, Graham took “stoutly Republican” views on issues such as gun control, gay marriage, and reproductive rights, and his hawkishness on foreign policy allied him with colleagues Joe Lieberman and John McCain. The trio were dubbed the “Three Amigos,” often traveling abroad together, and Graham—who never married—once described McCain as his partner in a non-romantic “political marriage.”

Graham also had “something of an independent streak,” said The New York Times. He joined with Democrats to try to pass a climate bill, attempted a doomed overhaul of immigration that caused Rush Limbaugh to deride him as “Lindsey Grahamnesty,” and was one of the few GOP votes for a 2022 gun control law. He was the only Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee to vote to confirm justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, saying they were qualified even if he disagreed with them.

Still, Graham’s greatest legacy may be transforming himself, “famously and awkwardly,” into a vocal champion of Trump, said The Atlantic. Soon after Trump’s inauguration, Graham cozied up, becoming a regular golfing buddy and confirming a record-breaking number of conservative judges during Trump’s first term. The reversal strained his friendship with McCain, a frequent target of Trump’s mockery. Though Graham famously said “enough is enough” in a speech after the Jan. 6 insurrection, he was back at Mar-a-Lago within weeks. Once Trump was re-elected in 2024, Graham pressed for a U.S. attack on Iran and used his position as chair of the Senate Budget Committee to get Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” passed through the back door, using the reconciliation process. Though some peers denounced him as a hypocrite, Graham believed his loyalty to the president allowed him to make a difference. “I worry more about the policy stuff,” he said. “And I have more influence than I’ve ever had.”