Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson play off each other so naturally they could almost pass for brothers. This new comedy series posits they just might be. Playing lightly fictionalized versions of themselves, the two veteran actors (and onetime True Detective costars) convene at McConaughey’s Austin ranch, where McConaughey’s mom, played by Holland Taylor, implies that she knew Harrelson’s father intimately. The news sends Harrelson spinning, and soon he and McConaughey are bickering like siblings as the latter explores a run for Texas governor.
Wednesday, Sept. 23, Apple TV

by Marlon James

“Why not just say it?” asked Dwight Garner in The New York Times. With his sixth book in an already decorated career, Marlon James “has written a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and possibly of the century thus far.” At 600- plus pages, The Disappearers is “a maximalist’s banquet” constructed from a simple story premise: In 1988 Jamaica, several closeted gay men are rehearsing a play in a house in Kingston when a homophobic mob storms in, killing one victim, blinding another, brutally beating the rest, and leaving the survivors forever changed. Still, “it’s hard to talk about this novel because there are at least two dozen ways to pick it up,” whether you’re interested in what James, a Jamaican native, has to say about violence, sex, pop culture, gay feeling, revenge, exile, or fathers and sons. The book “sank knives deep into my heart,” and “I’m still in recovery from it.”

Two young men, Eddy Porteus and Jordan Brown, hold the center of this “unforgettable” work, said Laura Miller in Slate. “Eddy and Jordan aren’t friends exactly,” and up until the mob attack, their experiences of Jamaica’s virulent homophobia vary significantly. But when two other members of the acting troupe vanish after leaving the hospital, they team up to find them. Throughout the book, as in his previous novels, James “invents his own literary language, horny yet tender, punctuated by puns and music and elegant flourishes,” said Hamilton Cain in The Boston Globe. And as the story drifts to Miami, London, New York, and back to Kingston again, it’s held together by James’ passion for the era’s pop culture and his characters’ will to survive in the face of hatred. Thanks to its sweep and power, it’s a novel that “will be read decades from now, pored over in seminars and bookmarked on subway commutes.”

While “there’s no denying” that The Disappearers is a great novel, it’s “also an ordeal,” said Ron Charles in his Substack newsletter. It “aspires to sear in the minds of readers the horrors of living in a world hostile to homosexuality,” and in that, it’ll succeed. But “James’ commitment to erotic realism, to the mechanics of oral and anal sex, voluntary and violent, is total and relentless,” and the book is in part “an encyclopedia of abuse and degradation.” I finished it “glad to have read it but equally glad to be done with it.” Even so, “what’s most surprising, given the book’s abiding terrors, is how James inches it erratically toward the light,” providing late glimpses of a few gay characters who not only survive but thrive. It’s easy to imagine that this “incomparable” work will be a beacon to more than a few young readers enduring violent hatred wherever it arises today.

The feminist icon who led the women’s movement

The personification of liberal feminism, Gloria Steinem galvanized the movement for equal rights and taught millions of women to advocate for themselves at work and at home. Instantly recognizable in her aviator glasses and her curtain of streaked hair, she spoke, wrote, and lobbied, helping create rape crisis centers, women’s shelters, and the National Women’s Political Caucus. An introvert who feared public speaking, she occupied the national spotlight for over half a century. In 1971, she co-founded Ms., the first magazine entirely owned and run by women, bringing feminism to a national audience at a time when a woman could not get a credit card in her own name. “When we started, there was not even a term for sexual harassment,” she often said. “It was just called life.”

Born in Ohio, Steinem grew up poor, the daughter of a nomadic antique dealer father and an ex-journalist mother who spent time in psychiatric hospitals. When she was 10, her father left and her older sister went off to college, leaving her to care for her ailing mother. She had little time for school, but she read voraciously and graduated magna cum laude from Smith College. Still, she “lived in fear of hitting the skids at any moment” and turning into her mother, said The New York Times. After college, she broke off an engagement, had a secret abortion, and fled to India, walking across the country with followers of Gandhi. After returning in 1958, she became a journalist and won plaudits for an exposé she wrote about the sexism endured by Playboy bunnies—having gone undercover as a bunny for the story. Soon she had a political column in New York, and she joined the anti-war movement. But it wasn’t until she was 35, and attended a 1969 speak-out about illegal abortions, that she began to focus on women’s rights.

Steinem became “the first famous feminist of the celebrity era, forging a public persona halfway between Madonna and Joan of Arc,” said The Guardian. She organized consciousness-raising sessions, led protests, gave speeches, wrote essays, and fundraised. All the while, she also gained attention for her short skirts and for dating a string of famous men. In 1970, she testified before Congress in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. She faced countless critics, led by conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly. A rift even developed between Steinem and The Feminine Mystique author Betty Friedan, who felt Steinem was too focused on social liberation rather than changing laws. While the movement tried to resist hierarchy, the media unofficially anointed Steinem the spokeswoman of feminism. She “was the perfect popularizer,” said New York, making “spiky, roiling, uncomfortable, often messy ideas around gender, race, class, equality, and liberation sound smooth and snappy, attractive and funny.”

Steinem occasionally alienated her supporters, as when she defended President Clinton against sexual harassment allegations in 1998, yet she always “remained a lodestar for women’s rights activists,” said The Washington Post. Proudly child-free, she rejected the institution of marriage, insisting she couldn’t “mate in captivity”— though she did eventually marry British environmentalist David Bale to help him get a visa. Editor of Ms. for decades and the author of a dozen books, she continued lecturing into her 90s. “I feel proud,” she said in 2022. “And I feel mad as hell we are still dealing with the same issues.”