As head of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and ’70s, Huey P. Newton chased many big ambitions. His most daring gambit, however, may have been a scheme devised to help him elude the FBI. André Holland stars as the activist and revolutionary in this period thriller series that dramatizes the moment Newton was wanted on a murder charge and teamed with Hollywood producer Bert Schneider to create a ruse to enable Newton's escape to Cuba. Don Cheadle directs the first two episodes. Friday, May 17, Apple TV+.

by Caroline Crampton

"The innate mystery of the body is at the heart of this book," said Fiona Sturges in The Guardian. A cultural history of hypochondria blended with memoir, it was written by a woman who has every reason to be hypervigilant about her health. Years ago, as she started college, Caroline Crampton had ostensibly already beaten Hodgkin's lymphoma when she discovered that her doctors were wrong to have declared that radiation and chemotherapy had left her cancer-free. A stem-cell transplant was required, followed by five years of checkups. Even so, "what those checkups didn't address was the anxiety that had embedded itself in her psyche." Surveying the experiences of fellow hypochondriacs across centuries, Crampton often wrings bleak humor from "the daft situations in which they find themselves." Less surprisingly, she also brings the compassion of a person who saved her own life by worrying. 

"Where is the line between rational, understandable worry about one's health and hypochondria?" asked Sara Polsky in The Brooklyn Rail. While there are "no firm answers," Crampton dissects the question "with care and nuance." She informs us that the first descriptions of something like hypochondria date to the Babylonian Empire, and that the term itself was used for centuries to describe a purely physical ailment. By the 1700s, hypochondria was considered a nervous disorder, creating a clearer line between Crampton and such fellow sufferers as Charles Darwin, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust. Some, no doubt, fretted unnecessarily. As always, though, it remains hard to define health worries as dismissible, especially when they're expressed by women or people of color, two groups who've been prone to having their health concerns dismissed. 

"Hypochondria, you may be surprised to learn, officially no longer exists," said Meghan O'Rourke in The Atlantic. In an effort to destigmatize health anxieties, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders retired the term in 2013. But the new labels that the DSM offers do nothing to address the real problem: that "the body's most obdurate mysteries remain," and doctors can only navigate them if they embrace uncertainty, "the very thing that modern medicine is least equipped to do." Crampton's book helps us see that the body at times sends unclear signals about the changes that it is forever undergoing. "The trick is to pay enough attention to those changes to catch problems without being devoured by the anxiety born of paying too much attention."

The artist who never stopped innovating

The father of minimalism, Frank Stella was the great shape-shifter of American modern art. In the late 1950s, the legendary artist was part of a vanguard that made a clean break from the messy gestures of abstract expressionism — in his case, starting with stark, chillingly precise all-black paintings. Over the next few decades, he would take more formal risks, with sunbursts of color and the first asymmetrically shaped canvases in contemporary art, his "Irregular Polygons" series. But anyone who searched for meaning in these hard-edged works would come up empty, which was just how Stella liked it. "If the painting were lean enough, accurate enough, or right enough, you would just be able to look at it," he said in 1966. "What you see is what you see." 

"Fame came to him early," said The Guardian (U.K.). Born in an affluent Boston suburb to a Sicilian-American gynecologist and a homemaker, Stella moved swiftly from the exclusive Phillips Academy — Andover, where he was taught by abstract painter Patrick Morgan, to Princeton University and then to the New York arts scene. His pinstriped "Black Paintings" earned him inclusion in the epoch-defining 1959-60 exhibition "Sixteen Americans" at the Museum of Modern Art when he was just 23, allotting him space alongside such luminaries as Jasper Johns and Ellsworth Kelly. Stella was a "restless, relentless innovator," said The New York Times. In the 1970s and '80s he "abandoned the flat picture plane, pushing his works away from the wall in assemblages bristling with painted aluminum curlicues," while in the '90s he moved into large-scale sculpture. Through it all, he enjoyed popular "adulation and stupendous commercial success," including dozens of solo shows and retrospectives. In 2021, he installed his stainless-steel Jasper's Split Star in the plaza of the rebuilt 7 World Trade Center, replacing two paintings that were destroyed on 9/11. 

Though Stella's works could sell for up to $28 million, "the critics weren't always smitten," said The Washington Post. The New Yorker's Harold Rosenberg found himself unmoved by Stella's "chessboard aesthetic"; others disapproved of how often his massive but morally unchallenging works graced corporate lobbies. But he refused to explain himself to them — or anyone. "The one thing I learned is not to say anything about my own paintings," he said in 2014. Otherwise, "you'll never stop hearing what you said. It will come back to you again and again."