Comedy and archaeology don’t often mix. But Amy Poehler and sitcom maestro Michael Schur (The Good Place, Parks and Recreation) have found a way to make the combination work in this new series featuring Poehler as a seasoned archaeologist leading a team of naive college students on a big dig in Greece. When Poehler’s Elise unearths a valuable artifact, she schemes to keep it in the ground until her credit-stealing boss, played by Hugh Laurie, retires. But archaeology is no game, and soon she and her younger coconspirators hilariously stumble into an international conspiracy.
Monday, Nov. 23, Peacock 

by Fredrik deBoer

Frederik deBoer, with his online essays and two previous books, “has attracted notice for being a leftist who criticizes the Left,” said Clare McHugh in the New York Post. With All in Your Head, he’s challenged conventional thinking again, revealing details about his own struggles with bipolar disorder to bolster his argument that the loose way we talk about mental illness today is hurting the people, himself included, who most need better care. His candor about his own condition, its cost in lost years, and how assiduously he must manage it, gives his book “authority and urgency.” But he builds his case against today’s thinking by turning to history, explaining how the abusive and barbarous treatment of the mentally ill in the early 20th century led to reforms that have overreached. We’re now so determined to erase all stigma attached to mental illness that, especially among the young, “it’s become cool to claim certain mental impairments.” 

DeBoer’s grievances “seem well-justified,” said Sally Satel in The Wall Street Journal. He reminds us that the closing of mental hospitals that began in the 1950s was never followed by sufficient federal funding for community-based care. He also calls out activists, scientists, and artists, including One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey, for either minimizing the effects of serious mental illness or glamorizing them. And he explains the damage being done by the many high-functioning young people who diagnose themselves with modest or serious disorders and gather online under their questionable new collective identity. That trend “siphons resources away from the sickest, encourages overmedication, and medicalizes normal variants of human distress.” DeBoer’s “impassioned yet cleareyed” assessment of an enduring societal challenge “arrives as a welcome antidote to faddishness,” said Daphne Merkin in The New York Times. “I read All in Your Head with admiration that here was a writer willing to go up against some of the bromides that doubtless make mental illness more palatable but ultimately ensure that those who suffer from it will not be attended to in a way that brings relief.” 

DeBoer’s “jarring rhetoric” is mostly effective, said Myles Werntz in Christianity Today. But his disregard for milder forms of mental illness is too sweeping. “The question of how best to care for the mentally ill should not be a zero-sum game, pitting milder and severer sufferers against one another.” Both groups have real needs, and our society is capable of caring for both. “This book is strong medicine. Accordingly, it is best taken in small doses.” Its readers will have to sort out for themselves where the expansion of the definition of mental illness has been beneficial and, alternatively, “where the new mental health discourse has run aground.”

The wealthy heir who fought for the poor

Jay Rockefeller had a famous last name and a family fortune, and he spent his life putting both to good use. Born just weeks after the death of his great-grandfather John Davison Rockefeller Sr.—the Standard Oil magnate and philanthropist who became a symbol of American wealth—he was named for his forebear but inherited more of the urge toward charity than business. The only Democrat in a family of prominent Republican politicians, he served two terms as West Virginia’s governor and 30 years as a U.S. senator. In Congress, he fought for mine workers and their families, authoring the 1992 Coal Act to give miners health and retirement benefits and championing the 1997 Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provided affordable health coverage to children from poor families. Being a Rockefeller, he said in 1966, “stands for public service, a sense of responsibility, and a high standard of demand on oneself.” 

“Born to privilege” in Manhattan and educated at Harvard, John D. Rockefeller IV was an unlikely figure to spend his life “serving the chronically poor Mountain State,” said the Charleston Gazette-Mail. Yet after a brief stint at the Peace Corps alongside Sargent Shriver, he came to Appalachia as one of the Volunteers in Service to America. In Emmons, a dying coal-mining town where most of the residents were illiterate, he helped establish a library, school bus service, and a Little League team. From then on, he was a local. Having chosen to remain in West Virginia, Rockefeller “began to climb the local political ladder,” said The Washington Post. He was elected secretary of state in 1968; governor in 1976; and U.S. senator in 1984, retiring in 2015. The state was “beset by troubles,” with little industry but low-paying coal mining, and Rockefeller focused his efforts on helping the poor. One of his “final legislative efforts” was sponsoring the 2014 Cybersecurity Enhancement Act, which brought broadband to rural areas. 

Throughout his career, Rockefeller “acknowledged that he was one of the Senate’s richest members” but “made no apologies for his campaign spending,” said The New York Times. He believed it was his prerogative to spend his money on his public service. “When I came to West Virginia 50 years ago, I was searching for a clear purpose for my life’s work,” he said in his farewell Senate address. “What I got was the opportunity to work incredibly hard, along with a real and utterly spiritual sense of mission.”